Controversy continues over the moneys spent by the multi- million Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation(SIDF). Lawyer Charles Wilkin QC, at the recent government forum on the economy, said that the former government used SIDF funds as it pleased in breach of the SKN constitution.
However on Wednesday’s edition of ISSUES on Freedom Fm, Senator Nigel Carty challenged and took Wilkin to task over the SIDF saying that Wilkin is the lawyer for TDC and Christophe Harbour which have received SIDF funding. Carty observed that if Wilkin felt the funds were illegally obtained in breach of the constitution, then he should have advised his clients not to take any SIDF money.
“In particular he has been the lawyer for TDC for many years, but at the time when the OTI was negotiating for funds from the SIDF for their major renovation and which the Cabinet of Ministers was very pleased to support. When FINCO was negotiating with the SIDF to get money to put into its loan portfolio to lend those loans to ordinary people and make a little profit on the top of that, a little interest profit from that, didn’t Mr. Wilkin know that the SIDF funds were illegal?”
In an invited response to Carty’s statements, Lawyer Charles Wilkin advanced that Carty was not qualified to get into a legal argument with him and accused Carty of ”persisting with a smoke screen that the SIDF is a private fund”.
“He’s not qualified to get into a legal argument with me. I will simply say it’s a pity that he persists with the smoke screen that the SIDF is a private fund. He should then say which private person it belongs to. As to his reference to monies advanced to TDC, those monies were loaned, not given and have been spent in a totally transparent manner. He can go down to OTI and see for himself. TDC is fully accountable for those monies. We will see in due course if the same can be said about the other billion plus dollars that went out of the SIDF coffers,” Wilkin said.
Meanwhile former PM Dr Denzil Douglas told Freedom Newsdesk recently that that the SIDF operations had not breached or violated any constitutional arrangement, and that the institution that established the SIDF was the National Trust of the national Bank Group of Companies.
“At no time did any Attorney General who was part of the entire operation of the SIDF when we were in government, supported any view that it should have gone into the Consolidated Fund…We believe that the Financial Administration Act allowed for the Fund to be established. We believe that the Constitution also allowed a fund of that kind to be established without monies received going into the Consolidated Fund. First of all, it was not the government that was generating the revenue. Government was engaged in an exercise that allowed for persons making an investment into a fund as a result of our programme – the Citizenship programme – allowed monies received from that activity to go into a…special fund,” Dr. Douglas said, adding that the institution that established the SIDF was the National Trust of the National Bank Group of Companies.