Marlon Morgan, senior member of the JLP's communication taskforce
April 14, 2025
JLP’s Morgan chides PNP for ‘hypocrisy’ over IC appointment
The Jamaica Labour Party’s Marlon Morgan is slamming criticisms by the People’s National Party (PNP) of the government’s objection to the appointment of Roneiph Lawrence as acting director of corruption prosecution at the Integrity Commission.
In a release Monday, Morgan said the PNP’s criticism of the JLP’s objection to the appointment of who he said would be the “final decision-maker on whether public officials, including politicians, are prosecuted”, is “another example of the PNP’s hypocrisy, deceptive conduct and conveniently changing principles.”
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The JLP-led government last week rejected the appointment on the basis that Lawrence is reportedly a long-time friend of PNP General Secretary Dr Dayton Campbell. Morgan said Campbell has publicly hailed Lawrence as a very close friend.
“The PNP’s media release begins with a deceptive framing. It describes the PNP General Secretary and the acting Corruption Prosecution Director’s close friendship as a past association. This is not so. Only this year, Campbell was at the wedding of Lawrence and appeared to be a member of the groom’s party, which is a role only reserved for very close friends and friends who are considered family” Morgan, who is also a government senator, said.
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“The PNP media release, which framed the position taken by the Government Parliamentary leaders as a witch-hunt, further confirms the PNP and its leadership’s unprincipled behaviour and willingness to talk from two sides of their mouth,” he continued, adding that “Only a few weeks ago, PNP President Mark Golding used a political platform to raise the issue of conflict of interest and urged the Governor General not to allow the appointment of anyone to a key post in the Integrity Commission, who is close to any member of the political fraternity.”
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According to Morgan, this is among the main points which the Government’s Parliamentary leaders made in their letter, “yet the PNP sought to criticise the position.”
He said the Opposition party’s release “confirms the PNP’s hypocrisy and that Jamaicans cannot, for a minute, trust any position they take on important national issues, because their stance may change at any given moment in line with what is politically expedient.”
Senator Morgan says the position taken by Leader of Government Business in both houses respectively, Ed Bartlett and Kamina Johnson Smith, on behalf of Government members, is credible and must be supported.
He said it is irresponsible of the PNP not to acknowledge that the sensitivity and authority of the particular position, acting director of corruption prosecution, is one which must be viewed with particular objectivity.
He added that it is important to note the concerns about Lawrence’s appointment were not raised in a vacuum. The concerns were also raised in the context of traditional and social media reports, he said, which indicate that:
– A former corruption prosecution director, who is of sound professional repute, ‘came under undue pressure’ following a lawful decision she made and her contract was subsequently not renewed.
– That a former senior investigator resigned from the commission, after a statement she gave, which called into question the ethical nature of the approach taken by the commission to an investigation, was upon the intervention of a senior official excluded from a report submitted to Parliament and efforts made to have her retract the statement.
– Bartlett and Johnson Smith had called for a probe of the above serious allegations which have entered the public domain following a series of past utterances and actions by some senior officials at the ocmmission which raised major public concern about potential bias.
