ON January 15, 2024, Senior Magistrate Leron Daly is anticipated to schedule a date for a case management conference (CMC) regarding the high-profile elections fraud case, following which a trial date will be established.

This case has remained stagnant for years due to its intricate nature and the extensive amount of evidence involved.

The electoral fraud case involves former District Four (Demerara-Mahaica) Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo; former People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R) Chairperson, Volda Lawrence; PNC/R activist Carol Smith-Joseph and four others.

The trio, along with Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) employees Sheffern February, Enrique Livan, Denise Bobb-Cummings and Michelle Miller, are before the court for allegedly defrauding the electors of Guyana by declaring a false account of votes for the 2020 elections.

During a court hearing on Tuesday, the state handed over, again, flash drives containing certified copies of Statements of Polls (SOPs) and Statements of Recount (SORs) along with video interviews. Several bundles of documents were also submitted.

In October 2021, when the case was before then Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan, Attorney Darshan Ramdhani, QC, who is the prosecutor in the case, handed over to the court several boxes containing certified copies of Statements of Polls (SOPs) and Statements of Recount (SORs) from the March 2020 elections.

The disclosure was also made to the seven persons accused of colluding to change the results of those elections.

However, when Magistrate Daly was assigned the case, she had requested for the evidence to be more organised for easier access for the court and the defendants.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Ramdhani said that the scanned documents were uploaded to flash drives to ease the paper load.

This was welcomed by Magistrate Daly, who commended the prosecution for this move.

However, the move was made with some rejection from the defendant’s lawyer. Attorney Eusi Anderson contended that how can the court be certain that the prosecution is submitting the same evidence and statement now as they did in 2021.

The Magistrate reminded Anderson that it was she who requested the statements to be more organised, given the volume of evidence to go through during trial.
“Same statements, better organised…The court does not have the impression that there are different statements,” Magistrate Daly told him.

As such, she warned him not to “put the cart before the horse.”
The court is expected to do its records keeping and on January 15, the defendants will uplift their statements. During that hearing, the court will also fix a date for the CMC hearing and, thereafter, a date for trial.

During the last hearing, Ramdhani was awaiting advice from the Chancellor of Judiciary (ag) Yonette Cummings regarding the possibility of appointing a special magistrate or court to adjudicate the case.

He was expected to present his feedback to Magistrate Daly, on Tuesday, but he has yet to receive it.

Meanwhile, Magistrate Daly is diligently proceeding to schedule the matter for case management conference in order to initiate the trial as soon as possible. Consequently, the prosecution is prepared to commence the trial.

Ramdhani along with Attorneys-at-law Glen Hanoman, Mark Conway, Ganesh Hira, Arudranauth Gossai, Latchmie Rahamat and George Thomas are all on record for the State.
Attorneys-at-law Hughes, Eusi Anderson, Ronald Daniels and Konyo Sandiford are representing the defendants.

PARTICULARS OF CHARGES

It is alleged that Lawrence, Smith-Joseph, February, Livan, Bobb-Cummings and Miller between March 2 and August 2, 2020, at Georgetown, conspired with former Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield and Mingo to defraud the electors of Guyana by declaring a false account of votes cast in the March 2, 2020, General and Regional Elections.

Additionally, Miller was slapped with a separate charge which alleged that between March 3-5, 2020, at the GECOM Command Centre at Ashmin’s building on High and Hadfield Streets, Georgetown, she conspired with persons to defraud the people of Guyana by not using the figures from the Statements of Poll for the purpose of ascertaining the figures to make the declaration of the results for the said District Four, thereby resulting in a false declaration being made for the said district.

The defendants’ attorneys had previously argued for the case to be heard in the High Court, given the nature of the proceedings which they claimed might infringe on their client’s rights to a fair trial within a reasonable time.

Nevertheless, the Chief Magistrate ruled that despite the voluminous evidence and the complexity of the case, the court has been proceeding with the hearing of the case “expeditiously.”
The case was thereafter transferred to Magistrate Daly.

In August 2021, Mingo, along with Lowenfield and his then-deputy, Roxanne Myers, had their employment terminated by the commission.

It is alleged that the trio inflated or facilitated the inflation of results for Region Four, the country’s largest voting district, to give the APNU+AFC coalition a majority win at the polls when, in fact, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) had won by 15,000 votes.

Those who rejected the results filed several legal challenges which ended up before the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Guyana’s highest appeal court. A lengthy recount of the votes eventually declared victory in favour of the PPP/C, and Dr. Irfaan Ali was sworn in as the President of Guyana on August 2, 2020.