Caribbean court clears way for extradition proceedings against Guyana’s opposition leader

The Caribbean Community’s highest court has cleared the way for extradition proceedings against Guyana’s flamboyant, Lamborghini-driving opposition leader to proceed by ruling his claims of cabinet bias in attempting to send him to the US to face a slew of financial crimes were invalid.

The Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) handed down its ruling on Wednesday, handing back the power to the lower Guyanese magistrate’s court to proceed with extradition hearings for Azruddin Mohamed and his father Nazar Mohamed in the coming weeks.

The Mohameds had approached the region’s top court earlier this year to ask it to pronounce on allegations that the security minister had acted with bias when she had signed the orders to proceed with the extradition process against him and his father. Still, the court ruled otherwise and cleared the way for the hearings to continue.

The Mohameds are in criminal “hot water” with federal authorities in the US after the Treasury Department had slapped sanctions on the family in mid-2004, accusing them of smuggling thousands of kilograms of gold to the US and evading local taxes worth at least US$50 million.

The sanctions forced Guyanese authorities to shutter a string of lucrative businesses run by the Mohameds, including their gold buying and exporting businesses, a foreign exchange cambio dealership and real estate interests. The younger Mohamed, 39, was very surprisingly elected as opposition leader following last September’s general elections. The We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party, formed just three months before the polls, picked up 16 of the 65 seats, making it the second-largest in the country.

“This is, of course, a complicated matter,” Chief Justice Winston Anderson,” said after the ruling. The full judgement was delivered by colleague judge Denys Barrow.

“There was no requirement for the minister issuing the order to proceed to be free from political bias,” Barrow said. “What was required was for the minister to engage in a process that allowed for consideration of the factors contemplated by the act. Their honors found that the applicants had not challenged the process that led to the issuance of the order, save for the allegation that the minister was politically biased.”

The Mohameds have also been indicted by the US Southern District in Florida on 11 counts linked to their gold export business, including money laundering and wire fraud conspiracy.

Reacting to the verdict, Nazar Mohamed said, “It is a 256-page judgement. Our lawyers are checking it through. Based on what lawyers say, all is not lost as yet. We will be fighting all the way.”

The opposition leader, meanwhile, was a bit more defiant.

“The fight is still on,” he said. “The CCJ did not rule in our favor, but we respect the court’s decision. But what is important to note within the judgment: The two hundred-and-something pages our lawyers just received, they acknowledged all the statements during the campaign and even before where [the] vice president and the attorney general and all the other ministers — the lies they mentioned about me and my family that could have interfered significantly with the independence of our judiciary here in Guyana. But… the extradition case will resume at the magistrate’s court, but the work of the people must continue.”