‘A traumatic experience’… Former West Indies Petroleum director and wife freed in larceny case involving motor vehicle

Former Director of West Indies Petroleum Limited (WIPL) John Levy and his wife, Donna May Levy, have been freed of criminal charges surrounding a motor vehicle, asserting that they were subjected to “cooked-up” allegations.

The charges were dismissed in the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court on April 1.

The Court Administration Division (CAD) confirmed the dismissal of the case.

The two were charged in December 2020 with simple larceny, receiving stolen property, conspiracy to defraud, forgery, and creating public mischief, according to court records.

“They were discharged on all counts,” CAD disclosed yesterday.

The charges came amid a dispute at WIPL, one of the country’s largest energy companies, and involve a motor vehicle owned by a subsidiary company, Island Lubes Limited.

Island Lubes was the complainant in the case.

The charges were related to the purchase of a then 16-year-old motor vehicle valued at $180,000 and owned by a company for which Levy was a director, the businessman said.

Sources close to the case explained that “there was not a sufficiency of material for the prosecution to ask the court to make an order for indictment”.

“So no order for indictment was made,” the source told The Gleaner.

This development comes nearly a year after Levy was freed of criminal charges for breaches of the Cybercrimes Act when prosecutors offered no evidence against him.

He was charged in 2022, alongside Courtney Wilkinson, another former director of WIPL, over allegations that they illegally accessed emails for executives at the company.

The case against Wilkinson remains before the court.

Both men were controversially removed as directors in 2021.

Levy, Wilkinson, WIPL, and its executives are currently embroiled in a series of court disputes in Jamaica and St Lucia.

Donna May Levy said the last five years have been “traumatic” for her family and business.

“There were false allegations about me, my reputation was tarnished, and my customers and my suppliers were contacted, and it affected my business negatively,” she said during an interview with The Gleaner on Wednesday.

“Masked men came to my office. A woman would ring the doorbell, and then three men would enter. People would park up at my gate, and my girls (daughter) didn’t know what to expect. It was very traumatic.”

Donna May Levy said she was unable to update her bank cards because her name was “flagged in the system” and that she and her husband were subjected to secondary screenings when they travelled to the United States (US) based on instructions from Jamaican authorities.

She disclosed that during a trip to the US, they were contacted via telephone by one of the investigators in the case, who indicated that John Levy was facing charges for allegedly stealing lubricants from a container at the port.

“And by the time we got back to Jamaica, it became a case about a stolen truck,” she claimed.

“The justice system was hijacked,” John Levy charged.

She disclosed that she has sought legal advice about potentially filing a malicious prosecution lawsuit against the state.

John Levy noted that the case was investigated and placed before the court by the police’s Counter Terrorist and Organised Crime Division.

“That’s like the FBI or the CIA coming to arrest someone for simple larceny or shoplifting in the United States,” he said, making reference to the two elite American law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

- Livern Barrett

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