The Tribune

By FARRAH JOHNSON

Tribune Staff Reporter

fjohnson@tribunemedia.net

THE Office of the Attorney General was successful in challenging a Supreme Court judge’s decision to award three men and a local non-profit group at the centre of an international fraud allegation damages for constitutional breaches.

In an oral ruling in June 2019, Justice Cheryl Grant-Thompson discharged a mutual legal assistance treaty restraint order, previously granted to the Attorney General, which prevented Jonathan Reid, David Valdez Lopez, Rudolph King and Celebrating Women International from accessing funds.

In her ruling, she also found breaches of constitutional provisions but ordered no damages for them.

However, according to court documents, in October 2019 Justice Grant-Thompson provided a written ruling with an “addendum” to her previous decision.

This written decision revised a portion of her oral ruling that had initially made no order for damages, to now order damages in favour of the respondents for constitutional relief.

The Office of the Attorney General recently appealed the judge’s decision after arguing that she erred in granting constitutional relief.

The office further asserted the constitutional breaches that were found should not to have been attributed to the MLAT application, but “more properly determined to have arisen from the domestic criminal proceedings, if at all”.

After reserving their decision in July, Justices Jon Isaacs, Roy Jones and Milton Evans yesterday granted the Attorney General’s appeal and quashed Justice Grant-Thompson’s awards for damages.

A copy of the judgment posted on the Crown’s website said the appeal came out of a request by the US Attorney for the Western District of Washington and the US Secret Service made pursuant to the Mutual Legal Assistance Act.

The request was “precipitated” by the transfer of more than $2m from SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, Georgia to the Royal Bank of Canada Caribbean accounts of all four respondents.

“It was alleged that the funds were fraudulently acquired from a company called Boeing via sham corporations, identity theft, a fraudulent passport and a forged email,” the court documents said.

“Having followed the paper trail, the authorities determined that the funds were being held in two accounts at RBC.

“The competent authority, that is, the Attorney General as envisaged under the MLAA, applied for and obtained a restraint order from the Supreme Court dated June 21, 2017, thereby preventing the respondents from accessing the funds.”

Justice Isaacs noted a court was entitled to amend judgments or orders by relying on the “slip rule”.

Still, he said, it would not be right for a court to seek to “re-craft” a judgment once it had already been pronounced in open court and “the import of that portion of the judgment is not so vague as to require clarification.”

“The judge’s words were pellucidly clear: ‘I ordered no damages as redress may have been available under other laws’,” Justice Isaacs stated.

“Having pronounced that she would order no damages, it was not open to the judge to entertain further arguments on the constitutional issues and to grant redress she had previously declined to give. This was a situation where the judge deliberately expressed her intention; and there was no question of there being an error.

“In as much as I have found that the judge erred when she re-entered into a consideration of the award of damages for the alleged constitutional breaches, I quash the judge’s awards for damage suffered by the respondents. As a result of my decision in relation to the relief granted by the judge it is unnecessary for me to consider whether the judge was correct to find that the constitutional breaches stemmed from the MLAT application and not to have arisen from the domestic criminal proceedings.”