Express Editorial

Politician that he is Mr Basdeo Panday, long-time leader of the United National Congress (UNC), may well believe that you can fool all of the people all of the time or enough of them so that it does not make any quantitative difference. But even his most die-hard supports, given the sequence, must find it difficult to swallow his claim that the charges he now faces for failing to disclose a foreign account, are part of a PNM plot to attack him for exposing the “unholy alliance” between the ruling PNM and the Jamaat al Muslimeen.

Long-time PNM leader Mr Patrick Manning gifted Mr Panday a sizzling campaign issue when he confirmed that he had agreed to grant the Muslimeen the section of State land adjoining theirs on Mucurapo Road. That, however, was two weeks ago. In contrast, the investigation into Mr Panday and the undisclosed account has been a long-running saga.

For example, it was since in October last year that this newspaper called upon the Integrity Commission to probe Basdeo Panday’s London bank account. We argued, then, that as Prime Minister and, moreso, the one responsible for the passage of the Integrity in Public Life Act, Mr Panday had a responsibility to account to the population on how he had been able to accumulate finances which seemed inconsistent with his known sources of income.

We also pointed out that Mr Panday, by his own admission, had failed to disclose the account as required by the Integrity Act he championed and we referred to what we perceived to have been a lack of forthrightness in his pronouncements on the issue.

The week before, the Integrity Commission’s had decided to refer the matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions, following which the police picked up their own investigations with the result that, rightly or wrongly, charges were laid against Mr Panday on Wednesday.

The truth is that the country had been made aware since May last year, via an exclusive Express report, that Mr Panday was being investigated by the Integrity Commission so that it is little short of astonishing that he should now be marrying the latest twist in that investigation to Mr Manning’s ill-conceived and fortunately shot-down plan to give the Jamaat land in what, we argued last Saturday, was nothing less than a betrayal of the public trust.

The leaders of the two major parties never cease to surprise and alarm us but, not for the first time, we need to draw public attention to Mr Panday’s perilous penchant for saying whatever suits him at a particular point in time regardless of whether his words will stand up to the scrutiny of reasonable men and women. MORE