One flew over the AG's nest?

JLP Senator Tom Tavares-Finson is a senior lawyer of many years standing. According to the Daily Observer (July 09, 2008), during last Friday's Senate sitting the goodly senator reportedly claimed the existence of "an obvious correlation between recent departures from the Attorney General's Department and the current review of the practice of employees collecting payments for work done for Government agencies."

Senator Tavares-Finson claimed that "Government lawyers were charging fees equivalent to those charged by lawyers in private practice to do Government work and were being paid with taxpayers' money." According to Tavares-Finson J$40.9 million was collected by "a few enterprising senior lawyers (at the AG's Department)." He emphasized that "this money was shared by a few lawyers and, while I have no intention of calling any names, let me say that there seems to me to be an obvious correlation between the recent departures and the beneficiaries of this largesse".



Tavares-Finson then concluded that:

* the review of the earning capacity of senior Government lawyers, as well as the attorney general's decision to review employment practices in the department were at the root of the tensions within the department.

* Efforts to blame resignations on the management style of the attorney general are groundless.

It seems that Tavares-Finson's flight over the AG's nest has rendered him impervious to logic, evidence, or just plain decency. Certainly, given the silence of the AG so far, it is fair to assume that Tavares-Finson views coincide with her own. Essentially, Tavares-Finson has accused government lawyers of running a fee-charging racket on at taxpayers' expense, and then walking away in a huff when the racket was stopped by the AG.

I am reliably informed that Tavares-Finson made no inquiries of any of the senior lawyers at the AG's Chambers about the fees supposedly collected. If indeed the fee-charging scheme is under review, why not wait until the review has been completed and documented before attacking these lawyers? Again, my information is that lawyers who did private work (for statutory bodies, for example) earned no more than J$30,000 (each) per annum, on average. If Tavares-Finson has evidence of lawyers collecting J$40M, does he not have an obligation to produce the evidence? Where would Tavares-Finson get this 'information' from other than Dorothy Lightbourne? It is curious that the AG has never publicly attributed the exodus of lawyers to internal disputes over the fee issue. by innuendo, Tavares-Finson has accused senior lawyers like Stephen Vasciannie, Patrick Foster, Nicole Lambert, et al of (a) being "beneficiaries" of "largesse" and (b) departing when the largesse was supposedly cut off. This is outrageous. I would challenge Tavares-Finson to repeat his claim outside of parliament, where his word would not be protected by absolute privilege.

How can Tavares-Finson credibly exonerate the AG given the history of her tenure at the AG's Chambers? How does Tavares-Finson explain that no AG in Jamaica's history has suffered an exodus of almost 1/3 of their Chambers in under a year? Does he seriously believe that Patrick Foster opted to leave before his contract was up, because he was being deprived of an extra $30,000 per annum? Is Tavares-Finson aware that some lawyers resigned before they had identified an alternative? Is he also aware that the AG pointedly accused some lawyers of being PNP sympathizers? Why does he ignore the fact that the AG contrived to derail Stephen Vasciannie's nomination as SG? What about the withdrawal of Nicole Foster-Pusey's acting appointment? How about the AG's interference in litigation being conducted under the supervision of the then acting Solicitor General? If the AG's management style is so stellar, why hasn't the AG's Chambers so far not succeeded in replacing the lawyers who have departed? Why, for example, is there no replacement yet for Stephen Vasciannie, as head of the international division? Why are there currently no Deputies-Solicitor General? I could go on and on.


Lawyers of the AG's Chambers, past and present, need to stand up and firmly rebuff this scandalous assault on their reputations. Nothing less will suffice.