The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

According to Fred ‘This is War’ Mitchell, he will not be bound by any court of law when it comes to what he considers to be his unqualified right to say and do whatever he pleases in Parliament.

I have already described the current controversy over parliamentary privilege as a storm in a teacup, deliberately manufactured to deflect attention from a public relations problem over influence peddling on a massive scale by Canadian resident Peter Nygard.

I gave a potted history of the arcane 16th century British origins of the concept of parliamentary privilege. But I also pointed out that the controversy threatens to open a constitutional Pandora’s Box - depending on how far government politicos are prepared to take matters.

Both Mitchell and his colleague - Jerome ‘Rubis’ Fitzgerald - have made an indignant pretence of claiming a right to parliamentary privilege with complete immunity from the law. “Any injunction which purports to restrict that (right) seeks to do so in vain,” as Fitzgerald declared melodramatically.

But if we take just a few steps back in time to when the Pindling government was faced with its own massive influence peddling scandal, we learn that the issue of parliamentary privilege was placed on the other foot then.

Some 30 years ago, the late Everette Bannister was a well-known cigar-chomping crony of then maximum leader Lynden Pindling. It was Bannister who cleverly earned a $300,000 “finder’s fee” for selling the Paradise Island bridge to the government. And it was Bannister who helped fugitive financier Robert Vesco channel payoffs to Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) bigwigs to avoid extradition.

Bannister was at the top of his game as a bag man in January 1982, when opposition MP Mike Lightbourn unleashed a bombshell in Parliament - producing the famous Miami Herald headline: “Scandal is Bitter in The Bahamas”. This was just before dramatic disclosures of the government’s “Nation for Sale” dealings with foreign drug lords, which led to the 1984 Commission of Inquiry.

Lightbourn tabled documents outlining Bannister’s connection to an American investor named Abraham J Lieber in a scheme that involved widespread payoffs to top government officials in return for extensive commercial “arrangements”. Lightbourn asked for a select committee to investigate “all matters pertaining to the peddling or purported peddling of political influence for personal profit”.

Lieber was a former New York jewellery maker who had reinvented himself as an international developer and head of the Euro-American Amherst Group. In 1979, as a special favour, he had given Pindling a secret $650,000 mortgage on his Skyline Drive home, for a nominal interest rate. At the time, The Tribune reported that the file for the mortgage company was “missing” from the Registry.

The most explosive document in Lightbourn’s possession was an account of a meeting that took place in the Philippines in early 1979, between individuals identified only as “EB” and “AJL”. This memo listed 26 items discussed by the signatories.

The memo said Bannister was to act as an intermediary between the Amherst Group and the government to obtain approvals, permits and other concessions to facilitate large-scale business ventures which the Amherst Group contemplated undertaking in The Bahamas.

These concessions included work permits for expatriates who were to be employed on the projects, licences to operate a casino in Freeport and a bank in Nassau, authority to build a convention centre on Cable Beach and to open facilities for horse racing and dog racing. Bannister would also arrange for all government buildings and vehicles to be insured through one of Lieber’s companies.

One of the documents alleged that “Bannister has arranged for A J Leiber to meet privately with the Prime Minister on several occasions as well as several other cabinet ministers, particularly George Smith. A J Leiber has made many payoffs (in cash and gifts) to officials of the Central Bank, Members of the cabinet and the civil service.”

As I wrote in The Tribune at the time, these politically damaging accusations presented government-controlled television station ZNS with an appalling problem of news management. “They solved it,” I wrote, “by saying only that ‘a Bahamian businessman’ had been charged with ‘political peddling’. Despite the fact that Bannister had been identified in the newspapers and in Parliament, ZNS referred to him only as the mysterious ‘EB’.”

But the very next day EB foiled this plan by calling a press conference and identifying himself on ZNS. He called Lightbourn a liar, claimed the documents were forgeries and then refused to answer questions. And while ZNS obligingly ran EB’s complete denial, it failed to mention any of the stupendous charges made against him. This was typical for the time, and things are much the same today at the Broadcasting Corporation.

Meanwhile, the House of Assembly was in an uproar, but the government could not see its way to reject the select committee Lightbourn had asked for. Those appointed were Hubert Ingraham, Sinclair Outten and George Mackey from the PLP, and opposition MPs Jimmy Knowles and Mike Lightbourn.

The revelations were widely publicised in the press and were such as to smear the cabinet, civil servants and other officials. So Attorney-General Paul Adderley began formulating the government’s defence, which amounted to an attack on parliamentary privilege.

In February, Adderley declared that “Mike Lightbourn can say anything he chooses on the floor of the House, but he need be aware of what he says lest there be consequences. Parliamentary privilege was never meant to cloak crime.”

He then asked for a court order forcing Lightbourn to turn over all documents and the names of his sources so the government could investigate the allegations. Attorney Keith Duncombe opposed the application on the grounds that it “constituted a breach of parliamentary privilege, in particular the right to freedom of speech in Parliament” and that “the Bribery Act should be construed so as to preserve parliamentary privilege”.

But in his March 1982 judgement, Chief Justice Vivien Blake said parliamentary privilege did not enable Lightbourn to refuse a notice served upon him under the Bribery Act. Lightbourn said he would appeal the order, but other events intervened.

Ingraham, as chair of the select committee, had issued a report on the scandal which was not the usual political whitewash - something that came as a huge surprise to most observers. He also wrote a private letter to Pindling warning him that his association with Bannister was damaging the government.

This led the Prime Minister to dissolve the House and call an early election in June, which the PLP won handily, and the scandal was essentially buried. As Lightbourn recalls: “The AG came after us with a vengeance because of the political impact the scandal would have on the PLP. I ran out of gas and did not run again. I was going broke anyway.”

Before the 1982 election the opposition had been divided into the Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by Norman Solomon, and the Free National Movement (FNM), led by Kendal Isaacs and Cecil Wallace Whitfield. Solomon wound up the SDP in 1982 and ran as an independent, while the FNM won 11 of the 43 House seats.

Ingraham was made a cabinet minister after the election. Four years later, he was expelled from the PLP after taking a stand against widespread official corruption.

This analogy is not perfect, but as senior lawyer Fred Smith has said: “Privilege does not put Members of Parliament in a class alone, they are still subject to the laws of the land. If Members of Parliament can be prosecuted for matters that occurred in Parliament so too can they be challenged for breaches of the Constitution.”

The reference to prosecution recalled a 2009 scandal in Britain, when several MPs were charged with submitting fraudulent expense claims. Some claimed immunity from prosecution because of parliamentary privilege, but this defence was rejected by the court. In other words, Parliament cannot use privilege as a method to avoid abiding by the ordinary laws of the land.

So presumably what we are left with is political theatre. A cynical effort to deflect attention from Peter Nygard’s influence peddling. From charges of sedition to claims of parliamentary privilege and threats to haul a sitting judge before a political inquisition, it is frightening to see just how far government politicos will go in the interest of propaganda.

What do you think? Send comments to lsmith@

tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com.