Court to rule on Reid, Pinnock Privy Council bid next month
Published:Wednesday | March 10, 2021 | 12:26 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
The Court of Appeal is to rule on or before April 30 whether it will grant permission to Ruel Reid and Professor Fritz Pinnock to go to the Privy Council in the United Kingdom.
The duo are challenging the Supreme Court’s and the Full Court’s rejection of their request for a judicial review of the criminal charges against them.
The three-judge panel consisting of Justices Almarie Sinclair-Hayes, Vivene Harris and Marcia Dunbar-Green will also decide on whether it will throw out the application.
The Financial Investigations Division (FID) had filed an application in the High Court in February asking that the application for leave to go to the Privy Council to be dismissed for want of prosecution.
Attorney-at-law Richard Small, who is representing the FID, said in his submission on Monday that the application had been left hanging for two months and had not acted expeditiously.
He further stated that the applicants’ lawyer had not submitted any written arguments of affidavit or made any oral argument on Monday.
Small also argued that the applicants’ attempt to revive the “abandoned” application is a result of the unfavourable ruling they had received in the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court and that their action is an abuse of the process.
COURT’S DUTY
Attorney Hugh Wildman, who is representing Reid, a former education minister, and Pinnock, the president of the Caribbean Maritime University (CMU), said on Tuesday that the court has a duty to extend the time for arguments to be filed.
Further, he pointed out that the regulations governing applications to the Privy Council are gazetted and have the force of law.
“The court cannot use an administrative directive which does not have the force of law to take away a right that is guaranteed under the Constitution,” Wildman added.
“So his argument is totally misconceived and falls down on its face and we are going to be asking for costs in this case.”
Small also accused Wildman of being very “flimsy” in his reference to the authorities cited, noting that the one case he was familiar with was completely irrelevant to the submission.
The attorney also told the court that it ought to put an end to the applicants’ abuse of the process.
“This court needs to address the conduct of the applicants and not just limit the review to the failure of the applicants to file the submissions. That failure to provide submissions is just another instance of the abuse of the process that the applicants have engaged in,” he added.
Wildman was instructed by the judge to provide the court and Small with his written submission and the cases that he had cited before the day ends.
The two applicants, along with Reid’s wife Sharen; their daughter Sharelle; as well as Brown’s Town division Councillor Kim Brown Lawrence, were in October 2019 arrested and charged following a yearlong corruption probe into the education ministry and CMU.
Since then, both Reid and Pinnock have sought to challenge the criminal charges against them.
Both have contended that the FID was not empowered by law to bring the charges against them and, therefore, acted illegally.
They further claimed that the FID was purely an investigative body and did not have the legal authority to bring criminal charges or obtain a fiat from the director of public prosecutions to prosecute them.
Both had ventilated the matter before Chief Justice Bryan Sykes in the Supreme Court and in the Full Court before a three-judge panel, comprising Justices David Batts, Chester Stamp, and Stephanie Jackson Haisley. Both courts had refused their application for leave to seek a judicial review.
The men, along with their co-accused, subsequently renewed their arguments in an application before the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court, but their arguments did not find favour with Chief Parish Judge Chester Crooks, who ruled that they had a case to answer.