According to the CAFT/GAFIC Antigua & Barbuda Ministerial Report dated 23 June 2008, entitled "Mutual Evaluation/Detailed Assessment Report on Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism", the Attorney General is the competent person responsible for coordinating requests from overseas regulators and enforcement agencies. It further states:
"Concerning national cooperation and coordination, the role of the Attorney General's Office as policy makers is to assess and advise on the legal criteria on which cooperation and coordination are based. The Attorney General is a Minister of Government, and in this capacity he plays a direct role in shaping national cooperation and coordination policies. The Attorney General also serves as the central authority in money laundering and financing of terrorism matters."
Given the above, Antigua's Attorney General Justin Simon must comply with the international laws that prevent money laundering, the suspicion of money laundering and benefits from the proceeds of crime.
No such constraints appear to apply to the Honourable Harold Lovell, Minister of Finance and the Economy, who appears totally content to deal with individuals who practice all of the prohibited sciences.
Within the last few weeks, Minister Lovell has announced that former offshore banker, William Cooper, who has been living freely in Antigua in frustration of a US extradition warrant for eight years, has been already handed US $800,000 by the Government of Antigua & Barbuda. He has received this as a down payment on a purchase of a property in Woods Mall ahead of the full sum negotiated for such sale of US$8.5 million.
In an effort to deflect concerns about Cooper's character and previous dealings, Lovell ironically argued that the Organisation of National Drug and Control Policy (ONDCP) would be involved in vetting the sale and would be given access to all information in that regard.
Bear in mind that oversight over the ONDCP now falls into the provenance of the newly formed Ministry of National Security, whose first Minister is Dr. Errol Cort, until very recently Stanford's personal attorney. It is also the purview of this Ministry to deal with issues of extradition, such as that of Leroy King, indicted in the US for collusion with R. Allen Stanford, an event too risky for Antigua to contemplate.
It may be remembered that the centrepiece of the U.S. indictment against Cooper was the failed Hanover Bank, whose original incorporators were William Cooper and Justin Simon and whose registered address has remained that of Simon's law offices. This is the same now Attorney General Justin Simon, who has no doubt prepared the closing documents for the purchase of Cooper's property.
This raises many further issues, some of which have been described in an earlier article published on this website and elsewhere: "Fox in the Henhouse: Regulation Antiguan Style."
It should not go unnoticed that while the Government of Antigua & Barbuda has failed to honour its debt obligation to the owners of the expropriated Half Moon Bay Resort, or its international responsibilities toward Stanford investors and creditors, it is delighted to engage in business transactions with William Cooper.
With Minister Lovell's sister, Debra-Mae Lovell, acting as Antigua's Ambassador to the USA, Antigua may feel that it has covered all its bases. However, with expropriation of private foreign-owned property, an umbilical connection to the Stanford banking fraud that cannot be severed by the extradition of an agent of the Government and the ongoing manipulations within what passes for the court system in the region, international eyes are watching ever more closely.
In spite of the impropriety of further financial assistance to the Government of Antigua & Barbuda under the current circumstances by any international agency, the latest loan by the IMF is accompanied by the opening of a local office of that agency on Antigua.
It is encouraging to think that some serious international oversight may come to Antigua & Barbuda in the form of a formal IMF office presence, provided the appointees to that office resist the overwhelming climate of corruption that will surround them.
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