An attorney for Andrew Fahie has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami.
Fahie, 51, was arrested last week during a sting by the US Drug Enforcement Administration as he prepared to board a private jet in Miami.
According to a criminal complaint, Fahie and his port manager Oleanvine Maynard were at the airport to meet the Mexican drug traffickers, but were in fact DEA undercover agents. In the indictment, Maynard referred to Fahie as a “petty crook sometimes” who did not hesitate to take advantage of a plot hatched by self-proclaimed Lebanese Hezbollah to smuggle large quantities of cocaine and drugs across the Caribbean. island.
The shocking shock rocked the British Virgin Islands, where Fahi was already facing allegations of widespread corruption and appeared to be stepping up calls for a two-year suspension of the government to clear the government and return officials to London.
Fahie’s lawyer declined to comment and did not provide details about her client’s two-page statement. Fahie, who also serves as finance minister, is said to have traveled to Miami to attend a cruise industry conference and had appointed a deputy prime minister in his absence.
But any battle for immunity is likely to face many obstacles.
“Immunity does not protect you if you are alone on drugs,” said Dick Gregory, a former Miami federal prosecutor who accused the prime minister of Turks & Caicos, another British colony, of drugs in the 1980s. Panama powerful general Manuel Noriega.
However, the prosecution of foreign officials is rare, and the prosecution of the Caribbean’s top elected official would certainly have been given the green light at the highest levels of the US Department of Justice and the US State Department, given the potential impact.
For example, federal prosecutors in New York were waiting for Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez to resign this year before accusing him of drug trafficking that came to light for the first time in his brother’s trial.
“This is not done willingly or unwillingly. “Prosecutors are clearly very confident about the facts,” Gregory said.
The series of islands of 35,000 inhabitants east of Puerto Rico is currently under a 2007 constitution that gives it limited self-government.
Governor John Rankin, who’s Queen Elizabeth II’s representative to the islands and their final chief executive, said the arrests led him to release – earlier than originally planned – a report by a commission of inquiry that had begun. in January 2021 to investigate allegations of widespread government fraud.
Governor Rankin said the investigation concluded that millions of dollars had been spent on projects, some of which were linked to the prime minister’s allies, that had been abandoned or found to be of no public benefit.
“Some of them were, in their face, fake,” the governor said.
The commission concluded that “unless the most urgent and drastic steps are taken, the current situation with elected officials deliberately ignoring the tenants of good governance will continue indefinitely,” Rankin told a news conference.
