…spoils
The Trinis just proposed an “Explain Your Wealth Bill”. What’s that? Well just that if you think it’s only the PNC that’s been doing certain things over the past four years, their counterparts over in T&T has been doing it for 50 years!!
When the PNM in T&T took office in 1956, they weren’t ousted for the next 30 years – two more years than Burnham had over here. But unlike Burnham who had sugar and bauxite, they had oil and which Eric Williams wasn’t daft enough to nationalise.
Rather he arranged for his supporters to situate themselves to take advantage of all the ancillary industries that were needed to support the oil industry. It was LEGALISED ‘benefits’, since the folks in the Opposition camp and their supporters were left to make do in the sugar fields and such like. And boy did they get fat!! Problem is, when you’re used to easy money that’s expected to fall into your lap when the business class don’t even have to be told to pass bribes. It’s not easy to be weaned off.
Which is what the Trinis are now forced to do now that oil has stopped flowing. Oil mighn’t spoil, like Williams said, but it WILL run out!! So now we have some REAL ‘benefits’ going on over there to keep on with their high living! The big time money laundering and drug smuggling involved explains the “Explain your Wealth” Bill, which the global community has insisted on. The theory’s quite simple: if your assets and your lifestyle are way out of whack with your legal source of income, then the onus shifts to you to show where you got that wealth!! – If you can’t explain, its freeze and seize, baby!
It’s like the Big Ones at City Hall fingered in the Kennard CoI. If we had such a law over here, the Police would just have to demand the ex-Town Clerk show them the source of the funds that made him snap up all those properties. Or have all those customs and Police Officers to explain how they ended up with those humungous properties and minibus fleets on salaries that their union insists can’t even provide them with room and board.
But the PNC ‘benefits’ since 2015 has them salivating over the thought of the BILLIONS OF US oil money coming down the pipeline.
Don’t expect any “Explain Your Wealth Bill” here!!
…mafia
Stabroek Market is once again in the news – for all the wrong reasons. But mainly for being a hotbed of crime: petty and not so petty and certainly never, ever pretty. But that’s how it’s been for the last five decades, hasn’t it? And that’s because the problems of the “Big” Market is a microcosm of the city problem writ small. The mafia – and it’s a mafia…the PNC mafia! – that runs Georgetown can clean up the Stabroek area with a snap of the finger! All they have to do is rein in their Constabulary from running one of the largest shakedown schemes in the country.
But it’s just mirroring the shakedown of the big ones of the business community as was recently exposed by the Kennard Commission. And just like how the PNC mafia promised audits and investigations would be continued to clean up of that Augean Stables, at City Hall, the shakeup that can clean up the Stabroek Market dystopia will never happen in our lifetime.
Remember the vendors that crowd the Stabroek Square? Remember the ruckus when they were cleared out for the Mash Parade of 2016? With a promise that they’d all be permanently relocated?
That, of course, is gone fuh channa!! The mafia needs them to mobilise!!
…controllers
The Police are denying they were INSTRUCTED by the PNC or the President to arrest the Opposition Leader – just as they denied they were instructed by the Public Security Minister to investigate Charrandas Persaud.
They were TOLD??
