‘Heads must roll’
A recommendation by P J Patterson that heads, including that of ruling party general-secretary Colin Campbell should roll because of the Trafigura scandal, has thrown the People’s National Party (PNP) into turmoil, well placed sources said last night.
At Sunday Observer press time, the party was still in vigorous debate over the Patterson recommendation, after a long day of meetings failed to resolve the issue.
The meeting also wrestled with how to deal with the Trafigura claim that it made no gifts to the PNP.
Sources said Campbell was taking a lot of flak as the man at the centre of the Trafigura affair, in which the party received $31 million from the Dutch oil trader which sells Nigerian crude on behalf of the Jamaican Government.
But Campbell, contacted during a break in the meetings, denied rumours that he had been fired by Prime Minister Simpson Miller or that he had resigned after being asked to do so.
“As at this moment, I have not been fired and I have not resigned,” said Campbell, who is also the information and development minister.
The sources said Campbell was being accused of not providing the party with all the relevant information before it stridently defended him after the Trafigura information was leaked from FirstCaribbean International Bank.
It was Campbell’s signature on cheques drawing down on the Trafigura money that Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Leader Bruce Golding was able to wave before the nation, in his dramatic revelation last week.
In any event, Campbell was said to have been integral in the negotiations with Trafigura which resulted in the money being paid over.
He was said to be part of a four-man delegation which met with Trafigura representatives in New York last August, during a visit to attend the Independence ball staged by Jamaican nationals there.
Simpson Miller and Phillip Paulwell, the energy, commerce and technology minister, were reportedly in the delegation but it was not immediately clear if the prime minister sat in on any of the meetings.
The prevailing view last night was that the dismissal of Campbell would take some of the heat off the party, which is grappling to overcome the firestorm of criticisms generated by the Trafigura incident.
After Golding’s revelation, Pickersgill and Campbell strongly denied any wrongdoing was involved in the party’s receipt of a gift, but Trafigura shattered that position by telling journalists that it had only been involved in a commercial and not a gift-giving one.
But groups like the influential Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica have lashed the party for accepting a gift from a government trading party, and just before a new deal was signed.
The Chamber said even though nothing illegal was done, the gift helped to “reinforce the perception of a culture of corruption in Jamaica”.