THE BANK account number was 39036189. He gave several reasons for not declaring it. At first, in reply to correspondence from the Integrity Commission seeking explanation, he did not seem to know whether the joint account existed since he was awaiting a reply from UK bank officials about it. Then, he said he believed the account was his wife’s and that it was money held in trust for the education of their children. Next, he said he was mistaken; the account had been opened to pay for heart surgery. At the trial before Sherman McNicolls, the chief magistrate, yet another explanation emerged: the money was a scholarship from Lawrence Duprey, the business magnate, but he did not know of this financial assistance since finances in Hindu families are handled by the wife.
On the eve of the new millennium, in the years 1997, 1998, and 1999, the money increased at a rate exceeding his income. The total accumulated year-end balances for the account for the three years was £159,600.35, which would be, factoring inflation, roughly £291,457 – or TT$3 million – today.
Basdeo Panday will be remembered for many things. But history records him as the first, and to date only, former prime minister to stand in a prisoner’s dock on criminal charges. Although his political enemies speculated, during his time as PM from 1995-2001, about various matters including those relating to Desalcott, Tidco, the purchase of food and drink at the official residence and the project to build an airport at Piarco, it was for knowingly filing false paperwork that he was convicted by McNicolls in a 2006 criminal trial. The conviction was later quashed because of “apparent bias” relating to the magistrate, who, at the very end of his ruling had said, suspiciously, “my mind is free of all sorts of influences.” Attempts at retrial were thrown out in subsequent years as abuse.
Nonetheless, the circumstances of this case remain one of the most disturbing chapters in TT’s history. They reveal the toxic consequences of what occurs when unbridled partisan interests collide with constitutional arrangements vulnerable to interference, real or perceived. There is no other case that more strongly supports the need for the constitutional reform Panday himself strongly lobbied for in life.
There was, thus, something serendipitous in judges not being invited to the former prime minister’s state funeral last Tuesday. Still, many individuals in the auditorium at the Southern Academy for the Performing Arts would have been familiar with the entire saga.
Anthony Carmona, the former president who this month called for the Order of TT to be bestowed on Panday posthumously, was the judge who held the unenviable task of deciding whether Panday should be given bail after McNicolls handed down a sentence of two years’ hard labour on each of three counts brought under section 27 (1)(b) of the Integrity in Public Life Act 1987. Paula-Mae Weekes, Carmona’s successor, who sat beside him in the audience, was on the Court of Appeal panel that ordered a retrial based on a
