Ak­ile Si­mon

De­feat­ed po­lit­i­cal leader of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress, Bas­deo Pan­day, ducked and ran from me­dia per­son­nel out­side the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates' Court yes­ter­day af­ter he reap­peared be­fore a mag­is­trate charged with fail­ing to de­clare his Lon­don bank ac­count to the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion. Pan­day faces three charges of fail­ing to de­clare his Natwest Lon­don bank ac­count to the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999. One of Pan­day's at­tor­ney, Ravi Ra­j­coomar, made an ap­pli­ca­tion be­fore First Court mag­is­trate Melvin Daniel to dis­miss the charge against Pan­day be­cause the State did not in­form the court its po­si­tion in the mat­ter. Ra­j­coomar, who leads Pan­day's daugh­ter, Mikela, told the court the pros­e­cu­tion had suf­fi­cient time to get its house in or­der.

Po­lice pros­e­cu­tor, In­sp Sur­ren­dra Sagram­s­ingh, in­formed the mag­is­trate the state was in­ter­est­ed in the mat­ter, but he could not ex­plain why the com­plainant was ab­sent. The mag­is­trate then ad­journed the mat­ter for 30 min­utes to al­low the pros­e­cu­tion time to con­tact the com­plainant in the mat­ter– re­tired As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er Welling­ton Vir­gil. "Your wor­ship I have caused one of my col­leagues to com­mu­ni­cate with Mr Vir­gil but we are un­able to con­tact him and in the cir­cum­stances the sit­u­a­tion re­mains the same," Sagram­s­ingh said when the mat­ter was re­called. Mag­is­trate Daniel then ad­journed the mat­ter to Feb­ru­ary, 22, for men­tion and said he want­ed to give the pros­e­cu­tion time to state its po­si­tion in the case.

While at­tempt­ing to leave the court, Pan­day man­aged to "out­smart" TV cam­era­men who were gath­ered out­side the north­ern en­trance of the cour­t­house af­ter they got word he was at the bot­tom of the stair­case and was ex­pect­ed to make his ex­it short­ly. Min­utes lat­er, Pan­day qui­et­ly slipped through the south­ern en­trance, on­to St Vin­cent Street, and raced to­wards his ve­hi­cle which was parked out­side the Par­lia­ment on Knox Street. Pan­day did not even look be­hind as me­dia per­son­nel called out to him. He bolt­ed across the road and jumped in­to the left pas­sen­ger seat of his Toy­ota Land Cruis­er which quick­ly sped off. The re­porters were hop­ing to speak with Pan­day on Sun­day's land­slide de­feat he suf­fered against Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar in the UNC's in­ter­nal elec­tions.