EDITORIAL

Conflicts Of Interest With Status Grants

Monday, May 3, 2004

A few minutes spent browsing through the list of Caymanian Status recipients published in the Extraordinary Gazette No. 33/2003 in December of last year brings up several issues that have never really been addressed properly.

In the list of 2,850 persons who were granted Caymanian status by the Cabinet under the provisions of section 20 (d) of the Immigration Law, number 349 is one Samuel Washington Bulgin, the current Attorney General of the Cayman Islands.

Interestingly, in response to the Caymanian Bar Association’s (CBA) current action seeking judicial review of the Status grants by Cabinet, the Leader of Government Business has suggested that Mr Bulgin’s presence at all relevant Cabinet meetings validates the lawfulness of those grants of Status.

Reasonable people, however, must wonder how Mr Bulgin could properly, objectively and impartially have advised the Cabinet as to the legality of its actions when he himself was a beneficiary of a decision made, according to the government, on the strength of his advice. Surely, the potential of a conflict of interests with Mr Bulgin’s presence at such meetings, not to mention relying on his advice as to the law in such circumstances, should have been obvious to the Cabinet.

But the peculiarities do not stop there.

The Cabinet also granted status to four other senior members of the Legal Department, namely, Stephen David Hall Jones, then acting Solicitor General (no. 1113), Keith Myers (no. 1829), Cheryl Richards (no. 2146) and Adam Roberts (no. 2175).

With so many of the Legal Department benefiting from the Cabinet’s actions, perhaps no one was left to provide unbiased legal advice to the Ministers on the Status grants, or for that matter, on the current CBA action challenging those grants.

There are three other names of interest, all part of the Cayman Islands judiciary, on the list as well: Grace Donalds (no. 749), Nova Gale Hall (no. 1115) and Margaret Hope Ramsay Hale (no. 2098). In case the significance escapes anyone, these three individuals happen to be the entire complement of Summary Court magistrates.

It is quite extraordinary that so many active members of the Cayman Islands judiciary would actually accept a gift of citizenship from the executive branch of Government.

There is a potential for all sorts of conflicts of interest resulting from this situation, not the least of which is the fact that the attorneys who have been retained by the CBA to challenge the legality of the grants of Status by the Cabinet have to seek justice on a daily basis for their clients before some of the same magistrates who were beneficiaries of such grants.

There is no doubt, from comments we have heard, that many people who were granted status by the Cabinet look upon the CBA and, by extension, their attorneys, as “trying to take away” their status. Such people, many of whom have the training and professional expertise to know better, conveniently overlook the point made on several occasions in this newspaper that the CBA action is not aimed at individuals, but is simply to establish whether the Cabinet acted lawfully or not.

And, clearly, there is doubt as to the lawfulness of the Cabinet’s action because the court has, in fact, agreed to review the decision in question.

Similarly, it must be made clear that it is not the character of the people in our judiciary system who received grants of Status from the Cabinet that is being questioned here, but the lack of overall prudence in avoiding a situation that could so easily lead to conflicts of interest.

It would seem that the full implications of the Cabinet’s grants of status, especially as to their impact upon the administration of justice, might not become apparent to the people of the Cayman Islands for some time yet.

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