St. John’s, Antigua: Members of the opposition Antigua Labour Party (ALP) and one of their legal advisors have condemned the swearing in of Guyanese attorney, Sanjeev Datadin, who was sworn in on Tuesday by Chief Magistrate Joanne Walsh and Commissioner of Police Vere Browne, as a special constable to probe the US $14 million Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Company Ltd (IHI) Japan debt settlement fraud, according to a report in the Antigua Observer.
The ALP members have labelled the move political and diversionary. But Datadin has countered, saying it is the ALP that is seeking to divert attention away from the allegations of a serious fraud. Former prime minister and ALP leader Lester Bird and his former junior finance minister Asot Michael are targets of the probe. Additionally, Patrick A Michael & Co, Josette Michael and Sir Ronald Sanders, a former high commissioner for Antigua & Barbuda to the United Kingdom, are also named as persons of interest.
According to the report Senior Counsel Anthony Astaphan said, “I don’t care how holy, how clean, how professional, how strongly (sic) his integrity is … I think it is an absolute outrage …what they are intending to do is to subvert the position of the DPP, seek to have a lawyer dressed up in the court as a constable with the powers of arrest which strikes me as a fundamental conflict between a person who should be independently and impartially reviewing the evidence to decide whether an arrest should be made.”
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