Apart from crime and the 2010-11 national budget, the issue generating the greatest amount of national discussion is that of extradition. At the centre of the matter are two high-profile local businessmen–Steve Ferguson and Ishwar Galbaransingh–who are both still incarcerated awaiting the decision of Attorney General Anand Ramlogan as to whether or not they should be extradited to the US to face charges there. As the debate rages, there are strong arguments surfacing that tend to shift the locus in favour of the men being tried in T&T, not merely because there is great imbalance in extraditions of US citizens from that country to other parts of the world, but the views of several local luminaries which say the correct and proper place for their trials is in T&T.
Eduardo Hillman-Waller, a US citizen and co-conspirator in the Piarco Airport Project, is the only US citizen to have ever been successfully extradited to T&T. Hillman-Waller was extradited on charges relating to the conspiracy to defraud the Airports Authority of T&T and money laundering. Long before Sir Ellis Clarke, the country's first President, commented on this inconsistency of forum, Justice Geoffrey Henderson, then Director of Public Prosecutions, submitted in 2004 that the proper jurisdiction for matters arising out of the Piarco Airport Project to be dealt with is in the Trinidad courts because "the important factor is the place where the victim is to be defrauded, not the place where the agreement is carried out."
Sir Ellis himself, a framer of our Constitution, had already given his views on the inconsistency of forum, when he stated, "I cannot refrain from laying emphasis on the glaring inconsistency in seeking extradition of Eduardo Hillman-Waller on the ground that Trinidad and Tobago is the forum conveniens but rejecting that very ground in order to extradite Ferguson and Galbaransingh. "It is difficult," he continued, "to see how an Attorney General, applying the law to facts in this matter and ignoring, as he must, irrelevant and unfair considerations, could fail to find that Trinidad and Tobago is the proper forum." Additionally, the accused themselves have made representations to the AG providing reasons why they should not be extradited.
Specifically, they have pointed out that former Attorney General John Jeremie as well as former DPP Henderson had already decided that T&T was the proper jurisdiction to hear the allegations arising out of the Piarco Airport project. Their reference point was that the local legal men had made that policy decision when they both argued that Hillman-Waller should be extradited to Trinidad, since this was where the victim was defrauded. Further, somewhere around the time that Hillman-Waller was in the process of being extradited to T&T, the Government had made a request for the extradition of Joseph Ben-Dak, a resident of the US, to face charges in Trinidad relative to contract awards to Desalcott, a joint venture between Ionics and Hafeez Karamath Engineering Services Ltd.
Ben-Dak had been arrested in New York and subsequently released on bail pending the outcome of the proceedings. However, in this matter, US Judge Gabriel Gorenstein dismissed the request of the T&T Government for Ben-Dak to be extradited. A good case for forum conveniens.
VK Sant
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