Financial crime blogger, Kenneth Rijock, says this past week saw the emergence of what can only be describe as double trouble for many of the corrupt national leaders in the East Caribbean (EC) states.
On his Financial Crime Blog, Rijock cites first, information about an offer to cooperate, coming from the newly arrested and now former, Premier of the British Virgin Islands, Andrew Fahie regarding his testimony against other corrupt EC leaders.
Rijock also points to the extradition, to the United States, of the most important Colombian drug kingpin to be arrested in decades, and who has already started cooperating with Colombian law enforcement.
According to Rijock, this has raised the presumption that he will now assist US law enforcement, especially regarding those Caribbean officials “who assisted his cocaine shipments reach North America”.
In one of his latest blogs, Rijock suggests that these two matters will result in the United States acquiring sufficient evidence and testimony to indict a number of East Caribbean leaders whose corrupt activities richly deserve long terms of confinement in American prisons.
He says while most of these leaders have operated with impunity, due to lack of sufficient evidence to sustain convictions in Federal courtrooms in Miami and New York, it is obvious that these two cooperating individuals will now most likely allow the United States to obtain the convictions of key leaders in the region, at the ministerial level, including prime ministers.
He predicts that national leaders in the five East Caribbean states that offer CBI economic passport programmes: St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St. Lucia and Grenada, jurisdictions where corruption is allegedly the rule, rather than the exception, should be considered the primary targets.
“My own information from my sources is that his representatives are already working to make a deal,” he said, referring to Fahie. “He maybe telling his constituents in the BVI that he is innocent, that he is going to fight it, that with God’s help he is going to be exonerated but that is not happening. So his representatives have already made overtures that he is interested in cooperating with the US government and he has things to offer and it includes information dealing with the guilt of leaders of other Caribbean states and countries.”
