A POLITICAL showdown involving corruption allegations and two governments is currently a major topic of interest in Antigua and Barbuda.

It got underway last Friday evening with a broadcast by Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer in which he announced the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry to probe claimed corruption under the Antigua Labour Party (ALP) administration of former Prime Minister Lester Bird.

The Commission, to be formally appointed by the Governor General, is to begin its work on August 6 with the Chief Justice of New South Wales in Australia, James Jacob, as the sole Commissioner.

A United Kingdom lawyer, Kirsty Brimelow, who, Prime Minister Spencer said, “specialises in international law and regulatory and financial crime”, will serve as Counsel to Commissioner Jacob who will be mandated to be ready with a report on his findings by December this year. Terms of reference of the coming one-man probe

However, within 48 hours of Spencer’s broadcast, Opposition Leader Bird, who heads the ALP, delivered a scathing verbal blast yesterday (Sun) against the Prime Minister’s United Progressive Party administration for engaging, he said, in a continuing “political witch-hunt” against him and his party that has already cost the public treasury “millions of dollars with no evidence…”

In his broadcast Bird said that not only had he formally requested, without success, an independent inquiry into corruption and bribery allegations against the first-term admonition of the ruling UPP. He had also personally sued Prime Minister Spencer for slander against him in falsely claiming during the last general election (March 2009) that he had a foreign bank account into which “monies were illegally paid…”

Prime Minister Spence admitted in his broadcast that investigations into corruption allegations involving a loan repayment of US$29, 07 million) to a foreign company (a Japanese business firm known as IHI) to the Antigua Public Utilities Authority. During an ALP administration “have been going on for a number of years.”

But, he claimed, “Persons involved have sought to frustrate the investigation, utilising every available legal maneouvre and technicality”.

Consequently, having failed to achieve success, the UPP administration, currently facing four election petitions against it in the country’s High Court, has chosen to go the route of a Commission of Inquiry.

The Commission’s terms of reference would include”, said Spencer, “recommendations concerning possible criminal offences that may warrant further investigation and possible prosecution…”

` `However, in his broadcast yesterday, declared that the people of Anrtigua and Barbuda had grown accustomed to financial corruption allegations from Prime Minister Spencer and his UPP, adding that they had many years to produce the evidence in a court of law but failed to do so.

With respect to the UPP government’s “witch-hunt about bank accounts belonging to me”, Bird stressed that had there been any evidence, “they would have taken action against me long ago….And the civil cases instituted (in the IHI loan repayment scheme) are all coming to nothing.”

Bird then repeated a challenge of his own for the Spencer administration to have a public inquiry into various government projects, including: How EC$100 million were spent to build less than ten miles of road. Secondly the expenditure of EC$10 million to construct approximately six miles of road leading to the Sir Vivian Richards stadium.

Further, said Bird in his broadcast, there needs to be an official response by the government to the claim by former Health Minister, Wilmouth Daniel in his resignation letter of May 2 this year, and since made public, of having been offered a bribe of US$100,000 by a cabinet colleague for him to “support the purchase of a building by the Medical Benefits Scheme.”

There was no public reaction by the govenment at the time of Wilmouth’s claim. But in his broadcast on Friday night, Prime Minister Spencer noted that Antigua and Barbuda “finds itself at a critical economic juncture….

“The wrong step now”, he said, “could mean the difference between mere survival and continued development’ between access to credit and international discredit; and between transparency in public office and the acceptance of malfeasance…”