The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

THE Free National Movement (FNM) on Friday persisted with its call for the Christie administration to release additional details about the recently struck Baha Mar deal.

This comes a day after Prime Minister Perry Christie explained that lawyers instructed him not to do so because of the sensitivity of the matters involved.

The FNM is arguing that public distrust of Mr Christie makes it difficult to take him at his word regarding Baha Mar.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Christie is citing the fact that Supreme Court Justice Ian Winder had to approve a deal between the government and China Export-Import Bank (CEXIM) before he could speak with confidence about the matter.

In a press statement yesterday, FNM Leader Dr Hubert Minnis criticised the government for seeking to have the Supreme Court seal documents relating to the deal.

“The Prime Minister has been in Parliament so long that he must think that he can now define words so that they can benefit him,” Dr Minnis said. “On Thursday, the Prime Minister claimed that there is no secrecy in the Baha Mar deal, yet he had the courts seal the documents related to the deal so that Bahamians could not see them. That is right; he thinks that sealing documents does not make them secret. Let me remind him that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of secret is: ‘Kept from knowledge or view’. That is exactly what he is doing with the Baha Mar deal – keeping it out of view from Bahamians.”

Dr Minnis said the Prime Minister “must be aware that the agreement that he signed was signed by him on behalf of the Bahamian people, and so the government has a duty to make the agreement public.”

“Making these documents public does not mean that he just tells us what is in them, but releases the actual copies of the deal that was signed. If the deal is already completed and signed off on by the courts there is no way for anyone to sabotage the deal, and thus his reason for keeping them sealed is void. It has been almost a week since he made his announcement of the secret deal and the people are demanding for the documents to be seen. Bahamians just want to know what the government is hiding from them by sealing these documents,” he said.

Lawyers have told The Tribune that it’s not unusual for documents to be sealed before negotiations are complete and certain aspects of an agreement are triggered.

However, some have argued that Mr Christie should not have made revelations about Baha Mar if he was not ready to discuss the issue in-depth.

Dr Minnis said: “Like all Bahamians we would be happy to see Baha Mar open and finally start providing jobs. But we also cannot forget that the PLP has handed out a lot of broken promises and empty rhetoric on Baha Mar in the past. Bahamians have lost faith in the Prime Minister no matter how much he does not believe it.  Bahamians are only asking to see the deal that the Prime Minister claims is a good deal for all Bahamians. If the deal is good for the Bahamas and it has already been signed off on so it cannot be sabotaged, there is no reason it should not be released. Unlike the Prime Minister, the FNM knows what secrecy means and in an FNM government we will expose this secret deal for all Bahamians to judge.”