‘The gloves are coming off’

Back in mid-April, Andrew Fahie, the then British Virgin Islands (BVI) premier, offered to make a generous monetary contribution to a church pastor to help complete an important project.

The 51-year-old Fahie had decided to make the donation – just under half of the remaining debt on the project – after he was approached by a close friend who also knew the pastor well.

The senior church leader – whom The Sunday Gleaner has agreed not to name in order to protect his identity and his congregation – thought nothing of it when he later received notification from the bank indicating that the funds could not be delivered because the account from which it was being sent had been frozen.

It was not until after the premier was arrested in Florida on April 28 by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and charged with drug-trafficking and money-laundering offences, that the frozen account began to make sense to the man of the cloth.

“I certainly was shocked,” the pastor told The Sunday Gleaner of Fahie’s arrest.

Like the church leader, many in the BVI were baffled that their head of government allowed himself to become so entangled, particularly considering his experience. In addition to an inquiry established by the British in January last year into lurid allegations of corruption by his administration, Fahie has had a previous encounter with US law-enforcement agencies.

Back in 2003, he was the subject of a US federal investigation into whether he and his wife had engaged in money laundering while he was the education and culture minister. The investigation was eventually dropped.

“If he knew he was involved in stuff, he should have stopped because you know they were gunning for you. Even before you became premier, they were after you,” a high-profile BVI resident told The Sunday Gleaner. “There were stories about the same money laundering and drug stories. And whatever plan they cooked up worked because an undercover agent was specifically positioned to target him.”

Fahie – along with Oleanvine Maynard, the head of the BVI port authority, and her son, Kadeem – was arrested on-board a private jet in Miami where he was allegedly being shown designer shopping bags containing US$700,000 as payment for the intended storing of 3,000kg of cocaine for four days. The payment was to ensure the drugs would not be intercepted by port authorities or the police, court papers filed in Florida claimed.

According to the affidavit submitted to the Miami court by special agent Shad Aschelman, Fahie met in Tortola with a DEA confidential source (CS) acting as a Mexican drug-runner on April 7 – seven months after the investigation was launched – where the premier is alleged to have complained he was not paid much by the British government.

The CS proposed Fahie be given a 12 per cent cut of the sales in return for allowing the cocaine to pass through the BVI ports. Having been told that the drug would sell for US$26,000 or US$28,000 in Miami and for up to US$38,000 in New York, Fahie reportedly pulled out a calculator and worked out the street value of the cocaine in Miami was US$78 million, and if he got 10 per cent he would receive US$7.8 million, according to the court papers.

Given the fact that he allegedly seemed suspicious of the DEA informant, asking him if he was an undercover operative, and that he allegedly said Britain had been trying to get him out of office for years, Fahie must have been blinded by greed, several observers concluded.

But to Kenneth Rijock, a Miami-based attorney and adviser to American and Canadian anti-narco-trafficking agencies, there’s another simple explanation: arrogance.

“In my experience, I have found that to a man, national leaders are extremely arrogant and don’t always look before they leap,” Rijock told The Sunday Gleaner in a telephone interview. “To an ordinary person like you or I, it sounds pretty stupid and foolhardy, [but] these people have become so damn arrogant, and they are surrounding themselves with sycophants who always paint everything in ‘you’re bulletproof, you can do whatever you want’.”

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

Fahie’s detention is reminiscent of March 1985 when Norman Saunders, then chief minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), was arrested in a Miami motel room and charged with offering to allow drug smugglers travelling between Colombia and the United States to land on the Turks and Caicos in return for cash payments. Also arrested were Stafford Missick, his commerce and development minister; Aulden Smith, a junior minister of works; and Andre Fournier, a Canadian businessman.

Saunders was convicted of conspiracy to travel and actual travel in furtherance of a crime – he was acquitted of actual drug importation charges – and fined US$50,000 and sentenced to eight years in prison.

