Reaction to Lord report and injunction is diverse

To say that the unilateral submission of a report by the D.F.C. Commission of Inquiry by co-chair Herbert Lord has opened a can of worms would be an understatement; it’s more like a truckload. And the interesting thing–to stretch the analogy–is that every one of those worms seems to be crawling in a different direction. As best as we can tell, here’s how things stand.

Over two years after Prime Minister Said Musa signed a statutory instrument creating a three-person commission of inquiry to investigate the D.F.C.; after hearing forty-four witnesses and examining thousand of documents; after enduring the illness, then death of chairman David Price; commission co-chair Herbert Lord–for reasons yet unknown–submitted his report to Prime Minister Said Musa. That report was not labelled as his alone, but carried the formal title “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Development Finance Corporation.” According to Lord’s co-chair, Merlene Bailey-Martinez, speaking to us today, Lord gave no indication that he intended to submit his own report and that the last time they met, they agreed to work out a schedule to draft their joint report, with deference to Lord’s demanding obligations as a judge. Bailey-Martinez said that her next communication with Lord was the receipt of a letter from him informing her that he would be submitting his own report to the P.M. the next day.

When we asked Bailey-Martinez if she could offer any explanation as to why Lord would have done what he did, she emphatically stated that she knew no reason. Was there a falling out? She says no.

So we now move to Wednesday, July eighteenth. The Prime Minister has returned to Belmopan and we are informed by the Press Office that the P.M. has received the report–that is the Report of the Commission–and has ordered it and the forensic auditor’s report released to the public and also sent to the D.P.P. for whatever action he may see fit. Sometime that morning Lord’s report is posted on the government’s website.

Later that afternoon things get complicated as Elson Kaseke, acting for his client Glenn Godfrey, succeeds in obtaining an injunction from Chief Justice Abdulai Conteh.

The ruling cites the Commission of Inquiry Act and holds that the law requires the commissioners to make a report. Conteh interprets this to mean one report, the product of both commissioners. Thus, Lord’s unilateral report cannot be the official report as required by the Act. The C.J. goes on to prohibit the government from releasing the Lord document to the public. For Glenn Godfrey this prevents any alleged damage to his reputation by what he terms a “biased” report. The only problem is that the full document had already been released to the public over the internet.

Interestingly, prodded by warnings from Godfrey and his surrogates, a number of media houses refrain from citing specifics of the report. Some mistakenly believe Justice Conteh has placed a gag order on the press, while others fear a libel suit by Godfrey and his cohorts who are harshly criticised by Commissioner Lord for their actions at the D.F.C. The feeling is that if Lord’s report was official it would protect the press from legal action, on the grounds they were simply quoting from an official document. Much of the debate then shifts from the actual content of the report to how its submission should have been handled. The Trade Union Congress writes a letter to the P.M. strongly recommending that the Lord report be withdrawn from the website and replaced, when completed, with the proper report compiled by both commissioners. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Lutchman Sukhnandan, speaking today to News Five, also expresses a preference for a single joint report. He agrees with the Chief Justice, saying the report may have been a commissioner’s report but was not the Commission’s report. He had not yet received the Lord Report but say that when he did he would read it, and if necessary make investigations … but his preference is clearly for a more complete presentation.

And speaking of complete, what about Commissioner Bailey-Martinez? Today she assured us that while she would have greatly preferred a single unified presentation, she is diligently working on her own report, although she cannot offer a firm date for completion. And how would that report be dealt with by the Prime Minister? “We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it,” she says.