The Prime Minister of the British Virgin Islands has demanded his immediate release from custody in the United States, arguing that he is immune from prosecution on cocaine smuggling charges because he is the elected constitutional head of government in the British Overseas Territory.
Andrew Fey’s lawyer made the request in Miami Federal Court on Monday.
Fahi, 51, was arrested last week during an attack by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as he prepared to board a private jet in Miami.
According to a criminal complaint, Fahie and Oleanvine Maynard, its port director, were at the airport to meet people who consider themselves Mexican drug traffickers, but are in fact undercover agents of the DEA. In the criminal complaint, Maynard called Fahie “sometimes a little crook” who would not hesitate to profit from a plan drawn up with the help of self-proclaimed Lebanese Hezbollah operatives to smuggle large quantities of cocaine and drug proceeds across the Caribbean. Island.
The shock shock rocked the British Virgin Islands, where Fahi has already been accused of widespread corruption, and appears to have backed calls for a two-year suspension of the constitution to clean up the government and return to home government by London officials.
Fahie’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment and did not provide details of her client’s request for immunity in her two-page file. Fahi, who is also finance minister, is said to have traveled to Miami to attend a conference on the cruise industry and appointed a deputy prime minister before his departure to act as prime minister in his absence.
But any battle to assert immunity is likely to face many obstacles.
“Diplomatic immunity doesn’t protect you if you’re in your own private insane asylum,” said Dick Gregory, a former Miami federal prosecutor who accused the prime minister of Turks and Caicos, another British colony, of drug charges in the 1980s. and then the powerful Panamanian general Manuel Noriega.
Still, prosecutions of foreign officials are rare, as the Caribbean’s top elected official would certainly receive the green light at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the US State Department, given the potential impact.
For example, federal prosecutors in New York waited for Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez to step down this year before being charged with drug trafficking charges that first came to light in his brother’s trial.
“It simply came to our notice then. “Obviously, prosecutors are very confident in the evidence,” Gregory said.
A series of islands of 35,000 people east of Puerto Rico are currently under a 2007 constitution that gives it limited self-government.
Gov. John Rankin, a representative of the Queen of the Islands and his ultimate executive, said the arrests prompted him to release – earlier than originally planned – a report by a commission of inquiry launched in January 2021 to investigate allegations of widespread government fraud.
Rankin said the investigation concluded that millions of dollars had been spent on projects, some of which were related to the prime minister’s allies, that had been abandoned or found to be of no public benefit.
“Some of them were fake,” the governor said.
The commission concluded that “unless the most urgent and drastic steps are taken, the current situation with elected officials deliberately ignoring tenants of good governance will continue indefinitely,” Rankin told a news conference.
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