In the near 40 years since that arrest, there has been little appetite in the US to go after corrupt government leaders or other leading government officials, giving the impression that those with dirty hands are untouchable, contended Rijock, who served two years in a federal prison from 1990-1992 for money laundering, before converting to become an unrepentant foe of those engaged in financial crimes.

However, he argued that Fahie’s arrest suggests “the gloves are coming off”, leaving “a lot of people across the Caribbean sleeping very little”.

It’s a sentiment shared by Crispin Gregoire, a New York-based Caribbean diplomat and international relations expert.

“The [Joe] Biden administration is really beginning to show that they are concerned about law and order in the Caribbean and they are sending a clear warning to Caribbean countries, especially with regard to money laundering, and putting Caribbean leaders on notice that if they are involved in such activities they will certainly come under the scrutiny of the US justice system,” Gregoire told The Sunday Gleaner, almost echoing Anne Milgram, a DEA administrator, who, following the arrest, stressed the DEA’s “resolve to hold corrupt members of government responsible for using their positions of power to provide a safe haven for drug traffickers and money launderers in exchange for their own financial and political gain”.

‘APPALLINGLY BAD’

Fahie’s arrest followed a commission of inquiry established by Augustus Jaspert, then governor of the British territory, and led by British judge Sir Gary Hickinbottom, into the state of governance in the BVI amid claims of corruption and misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Hickinbottom, the sole commissioner, submitted his report to John Rankin, the current governor, before Easter, but he took his time to digest its contents, deferred its publication and only released its content the day after Fahie’s arrest.

While there’s no indication whether or not Rankin knew of the DEA sting operation, few believe the Brits and the Americans did not collaborate.

“They had to waive the immunity for him to be arrested [and] I think that waiver of immunity was sitting on somebody’s desk and all they had to do was sign it and date it the day they arrested him,” a US official told The Sunday Gleaner. “That request was pending long before they arrested the premier.”

Hickinbottom concluded that the state of governance in the territory was “appallingly bad”, with elected public officials shunning the basic principles of good governance, giving rise to an environment in which dishonesty can flourish.

He recommended a two-year suspension of the BVI constitution, cessation of the elected ministerial government and the direct rule of the UK-appointed governor, similar to action taken against the TCI in 2009, after a commission of inquiry set up in July 2008 said it found “information in abundance, pointing to a high probability of systemic corruption and/or serious dishonesty” along with “clear signs of political amorality and immaturity and of general administrative incompetence”.

The Hickinbottom recommendations have not gone down well with the local population who are expected to resist any attempts at direct rule, the high-profile resident told The Sunday Gleaner.

The St Lucia-based Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), an intergovernmental grouping of Eastern Caribbean countries of which the BVI is an associate member, has also rejected the British government’s intention, describing it as “a bad idea” and a “retrograde” move.

“It is clear to us that, in principle, it is a bad idea to impose direct colonial rule, and the history of such imposition in the Caribbean has never delivered the desired result,” argued the OECS secretariat in a statement released on Monday.

‘MINOR BRITISH-LED ENTRAPMENT’

Fahie himself has described the entire episode as a conspiracy between London and Washington to derail his government’s fight for the “right and determination to set our own destiny as a people”, according to a widely distributed message on social media, believed to have come from the premier.

Describing his arrest as a “minor British-led entrapment”, the defiant Fahie insisted he would not resign and promised to lead the fight against Britain.

“The people of the Virgin Islands, I was framed by our colonial masters, with the help of the United States, to oust myself from office, embarrass the VIP party [the ruling Virgin Islands party] but most important, bring doubt and shame to the people of the Virgin Islands,” said the message. “Do not be fooled by this.”

Last week, Dr Natalio ‘Sowande’ Wheatley was sworn in as the new premier of the BVI, a few hours after the House of Assembly passed a ten-to-one no-confidence resolution evoking the appointment of Fahie as premier.

editorial@gleanerjm.com