Business

Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Baldwin Spencer has rejected claims that this country's Ambassador to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Anthony Liverpool, has accepted bribes from pro-whaling Japanese interests.

"The fact of the matter is, for Antigua and Barbuda, we are not selling our souls anywhere or to anybody," Spencer said Tuesday in response to a British newspaper article that a Japanese firm prepaid Liverpool's US$5,906 bill at the Atlas Amadil Beach Hotel in Morocco where he is booked for two weeks.

Liverpool, who is the IWC's vice-chairman, described the allegations as part of a campaign that has been going on for many years, "suggesting that particularly Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States countries and other Caribbean countries, like Suriname and African countries, who are part of a sustainable-use grouping within the IWC, are lapdogs and supporters of Japan and that we are selling our votes at IWC".

Personalised issue

Liverpool added that the issue had become personalised because he was currently sitting in for the IWC chairman, who was unable to attend the meeting due to ill health.

"I think I was just targeted in that respect," he told a local radio station via telephone from Morocco.

"Those statements made in those papers, they are false. They are designed to destroy my character, and the whole idea is to derail the process here and to distract countries from dealing with the real issues," Liverpool added.

Antigua and Barbuda, along with five other Eastern Caribbean countries, may well hold the key as to whether or not the IWC overturns the 1986 global ban on commercial whaling and allows hunting in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary around Antarctica.

The proposal will be put forward during the June 21-25 IWC meeting. Regional envi-ronmentalists and others opposed to the lifting of the ban are calling on Caribbean governments not to give in to countries like Japan that have used their financial muscle in the past to get regional countries to side with them.

Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada - all members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States - belong to the IWC, which was set up in 1964 to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and the orderly development of the whaling industry.

- CMC