Mon | Oct 20, 2025

Brady paid off Manatt, says JLP

Published:Friday | July 16, 2010 | 12:00 AM

Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter

Facing a fresh barrage of criticisms over its relationship with the United States law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the Government yesterday sought to distance itself from the cinder which sparked the latest flame.

And it is getting help from the man at the core of the firestorm, attorney-at-law Harold Brady, who appears ready to shoulder the blame.

The Bruce Golding administration has been under renewed pressure since Wednesday when news broke that the local law firm Harold Brady & Company had paid Manatt US$15,000 on March 19.

That was in addition to a US$50,000 payment which Golding admitted had been made to the law firm by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in a bid to settle the dispute with the US over the extradition request for Christopher 'Dudus' Coke.

The additional payment was made one month after Golding had claimed that the relationship between the party and the law firm had ended.

This disclosure - first reported by the US publication Am Law Daily - triggered more calls for the Government to come clean on the Manatt issue, with speculation rife about what details were omitted by the prime minister in his May 17 revelation to the nation.

Ties severed

But yesterday, the JLP claimed it had no contractual relationship with either Manatt, Phelps & Phillips or Harold Brady & Company since the effective termination of those arrangements.

"Our understanding is that a payment was made by Mr Harold Brady as part of the termination of the contract. The contract was terminated in February, but as part of the contractual obligation, they had to negotiate a final payment. Mr Brady made it, but my understanding is that he made it from his own funds. It has nothing to do with the party," Golding said yesterday.

Similarly, the JLP, in a statement, said, "The party did not in any way advance to Harold Brady & Company any funds or facilitate Harold Brady & Co in making this recently disclosed payment of US$15,000.

"We have since confirmed that this payment was made directly by Harold Brady & Company as a final payment for the commercial obligations that existed as a result of the termination of the contract for services and which fell to the account of Harold Brady & Company," added the JLP in a statement issued hours after Information Minister Daryl Vaz faced journalists at the weekly post-Cabinet media briefing.

Vaz was adamant that the payment was from a Jamaican law firm to US law firm and in no way related to either the Government or the JLP.

But he could not say what if any action would be taken against either firm for misrepresenting the payment as coming from the Government of Jamaica.

"What I can indicate, as you will recall, is that the Government did document our position in earlier days in relation to that matter but this is a new development that will have to be dealt with after the party gets all the information relating to this payment," Vaz told journalists.

He claimed neither the Government nor the JLP was aware of the latest payment, but he did not address the US firm's continuing claim that it was in a deal with the Jamaican Government.

For his part, Brady restricted his comments to a terse statement claiming that his company paid the money to Manatt as part of a regular business transaction.

"This amount represents a final payment under the commercial arrangements between the two law firms to terminate the contract in February 2010," Brady said.

The Government has scoffed at calls from the Opposition People's National Party (PNP) for a commission of enquiry into the Manatt affair.

"When you hear the utterances of this born-again PNP on the moral and integrity platform ..., they have a lot of questions to answer," Vaz said, later referring to the Trafigura Beheer scandal in 2006.

arthur.hall@gleanerjm.com