October 20,2017
Less than a day before the High Court is scheduled to hear an application from the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI) on the production of key documents, the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) yesterday charged the bank’s directors with contempt and they are to appear in a Georgetown Magistrate’s Court on Monday to answer.
Stabroek News was reliably informed that the charge was instituted based on the advice of the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) following a second review of the case file.
This newspaper was told that Chairman Robin Stoby SC, John Tracey, Edward Beharry, Suresh Beharry, Kathryn Eytle- McLean, Basil Mahadeo, Carlton James and Richard Isava have been charged with the failure to comply with a production order. They were all invited to SOCU’s Camp Street Headquarters, where they were charged.
The contempt proceedings stemmed from the bank’s failure to comply with a production order made by the acting Chief Justice Roxane George SC on August 29. The bank subsequently said in a newspaper advertisement that in areas where the laws may conflict, the bank takes the position that “its primary duty is to protect the interests of its customers” and maintain the confidentiality associated with its fiduciary relationship with them.
The bank has contended in its application for the variation of the order granted by Justice George that countless efforts were made to gather all the documents requested but it was discovered that some were either destroyed or could not be found. It insists that it has complied to some extent with the requests of SOCU as thousands of documents have already been delivered.
The documents are pertinent to the ongoing US$500M Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) probe being conducted by SOCU. The bank’s failure to hand over the documents has stalled the probe and has since led to a clash between GBTI and SOCU.
The bank’s recent application was made by law firm Cameron and Shepherd. Attempts by Stabroek News to obtain a copy of the application from SOCU proved futile.
According to the court documents, the bank and its directors sought to be relieved from having to produce documents referr-ed to in the order that was previously granted on the grounds that they have “either been destroyed by the Applicant after the Applicants’ retention period had expired or they have been lost and cannot be found despite diligent efforts of the claimant to find them, accordingly it is impossible for the Applicants to produce these documents.”
It was explained in the application that some of the documents were likely lost as a result of misfiling.
Alternatively, the court is being asked to grant an extension or stay of three weeks from the date of the order to enable the bank to make “further checks to seek to find and to produce such of those documents to which the order…refers which can be found after all extended efforts are made by the Applicant, in the category of documents thought to have been destroyed under the applicants’ retention rules or which cannot currently be found despite reasonable efforts of the applicant to find them to date.”
The bank and its directors are also asking the court for an interim stay of all further proceedings.
‘Unfair’
Shaleeza Shaw, the bank’s acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO), in an affidavit in support of the bank’s application, said that GRDB has been a customer since 1995 and this relationship has resulted in the processing of thousands of banking transactions each year. She pointed to the bank’s processing of receipts and payments to rice farmers and rice millers in or around crop time, that is June to August and November to February, each year. She said that GRDB became a more active account when it began to handle payments to rice millers under the PetroCaribe rice for oil deal between the Government of Guyana and the Government of Venezuela, sometime around 2010, which spurred the growth of the rice sector.
Shaw said during 2017, it became apparent that GRDB and its officers were the subject of a possible criminal investigation by SOCU and as a result of this requests were made by the unit for information “thought to be available at the Bank concerning the transactions of the GRDB and its officers for several years past.”
According to the CEO, the first sets of requests were made pursuant to court orders dated 14th February, 2017; 20th June, 2017; 29th June, 2017 and 25th August, 2017. She said that these requests were promptly answered as best as possible on 11th July, 2017; 9th August, 2017; 16th August and 6th September, 2017. “However SOCU expressed their dissatisfaction with the manner and degree of the bank’s answers and subsequently obtained a Production Order …directing production of the category of documents listed in the said order on or before 6th September, 2017,” she added.
She said that for security reasons, a copy of the said order will be laid over with the court when the application for variation is heard.
Shaw said in her affidavit that the bank sought to comply with the order made by Justice George and researched hundreds of thousands of documents in its archives for the periods in question, with a response that was given in batches on August 31, 2017; September 6, 2017; September 8, 2017; September 11, 2017; September 12, 2017 and September 13, 2017.