Trinidad Targeting Official Misdeeds

First came the kickback charges: 27 fraud counts alleging that a Cabinet minister had systematically shaken down a contractor to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then the official, former Local Government Minister Dhanraj Singh, was charged with murder in the execution-style slaying of a senior regional official who had denounced such corruption.

And then there was the apparently unrelated matter of Trinidad’s new airport. The $120-million terminal complex that began serving passengers this weekend has been plagued by years of delays, cost overruns and persistent charges of kickbacks, overpricing and other irregularities--so persistent, in fact, that the government this year hired an outside investigator to help pursue them.

It’s not that petroleum-rich Trinidad and Tobago is the Caribbean’s cesspool of official corruption. Quite the contrary, insists Atty. Gen. Ramesh Maharaj, who is leading the government’s charge against graft.

Rather, Maharaj said, this airing of so much dirty laundry--most of it at the expense of his ruling United National Congress--is the price of a purge: an effort to become a corruption-fighting model for developing nations worldwide.

The government’s strategy is outlined in a 47-page report Maharaj submitted this month to Transparency International, a London group that links a nation’s corruption to its underdevelopment.

The blueprint will also be submitted to the Global Forum on Fighting Corruption in The Hague this month, Maharaj said.

“Allegations of corruption in Trinidad and Tobago have always been made,” he said. “The problem is, we haven’t had the kind of institutions that can go after it. . . . The fact is, no minister of government has ever been prosecuted for corruption.”

Until now.

In the last two years, Prime Minister Basdeo Panday has steered through Parliament a series of innovative laws, drafted by Maharaj, targeting official misdeeds.

The Integrity in Public Life Act passed last year is sweeping legislation whose premise is that any judicial, legislative or executive official who cannot explain his or her finances is presumed to be corrupt.

The law requires public disclosure and defines conflict of interest for the first time, and it empowers an independent Integrity Commission to investigate and prosecute cases too sensitive for the police or the politically appointed attorney general.

In the coming weeks, Parliament will debate legislation that provides protection for whistle-blowers and creates another independent commission.

The fact that Singh is in jail facing fraud and murder charges--allegations that the former Cabinet minister denies and asserts are politically motivated--”is indicative of the fact that the government does not interfere in such cases,” Maharaj said.

The probe of the new airport, Panday’s pet project, is seen by many here as an acid test of the government’s anti-corruption commitment.

Maharaj and Trinidad’s national security minister hired U.S. investigator Bob Linquist to provide outside “expert assistance” in the airport inquiry. Linquist has submitted a preliminary report to Maharaj, who declined to release its findings.

Critics speculate that the attorney general, who is running for his party’s deputy leadership in June 3 elections, is sitting on the report as leverage against other party leaders in the polls. Maharaj flatly denied the charge.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on the report,” Maharaj said. “This is a continuing investigation. I wouldn’t want to prejudice it.”