DARYL SMITH 101

Okay. I get it. A lot of people are totally confused about what can euphemistically be referred to as "the Daryl Smith affair". I don't blame them. there have been so many charges and counter charges and claims of cover-up that it is practically impossible to understand what exactly is going on. One can be forgiven for thinking that the Government's playbook in this matter is being taken from the old line "if you can't baffle them with your brilliance, then bamboozle them with B.S." (and by the way, my old history teacher in high school once told me ... and teachers never lie ... that 'B.S.' stands for 'Baloney for Sure'! NOT what you are thinking!!). So perhaps it is time that we go back to the beginning and look at the so-called "facts" that are in the public domain:


Fact 1: A fairly good looking young woman called Carrie Ann Moreau was hired by the then Minister of Sport in some sort of capacity that required her to be in constant and close contact with the Minister. The Minister was Daryl Smith. Exactly what her duties were supposed to be at the Ministry of Sport is not clear. I think that she was to be some sort of assistant to the Minister, but I'm not sure of this nor of exactly what her duties were supposed to be.


Fact 2: Shortly after she joined the Minister's team there was some sort of inter action between the two. The allegation that is in the public domain is that the Minister made some sort of sexual advance to the young lady which made her very uncomfortable and was in fact rejected by her.


Fact 3: Following such rejection she found it impossible to continue with her employment and took her substantive employer, who was the Ministry of Sport, to the Industrial Court and was asking for $225,000 in damages  for wrongful dismissal.


Fact 4: The Ministry of Sport engaged the services of the Prime Minister's personal attorney, Mr. Michael Quamina, to defend the matter.


Fact 5:  Mr. Quamina advised that the case would be lost and advised a settlement.


Fact 6: A settlement figure of $150,000 was arrived at and a settlement agreement was signed between the parties (i.e., Ms. Moreau and the Ministry of Sport) and the money was paid to the young lady. We don't know whether this sum included her legal bill but it probably did.  We don't know of any other monies paid to or for her. Certainly, we don't know what the legal bill was for the Ministry of Sport in this matter. In other words, the cost to the taxpayers could easily be more than the $150,000 ... but how much more, we simply don't know.




Fact 7: The settlement agreement contained a nondisclosure clause forbidding/preventing Ms. Moreau from discussing any aspect of the case. In other words, the existence of this clause effectively prevents the general public from knowing why $150,000 of the public's money was used to settle this case or even why it had to be paid. Put another way, we simply have no facts to go on to find out why the taxpayers had to foot a $150,000 bill that may or may not have been caused in the first place by the misbehavior of the Minister.


Fact 8: All the monies paid to Ms. Moreau (i.e., the $150,000) were public monies. None came out of the Minister's pocket.


Fact 9: The Prime Minister commissioned a report on the whole matter but says that he can't disclose the findings of the report because certain legal formalities were not observed. The claim is that the committee appointed to investigate did not interview the Minister or give him a chance to be heard. The Attorney General has backed up the Prime Minister on this.


Fact 10: Meanwhile the lawyer for Daryl Smith has jumped in and called for the destruction of the report. She also says that reconvening the committee would be a waste of time because the committee is clearly biased against her client having made adverse findings against him. (How she knows that the findings are adverse is not exactly clear.)


Fact 11: Nobody has considered this matter to be important enough to deal with this matter definitively by simply appointing another committee with a remit to investigate the matter and come up with a proper report within a limited period of time ... say, two weeks. Instead, the confusion is allowed to continue and the central issue of what exactly happened and why was it in the Government's interest to have a non-disclosure agreement for the payment of public funds?


So? Where are we? Exactly where we were at the very beginning before all of the above came to light: bamboozled by the B.S. (Baloney for Sure). And we must like it so because there is no public outcry. But then, I guess that's why God is a Trini!