The voluminous Sir Anthony Colman report into the collapse of the Colonial Life Insurance Company has been sent to Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Roger Gaspard for his attention and action. The report, according to well-placed sources, was passed to the DPP’s office soon after it was received by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley.
However, over the past five years the DPP’s office has been conducting criminal investigations into the collapse of Clico, and had gone before the Colman Commission expressing concerns that the inquiry could have prejudiced the ongoing criminal investigation.
Former AG and legal counsel for the United Policyholders Group, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, recalled that notwithstanding the concerns of the DPP’s office, the inquiry proceeded. Maharaj said “it may be the COE obstructed the investigation.” Attempts to contact Gaspard were unsuccessful.
The Colman report, a well-placed source said, “focused on criminal conduct in a specific way,” and “this is why Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has not made the report public.” The source said the Government was being very careful what it said about the report “because we do not want to make statements which may be tantamount to pre‐trial publicity. We want to ensure at the end of the day there is a conviction.”
The Government, the source said, does not intend to let the findings and recommendations of the inquiry go to waste.
A legal source pointing to the 2014 report on the collapse of the Hindu Credit Union said that report was sent to the then Kamla Persad Bissessar government and was laid in Parliament. That, the source said, may have constituted pre-trial publicity and impacted the matter, but “that is not going to happen with the Colman findings.”
The document was also forwarded to the DPP but there had been little follow through on the recommendations contained in that report, which included that 18 criminal charges could have been brought against former HCU president Harry Harnarine.
In June of this year, Colman had written to the President raising concerns that “of the three local attorneys two proved to be so incompetent, inexperienced and lacking in any sense of professional responsibility that they became unavailable or only partially available.”
The commission's legal team included counsel to the commission Peter Carter, QC, Celeste Jules, Gerald Ramdeen, Varun Debideen, Wayne Sturge, Israel Khan and Shankar Bidaisee. While Debideen had acknowledged that Colman’s criticism was directed at himself and Ramdeen, Ramdeen told the GML Enterprise Desk that he came to the commission after people were appointed and left, and he was not aware that the criticism was directed at him.
Reports indicate that the inquiry cost the country over $100 million, of which attorneys were paid close to $80 million in legal fees. While published figures indicate that Ramdeen was paid $5.8 million and Debideen $4.9 million, sources said another attorney “hand‐picked” by the last administration was paid over $8 million.
The office of the attorney general is currently calculating the number of appearances made by each attorney, the billable hours, and the rate of payment. This will be done in conjunction with the secretary of the commission Judith Gonzalves who presented the report to the President last week.
The total cost of the Colman Commission of Enquiry is still being calculated, a source said.
“There is missing paperwork, we still have to calculate who paid for what. There were expenses from the Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance, state enterprises, what has been spent so far on investigations by the DPP office.” Well-placed sources said “everything arising out of the inquiry including costs will be made public in due course.”
According to sources, because the inquiry was financed through the Office of the Prime Minister, it is “the OPM which will be dealing with matters of incompetence included in the report.”
The inquiry followed a probe done into the collapse of Clico by Canadian Forensic expert Bob Lindquist. The cost of the Lindquist probe was $105 million.
In November 2011, then attorney general Anand Ramlogan told the Parliament in response to a question from then opposition leader Dr Keith Rowley that the Clico probe done by Linquist cost the country $105 million. He said then, “the Clico matter did not in fact result in any case of any kind, but $105 million was spent on the Clico probe through the Central Bank.”
Ramlogan gave the breakdown: “$56 million to Mr Bob Linquist;$31.5 million for legal fees and; $17 million for specialist fraud experts. So that is $105 million spent on the Clico probe,” he told the Parliament.
Lindquist got the Clico brief under the then PNM administration led by Patrick Manning who wanted answers on who were responsible for the disappearance of billions of dollars from Clico, the Clico Investment Bank and CL Financial, once the Caribbean’s largest business conglomerate.
At the time of its collapse, the commercial entity was reported to have assets in a portfolio of more than 60 companies operating in the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including banking and financial services, insurance, energy, real estate, forestry, insurance, medical services and retail.
Investigations conducted by Lindquist unearthed forensic evidence which led to a civil suit being filed in June 2011 by the Central Bank and Colonial Life Insurance Company Ltd (Clico) against Duprey and the CL Financial’s former financial director, Andre Monteil. Files coming out of that probe were forwarded later to the DPP to determine if criminal charges should be laid against the two men.