Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Roger Gaspard, SC, says the other Piarco cases are still “active.”
He made the comment on Monday, in response to questions from Newsday about whether he had made a decision on those cases, since the prosecution in the Piarco 3 inquiry was discontinued on the day it was expected to go to trial again.
On June 27 last year, Gaspard admitted that a Privy Council decision, two days earlier, had cast judgment on the committal of the defendants in the Piarco 1 matter because of the conduct of former chief magistrate Sherman Mc Nicholls, but said it did not dismiss any of the charges against them so the evidentiary foundation remained “unbesmirched and intact.”
He said it was not the end of the matter, as there were options: a new preliminary inquiry, or an indictment to be filed in the High Court, bypassing the inquiry stage. Gaspard said there were several public-interest and evidential considerations he had to look at before deciding on whether the proceedings should be reinstated.
However, he said his position was that taking the Piarco 1 matter to trial would have been “oppressive and legally nettlesome” with the other matters in train, especially as there were common defendants in those matters, so “a joint trial of the allegations in Piarco No 1 and those arising from those other matters, was desirable.”
Gaspard also reminded that the Privy Council ruling in Piarco 1 did not affect any of the other matters.
In November last year, attorneys for those in the Piarco cases urged the DPP to discontinue all four matters. In that letter, King’s Counsel Edward Fitzgerald put forward six main grounds why they felt Gaspard should do so. He spoke of political interference and the delay in bringing the matters to trial after almost two decades.
In February, after the magistrate in the Piarco 3 matter set trial dates, the Pandays’ attorney, Chase Pegus, also wrote to the DPP asking him to consider discontinuing and for a reason why he had, at the time, chosen to continue the case.
There have been countless legal challenges in all the cases which the Privy Council, in 2016, said “had aroused strong feelings in TT for some years.
“The Piarco cases are said by the DPP to be the largest complex fraud and corruption cases ever prosecuted in the Caribbean Commonwealth,’ the decision said. It also noted the committal proceedings were very long-drawn-out, partly because of the complexity of the facts and partly because they involved a great deal of oral and documentary evidence and frequent adjournments.”
In September 2012, a week after presidential assent to the Administration of Justice (Indictable Proceedings) Act 2011, which included the controversial section 34 clause, the Piarco accused applied to invoke the law. That section introduced a ten-year statutory limitation period for some criminal prosecutions, but was short-lived as it was in force for only two weeks before Parliament repealed it.
The Piarco matters
There were four inquiries arising out of the corruption
