Panday’s tangled web

A United States Grand Jury will be trying both men to determine if they are guilty on several charges, with the focus on money laundering. As with PNM chairman Franklin Khan, who is facing corruption charges, the issue here is not guilt or innocence but political consequences. And those political consequences will impact most greatly on Mr Panday.

From the very inception of the Millennium Airport Project, questions were raised about where the money was going. Mr Panday, Prime Minister at the time, greeted all inquiries with a dismissive quip. And when the public outcry became too loud for even Mr Panday to ignore, he tried to play clever by shifting responsibility from Cabinet to Nipdec — a move which blew up in his face when media investigations uncovered a Cabinet note instructing that contracts be given to the Northern Construction Company. Additionally, Mr Panday went to bat for Mr Galbaransingh to the extent that he even attempted to use his Prime Ministerial clout to remove the Parliamentary privilege that makes any statement in the chamber immune to libel proceedings.

Meanwhile, Mr Ferguson, a shadowy figure in this affair, had been the centre of a different sort of controversy, when his two pitbull dogs escaped, mauled and killed a passer-by. That matter was eventually settled quietly out of court, but it led to a call for legislation to ban pitbulls — a call which the UNC regime curiously hung fire on for the longest while and which, when the law was finally passed, ensured that wealthy persons could still own pitbulls.

Justifiably or not, all this scandal now attaches to Mr Panday like a noxious scent. That is the nature of politics, especially when a politician chooses his bedfellows unwisely. If Mr Galbaransingh and Mr Ferguson are found guilty by the US Grand Jury, then Mr Panday will be considered guilty by association. But, if they are found innocent, that may still not raise his political stocks.

The UNC hierarchy has already realised all this, and its former chairman Senator Wade Mark has been trying desperately to shift the tide of public opinion by making much ado about the charges laid against Mr Khan. Mr Mark’s strategy is to allege that there has been a biased approach by the authorities in the way Mr Khan has been treated by the authorities as compared to Mr Panday. Additionally, UNC Senator Robin Montano has even bent so low as to suggest that there is a perception that race is the reason why Mr Khan has been charged but not Energy Minister Eric Williams.

Not only do such arguments betray the desperate straits the UNC is in, but the strategy is itself foolish since it only draws attention to the corruption charges that Mr Panday is himself facing — much like the baseless comment Mr Mark made just months after the UNC assumed office, when he accused the print media of always photographing Mr Panday with a drink in his hand. As the old saying goes, with friends like that...

Mr Panday is a brilliant politician, but it will take political genius of no small order to extricate himself from this tangled web. But this newspaper’s primary concern is not Mr Panday, but the Opposition party, which needs to be a potent force for the country’s democracy to function. And so we wait to see how Winston Dookeran, the UNC’s official leader, treats with this new development.