FORMER President Donald Rabindranauth Ramotar and other leaders of the opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) are being sued for $2.5 billion for libel and slander by Dr. Phillip Mozart Thomas in his personal capacity and as Chairman of GNCPP and GNCSC.

The action was filed in the High Court on Monday by Dr. Thomas and two organisations in which he is the chairman – the Guyana National Council on Public Policy, Inc. (GNCPP) and the Guyana National Civil Society, Inc. Council (GNCSC).
Dr. Thomas had organised a Guyana National Civil Society Summit for September 17-19, 2014 at the Guyana International Conference Centre, Liliendaal, East Coast Demerara (ECD) but said he was forced to postpone it to December. Further, he is accusing Ramotar and the other PPP leaders of using their offices to maliciously and intentionally publish defamatory statements that were libelous and slanderous to his reputation and character.

The other PPP leaders named in the action are General Secretary Clement Rohee, former Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon, former Housing Minister Irfaan Ali and the permanent secretaries of the former Office of the President and the former Ministry of Trade, Industry and Commerce.
Thomas has hired a battery of lawyers that includes Senior Counsel Stanley Marcus, Senior Counsel Richard Fields, Jonas Coddett, Saphier Husain Subedar and Lawrence Harris.
Dr. Thomas is seeking a declaration and enforcement order compelling the defendants to immediately publish a complete, unqualified retraction and apology to the plaintiff for malicious interference and violation of chartered constitutional, civil and human rights; slander, libel, conspiracy to publish defamatory information, interference with economic relations, inducing breach of contract, nuisance, intimidation, defamation of character and false light invasion of privacy.
Further, court documents state that the PPP carried out a campaign during and in the course of 2014 and early 2015 which amounted to breach of contract in that the former Guyana International Conference Centre, now the Arthur Chung International Conference Centre, which was entirely controlled by the defendants notified the plaintiff on the first day of their three-day scheduled Guyana National Civil Society Summit, and in the middle of the first day of the event, that they could no longer accommodate the ongoing Civil Society Summit so the conference had been forcefully terminated.
The lawsuit further noted that a defamatory press release from the then Office of the President was broadcast and published by the defendants’ controlled National Communications Network (NCN), the worldwide web via Internet Protocol address (IP), radio medium platform known as Fresh 100.1FM, 98.1FM, Guyana Chronicle, TV Guyana Channel 28, Guyana Times, RCA, and Radio 89.5FM.
Dr Thomas stated that these malicious and fabricated acts of defamation by the defendants immediately resulted in embarrassment, humiliation, frustration, ridicule, loss of character and casting a false light in the minds of proposed attendees to the Civil Society Summit.
“These utterances by the defendants which the plaintiff state were all untrue, atrocious and wholly unjustified were broadcast and published with the most malicious intention in that they were repeated completely and/or substantially in several replays and re-broadcast, both print and visual media,” the lawsuit stated.