July 14, 2007

PRESUMABLY the "gag order" preventing any follow-up news on "Ewartgate" (a perfect anagram of Watergate) has, in part, been implemented to give the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office a chance to get its act in order. Well . . . not exactly in order. Not while the Queen's representative here has known for two years the full extent of the Bermuda Housing Corporation police reports on which he's been entirely inactive. No, the FCO and its man in Bermuda will be using the time available to them to come up with yet another white wash of the facts associated with the BHC scandal.Sir John Vereker's inaction together with his recent actions following the leaking of the police dossiers bear close scrutiny.

His attitude of righteous indignation when our egomaniacal Premier demanded he attend meetings at his place rather than Government House swiftly changed to side-by-side mutuality and the spouting of indignant stupidities about the public's seemingly limited right to know of their leaders' incriminating activities.

Terrence Smith was convicted of "numerous charges of fraud" for tarting up his house on BHC funds and trying to sell it for profit. He's serving a long prison term for his crimes.

But when our Premier is investigated for allegedly engaging in not dissimilar activities, all of a sudden our fraud laws aren't stringent or sophisticated enough to take him to court?

Come on! There's enough BS there to fertilise all of Tom<\p>Wadson's farm!

Vereker is at the very least guilty of dereliction of duty by siding with the former Director of Public Prosecutions (or perhaps instructing him?) not to allow police to interview Ewart Brown — a decision most lawyers will tell you has absolutely no basis in law.

Anything for a quiet life, eh Sir John, even if that means presiding over a comprehensive cover-up of a major criminal investigation?

His years of pleasant idling in Bermuda slid into an seeming interminable extension of his term here — presumably so he could go yachting with creme-de-la-creme sailors.

Deserved public humiliation may yet happen during this extra time Vereker sought out in Bermuda. Why does Bermuda work with a system so similar to over-extended and deteriorated knicker elastic that we are internationally perceived as fools with our pants on the ground who continue to sustain two such appalling men as leaders?>PLAIN SPEAKING

Southampton

July 14, 2007

I HAVE been horrified by the continuing examples of corruption and cronyism in the Brown Government. The $600,000 paid to André Curtis, Brown's campaign manager, to promote "faith-based tourism" seems to have produced a mere 1,000 such tourists. At $600 each, that seems pretty expensive. Mr. Curtis seems unwilling or unable to account for any of this money and there seems no real way of forcing him to short of a Police investigation. He's not a registered charity and not a branch of Government, but nevertheless he has the peoples' money - $600,000 of it! Perhaps Mr. Curtis should be fired.Certainly Ewart Brown should be fired. In the meantime the Governor might redeem himself by ordering a police investigation into where our $600,000 went.Then there is the lurking matter of the St. George|0xb9|s Post Office cedar beams. There were certainly cedar beams removed from the Post office. Apparently there is plenty of recently milled old Bermuda cedar, including paneling for an entire walk-in closet at Ewart Brown's "Gombey House" (I didn|0xb9|t know he danced, too.) There should be a Police investigation into what happened to the cedar from the Post Office. Where is the Governor when we need him?

If the cedar cannot be found where did it go? Was it paid for? Who took it and where did it wind up? Was it milled for subsequent re-use and if so by whom? Did it wind up built into "Gombey House"?

It seems quite possible that Ewart Brown is, at best, a receiver of stolen goods. This would be a crime.

At worst, of course, Ewart Brown may have "directed" the whole thing to provide himself with easily and cheaply obtained old Bermuda cedar when such cedar is usually unobtainable at any price.

Perhaps it was paid for but at fair market value?

If it wasn't paid for at fair market value, it would of course be theft. This is a worse crime. Let the Governor recover a vestige of reputation by ordering a full Police investigation into this matter as welB>PRO BONO

City of Hamilton

July 15, 2007

ENORMOUS amounts, so far undisclosed, of public money has been spent on furious and ongoing legal efforts to suppress the information contained in the leaked or, possibly, "stolen" police files that Ewart Brown claims, implausibly, "exonerate" him of wrongdoing. If the file "exonerates" him, why on earth is he going to such frenzied efforts and at such vast public expense to suppress the information contained in them?The obvious answer, even to the most incurious mind and to the most blindly dedicated PLP adherent, is that, whatever else these files do, they most certainly don't paint Ewart Brown and his cronies in anything other than a very unfavourable light.

Criminal they may not have been; unethical they must certainly have been.

Their own desperation in suppressing the files proves it. The fury with which Ewart Brown has sought to suppress the files more than indicates his admission of their highly unsavoury and damaging content.

By his own actions Ewart Brown seems to have confessed to unethical dealing with others in the PLP Cabinet and with the highly questionable Zane DeSilva.

So what happens next? Ewart Brown engineers the nomination of this dubious Zane DeSilva, apparently named in the suppressed police files, to run for a seat in Parliament.

If the voters in his constituency elect him, the next thing will be his appointment to Cabinet as Minister of Works, Engineering and Housing. Then the fat may be expected to really be in the fire burning out of control.

Should the Privy Council rule against Ewart Brown and his cronies in the Police Service (Disservice?) and Attorney General's Office, one may expect the costs of the two appeals to be borne by them personally and not by the people of Bermuda.

It would seem that these people have sucked enough out of the public purse already without having the public pay for their expensive efforts to suppress the files that accuse them. If the PLP cannot get rid of Ewart Brown, the people of Bermuda will have no choice but to get rid of the PLP. Come to think of it, the PLP Government has done precious little in its now longish tenure in power. Probably it's time to get rid of them anyway.DIOGENES

City of Hamilton

July 14, 2007

ALVIN Williams has dedicated a lot of thought and column inches to the vexed topic of the "N" word recently. He rightly rounded on white American public figures like the pathetic Michael Richards and Don Imus who made racially inflammatory remarks (the for Seinfeld star going so far as to actually repeatedly use the "N" word in a rant he delivered against some black hecklers at a nightclub) as well as rappers and other African-American entertainers who routinely employ this derogatory term. Mr. Williams is clearly on the side of the angels when it comes to this topc. Recently Ebony magazine and other publications in the Johnson stable announced they would no longer include the "N" word in their pages - even in direct quotations from rap artists. And the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People last week gave the "N" word a symbolic funeral at its annual convention.

So how does Mr. Williams reconcile his principled aversion for those who use this term with the Premier's decision to fast-track his friend Zane DeSilva as a Progressive Labour Party Parliamentary candidate?

Mr. DeSilva is, after all, quoted in the leaked police files on the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal as having described himself as "the head 'N' in charge of Bermuda?"

Surely Mr. Williams - even as a well-known apologist for the current Premier - won't attempt to whitewash (sorry) this slur when hotel managers are being run out of Bermuda for using far less inflammatory racial language (after themselves being subjected to racial harans)?CURIOUS

Sandys Parish