At a press conference on November 14, following a question by a reporter, President Ramotar denied that he had ever spoken to businesswoman Mrs Bhena Lall about tax evasion charges that had been brought against her and her husband, the proprietor of Kaieteur News, Mr Glenn Lall. The allegation that he had conducted discussions with Mrs Lall arose from the now infamous conversation between Attorney General Mr Anil Nandlall and a KN reporter on October 25th.
Mr Nandlall was heard on the recorded conversation to have said “I already, I sent a message already and I… Bhena has been in contact with the president, they are very close, right but Glenn is not keeping up his end of the bargain, the things them that Bhena spoke, they work out an arrangement.”
From the tone and the direction of the conversation it would have appeared that the AG was asserting that more favourable treatment by the newspaper of the government would have led to some easing of the legal quandary of the Lalls in relation to the tax evasion charges.
The President’s response, after saying that he had intended to address the matter earlier, was as follows: “I can tell you now that I never had any discussion with her relating to any tax issues”. He continued, “That was what was implied, that was what was said, and that’s the interpretation that came out of that… but we did not speak.”
As has been stated by many commentators since the scandal broke, any negotiation of charges, in this case, brought by the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), undermines in the most fundamental manner the rule of law and perverts the course of justice. As it is in today’s society, it is frequently argued that the laws are in the main applied to the poor while the well-heeled get off with almost everything. Based on the contents of the conversation, both the President and the AG were ensnared in such a design which would have also called into question the independence of action of the GRA.
It wasn’t so much the denial of intervention by the President which is worthy of comment. It was his accepting that an allegation contained within the threatening, crude and profanity-laced conversation, featuring the AG, was worth defending or commenting on. If it was worth defending, then the President has clearly laid the foundation for an investigation of his AG over this matter. The AG made a most disturbing allegation about the manner in which a charge was to be handled and the President, without even a feint at the dubious excuse that the conversation was distorted, defended himself. This is now a case of the President’s word versus the words of the Attorney General. The President is surely entitled to interpret this matter and issue a defence in relation to some portions of the conversation. So too are other stakeholders. The ordinary man and woman also have a vested interest and right to have all of those mentioned in this conversation account for actions and to have these further investigated. President Ramotar’s intervention was exactly the type of acknowledgement that many sections of society had sought following the airing of the conversation.
Aside from his conduct and crude behaviour, many of the utterances of the AG during that conversation related to matters of grave public interest. It is now not a case that privacy was breached. It is now a matter that the Leader of the Bar impugned himself on several grounds and drew into this circle of infamy the President of Guyana.
As a result of the entrenched political instability and the deep division between the government and the opposition, there is virtually no prospect that the Ramotar administration will seek to investigate its AG over this matter and his implicating of others in unsavoury occurrences. So weakened is the Ramotar government, it would be unable to ostracize one of its frontline defenders or even sideline him.
However, this scandal will not go away no matter what the Ramotar administration thinks. There will be a detailed investigation of the AG’s conversation and he will undoubtedly face sanctions from his professional body and the legislature when it is reconvened.
