GEORGETOWN, Guyana, CMC -Attorney General Anil Nandlall says the embattled Assistant Police Commissioner Calvin Brutus will go down in Caribbean history as the highest-ranking police officer in Guyana “to be implicated in this level of criminality” as the authorities prepare to lay several fraud-related fraud-related charges against him.
Last Friday, Justice Gino Persaud denied Brutus permission to leave Guyana for the United States for “legal and personal” and “medical reasons.”
Speaking on his weekly “Issues in the News” broadcast on Tuesday night, Nandlall said that charges against Brutus are imminent after the Special Organised Crime Uni(SCU) of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) recommended 240 charges be laid against him following a money laundering probe.
Brutus named the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Police respondents, and the Court added SOCU as an interested third party.
Nandlall told viewers that Brutus had provided information not necessarily known to the authorities and the broader public in filing the court matters.
“It is Mr. Brutus, through his affidavit, who filed and disclosed to the public a large volume of information that the public was unaware of,” he said, adding, “Naturally, the respondents, who had been served, had to respond in kind and a lot of the information again got into the court system and by extension the public domain.”
Nandlall, also the Minister of Legal Affairs, said that several bank accounts belonging to Brutus and his wife had been frozen under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, except for one to which his salary was being paid.
Nandlall said the accounts had “large sums of money” and that Brutus had been unsuccessful in getting the courts to unfreeze those accounts.
SOCU has indicated that its probe of the Assistant Commissioner covers more than GUY $800 million (One Guyana dollar = US$0.004 cents), including GUY $500 million that was uncovered in bank accounts linked to him.
During the broadcast, he told viewers that Brutus would be removed from his position within the GPF once the Director of Public Prosecutions formalized the charges against him.
“Obviously, when the charges are instituted, steps will have to be taken by the relevant agency and in compliance with the relevant legal process to remove Mr. Brutus from office, but that will happen soon,” the Attorney General said.
He suggested that Brutus’s allegations might be the first of this scale, at his level, in any part of the Caribbean.
“Mr. Brutus will go down in history as perhaps the highest-ranking officer of the Guyana Police Force to be implicated in this volume of fraud. I believe he will go down in the Caribbean as an officer of such rank to be implicated in this level of criminality,” Nandlall said, dismissing claims “in certain sections of the media and the opposition” that the government had been orchestrating the charges against the embattled top police officer.
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