AUDLEY Shaw yesterday described events surrounding the Outameni saga as a web of deception and said that prior to the $180-million spent last year for the purchase of the Trelawny property, the Government-owned Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ) wrote off $80 million in liability owed by the company.

Shaw levelled the charge at the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP’s) 71st Annual Conference at the National Arena in Kingston where he joined JLP and Opposition Leader Andrew Holness in drawing attention to the issue and accused Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller of misleading the country in her answers to questions in the House of Representatives last Tuesday.

They threatened to extend the scope of their investigations and revelations during this week on the controversial deal between the State-run National Housing Trust (NHT) and filmmaker Lennie Little White’s Orange Valley Holdings Limited, which owned the nine-acre property.

Shaw produced new information from documents relating to the transaction, which showed that prior to the March 2013 purchase of the tourist attraction, the Governmentowned National Investment Bank of Jamaica (NIBJ), which was later submerged into the DBJ, invested US$500,000 ($56 million) in the Outameni project.

The investment was by way of preference shares, which required an annual dividend payment of eight per cent per year over a fiveyear period and should have yielded a US$200,000 or $23 million gain. However, Shaw said that there was no gain from that first bailout, as “from day one, not one red cent of dividend was paid by Outameni to NIBJ”.

He said that an outstanding liability of US$700,000 or approximately $80 million, which remained on the books of DBJ, representing its equity in the Outameni company, has now been written off by the DBJ.

Both Holness and Shaw promised more questions and disclosures over the next few days as more documents become available.

Holness told the conference that the JLP now has information that shows that Prime Minister Simpson Miller misled the House when she said that she was not aware of the purchase of the tourist attraction until she read it the press. “Now we see that the prime minister had intimate knowledge of what was happening,” he told the JLP crowd.

He said that for Simpson Miller to have said that she was ignorant of the deal, meant that: (1) she was negligent in her duty to supervise the board of the NHT, in which case he suggested that she should resign as prime minister; or (2) if she never knew, as she claimed in answers to questions in the House of Representatives last week, “and if she agrees that the action was not right, then she has a duty to fire the board chairman and fire the board”.

“But she didn’t do that. She came to Parliament and she tried to obfuscate, confuse… It appears to me that because she has not acted against the board, the only thing that we can conclude is that she agrees with and possibly knew and authorised Outameni’s purchase,” Holness said.

Shaw also concluded that the prime minister had misled the House in her answers. He said that, in both cases, when she said that the NHT had not purchased the Outameni Experience, and that the first time she had heard about the transaction was in the press, she had misled the House and the country. “The entire sordid affair has turned out to be nothing but a web of deception,” Shaw told the conference.