FORENSIC accountant Terrence Jaskaran’s 2021 report landed in Principal Magistrate Faith McGusty’s courtroom a week ago with the force of a thunderclap. I have followed the 2020 elections fraud trial since before the case was reassigned to Magistrate McGusty in 2024, and never before have I seen the attorneys defending the nine senior GECOM and APNU+AFC officials so ruffled.
Throughout the week, the courtroom carried a palpable air of desperation as five experienced attorneys performed legal backflips in search of a way around numbers that refused to disappear. They made their intention clear: they wanted Jaskaran’s report struck from the record.
With that goal in mind, they went beyond the routine testing of a witness, an essential feature of any criminal trial. Theirs was a coordinated performance where counsel after counsel mounted a sustained, theatrical effort to dislodge Jaskaran from the evidence. At one point, he was called a liar. The stoic accountant, wearing a faint smile of bemusement, replied: “Respectfully, you are wrong, counsel.”
Ronald Daniels sharply asked whether Jaskaran believed his report was “fair.” Jaskaran shot back: “Respectfully, counsel, I deal with numbers, and my numbers are accurate.”
Over five days, the defence searched for an opening like Knight Riders bowlers trying to dislodge Shimron Hetmyer on his way to another century. They examined Jaskaran’s qualifications and came up with nothing that stuck. His accounting firm had conducted audits of state agencies under APNU+AFC’s 2015 tenure in office. And get this, Jaskaran had even audited the accounts of the law firm of at least one of the attorneys questioning his integrity.
Jaskaran, it appears, is professionally acceptable when entrusted with institutions and private financial affairs of APNU+AFC figures, but politically compromised when his analysis produces uncomfortable truths.
The attorneys trawled his Facebook account for political opinions, only to establish that, like the majority of Guyanese who voted in the most recent elections, he is pro-PPP/C. Anyone observing the line of questioning could be forgiven for believing that Jaskaran, not the nine accused, was on trial.
Attorney-at-law Eusi Anderson performed one lengthy Jaskaran Facebook post with such oratorical flourish that it deserved to have been recorded. By week’s end, however, the defence had produced no “gotcha” moment, only a great deal of sound and fury that left the central arithmetic of Jaskaran’s report untouched.
From Facebook, they turned to five unavailable Statements of Poll out of 879 in Region Four. “Your report is incomplete,” Dr Dexter Todd insisted. Jaskaran calmly cited the page numbers where the numbers assigned to the missing SOPs were explicitly recorded, and maintained that his report was complete.
Then came a painful hour in which Dr Todd appeared convinced he had finally landed on something that would expose a flaw in the report. He insisted the accountant had missed an SoP and that his count was wrong. Jaskaran was unmoved: “You are wrong, counsel, respectfully.”
Here was a lawyer telling an accountant he had miscounted. Dr Todd pressed for a recount and, after trying and admitting his own difficulty with the exercise, insisted Jaskaran count all 879 SoPs. When the accountant’s numbers held, Dr Todd’s booming courtroom voice was reduced to a whimper.
The defence pressed Jaskaran on the password on the police-issued laptop used for the analysis. After work each day, between June 3 and July 28, 2021, the computer was returned to the police for safekeeping. Jaskaran alone had the password; there was never any evidence of a security breach, and he said he frequently reviewed his calculations to ensure they reflected his work.
Almost all the attorneys raised the issue of document authentication. Jaskaran repeatedly explained that his mandate was numerical: tabulate the certified SoPs supplied through the court process, compare them with the figures used for the March 5 and March 13, 2020 Region Four declarations, and report the variances.
His central findings were the same. The certified Region Four SoPs recorded 116,215 votes for APNU+AFC. The March 5 declaration recorded 20,243 extra votes for the coalition, while the March 13 declaration added 19,842 votes above the certified SoPs total.
He recorded an opposite trend for the PPP/C. While the party received 80,288 votes according to the certified SoPs, the two declarations recorded 2,959 and 3,057 fewer votes, respectively.
Jaskaran’s report is the clearest evidence yet that GECOM’s Region Four declarations were an attempt to flip an approximate 15,000-vote PPP/C lead into a nearly 7,000-vote APNU+AFC lead. It was enough to give the losing party a one-seat majority in the National Assembly.
The defence team of attorneys can perform all the courtroom acrobatics they wish, but the numbers in Jaskaran’s report will still point to one conclusion unless you believe in UFOs – someone or perhaps a group of individuals attempted to steal Guyana’s democracy in 2020.
If you would rather forget the five months of ordeal and sheer panic our nation experienced, reflect for a moment on the words of former US President Barack Obama: “Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.