By Barbara Gayle, Staff ReporterA lawyer who has been involved in a legal battle with the trustees of the Air Jamaica pension fund over legal fees is now urging a judge of the Supreme Court to send the trustees to prison for breaching a United Kingdom Privy Council ruling.
Phillip Forrest, a former partner in the law firm Clinton Hart and Company which represented the former Air Jamaica workers in their legal battle to get the surplus in the pension fund, has applied to the court for the trustees to be sent to prison.
He is contending that they were contemptuous of the Privy Council ruling that the legal fees should be paid from the fund before the beneficiaries or anyone else was paid. He said the Government paid out $700 million to the trustees and from that the former partners should have been paid $100 million for legal costs.
Mr. Forrest said that instead of paying out the legal fees, the trustees embarked on legal manoeuvres and tied up the matter in court for a year. He said that so far $20 million had been paid from the legal fees to Tastee Ltd., the General Consumption Tax (GCT) and a law firm, and that was done without his permission or knowledge.
The trustees are CIBC Trust and Merchant Bank and former Air Jamaica workers Ian Blair and Joy Charlton.
Dennis Morrison, Q.C., of DunCox who is representing the trustees, argued that the trustees had not committed any breach for them to be locked up. He said that Mr. Forrest was abusing the process of the court. The application for contempt proceedings was brought before the court three weeks after the Court of Appeal had made a ruling in the matter, Mr. Morrison said.
Mr. Justice David Pitter is expected to make a ruling today in the matter.
The Privy Council had ruled in 1999 that legal costs must be paid from the surplus in the pension fund which, with interest, amounted to almost $1.4 billion.
Mr. Forrest had applied to the Supreme Court last year for an order that the trustees pay him his portion of the fees. Mr. Justice Basil Reid heard the summons and ruled that Mr. Forrest should be paid $15.9 million which represented his 25 per cent of the legal costs.
The trustees took the matter to the Court of Appeal contending that they had no legal obligation to pay individual costs to individuals in the law firm. The trustees said it was the law firm which should have the responsibility to distribute the costs. The Court of Appeal agreed with the trustees and set aside Mr. Justice Reid's ruling.
After the Government sold the national airline in 1994 to the Air Jamaica Acquisition Group, the government had pledged the $400 million surplus in the fund as part of the assets of Air Jamaica Ltd. The former workers objected and took the matter to court. The matter ended up in the United Kingdom Privy Council which ruled that the surplus in the fund belonged to Air Jamaica Ltd. and the former workers.
