BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – AMIDST resignation calls by the rival Labour Party, Lindsay Grant, Leader of opposition People’s Action Movement (PAM), said that Prime Minister Hon. Dr. Denzil Douglas must step down for the role he played in a bribery plot.
“Hon. Richard Skerritt was one of the chief architects in a plot he concocted with the Prime Minister to smear PAM’s name. Both he and Douglas should resign immediately,” Grant said today (Jan. 12) in an exclusive interview with SKNVibes.
News of a bribery plot involving Grant originated in a PAM public meeting on Sunday (Jan. 10), where Grant revealed that he had been approached by someone claiming to be a foreign investor. At a subsequent meeting, the gentleman, who Grant identified as Graham Wills, offered to contribute EC$1.5M to the party’s campaign if a PAM government agreed to sell him land in Brotherson Estate for US$20 000 per acre.
Skerritt called for Grant’s resignation at a St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP) meeting last night (Jan. 11), while PM Douglas said during a press conference that his party was not involved in the matter.
“As far as I am concerned, it is only Grant’s word we have gotten in connection with this matter. If he met somebody who he said was attempting to bribe him on behalf of the Labour Party, then that other person must come forward and speak. The Labour Party knows nothing about this,” Douglas claimed.
Despite the Prime Minister’s assertion, Grant insisted the plot was their orchestration.
“A few weeks ago, PAM intelligence told me that Hon. Nigel Carty, the Prime Minister, Skerritt, Charlie Jong and Lincoln Maynard had cooked up a plot to discredit my party. I was told that I would receive a call from someone pretending to be an investor. When I got the call from Wills, we decided to do some research on him.
“We found out that Wills had already been in St. Kitts for some time working with the Labour Party, and that the room he was staying in, Room 1111, was being paid out of the Office of the Prime Minister. After extensive discussions with my team, I decided to meet with him because I wanted to discover the depth and extent of the SKNLP plot.”
The two men were to meet again on Monday at 10 a.m., but according to Grant, that was thwarted by his exposure of Wills on the platform. He said the “investor” had been hustled out of the Federation as a result of the disclosure.
“The SKNLP devised the plot with the hope of scoring cheap political points off it. But my exposure has put them on the back foot because the country is now aware of the lows they are capable of,” stressed Grant.
He added that the incident underscored the imperative for change and for a PAM government that would introduce “critical” pieces of legislation including the Integrity in Public Life Act, a Campaign Financing Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
The PAM leader promised to reveal the extent of the Labour Party’s corruption through a “yellow briefcase” he would open at a party meeting tonight on Central Street.
Since the announcement of the January 25 election, both parties have stepped up their campaign efforts, mounting new billboards and increasing the frequency of their public meetings.
