PHILIPSBURG--Minister of Public Health, Labour and Social Affairs VSA Pamela Gordon-Carty has paid all outstanding amounts in court fees, it was confirmed on Tuesday. BZSE lawyer Jelmer Snow said his law office had received all due payments and that thereby the matter was settled.
One day after she was sworn in on Thursday, November 28, the brand-new minister ran into trouble after it emerged she had deposited an unsecured cheque on the third-party account of BZSE Attorneys at Law in Cay Hill.
The payment was in connection with a verdict by the Court of Appeals of November 15, 2019, under which Gordon-Carty in her capacity of accountant and entrepreneur at Master Accounting Service (MAS) was ordered to pay the cost of the legal procedure, which was set at NAf. 6,272.50.
In a separate case, in which the Court of First Instance ruled on May 19, 2017, Gordon-Carty and her partner were ordered to pay NAf. 2,283.50 in legal fees. The BZSE law firm itself had also sent an invoice to Gordon-Carty to the amount of US $108.32, Snow had stated.
As Snow had not heard anything from Gordon-Carty or her lawyer Jairo Bloem concerning payment, he sent a letter on Monday in which he informed her of his intention to petition the Court and file for Gordon-Carty’s bankruptcy. However, it did not get that far because the outstanding amounts were fully paid on Tuesday.
Attorney-at-law Bloem said on behalf of Gordon-Carty that the incident with the bounced cheque was an “apparent misunderstanding.” He said his client had been in the midst of the screening process in connection with her appointment as a minister and had not deliberately signed an unsecured cheque.
“Also, we were caught off-guard by the fact that the lawyer demanded the outstanding amounts to be paid within five days, which is not common practice,” Bloem stated.
He said that to make the payments his client had to transfer money from a foreign bank account to a bank account in St. Maarten, which takes several days.
When Snow “immediately” went to the bank to cash the cheque it bounced because the money had not arrived in the St. Maarten bank account as yet, Bloem explained.
“On Thursday the cheque bounced, and on Friday we received a letter in which Snow stated that he would be filing a report against my client,” said Bloem.
“I think this is also called a ‘scam’ and that of our Minister of Public Health, Labour and Social Affairs,” Snow said in an article which appeared in Monday’s edition of The Daily Herald.
Bloem wondered about his colleague’s true intentions in this matter. “I wonder if BZSE also wants to become involved in politics, as there is an apparent tendency among lawyers to run as candidates in the upcoming election.”
