Dear Editor,
I did not have to open the paper on Thursday last to read about the 11 million harbor fraud case. I will not pull any punches and just go along and explain my point of view how people in the government of our kingdom go about fraud.
In my opinion over the years people in the governments of both Holland, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles ( I do not know about Indonesia) have committed fraud, whether proven or not. There is a difference, however, how the different perpetrators have gone about it.
Some of the suspects have taken and stopped to wait and see if anything will be noticed and then they would take again. If they happened to be discovered to have committed fraud, one would read that a certain Minister has tendered his resignation because of rumors of spousal abuse (or some other behavior not becoming a Minister of government). And gradually those accusations die a natural death.
Ironically, primarily in Holland this has been the picture that we have gotten over the years. The same Holland whose RST is mandated to investigate similar cases also in the rest of the kingdom.
Because of the amount of arrests, investigations and especially court cases involving fraud by our people in government, I wanted to know the difference and this is what I have come up with. Our people take and take and take and take until they are caught and instead of trying to dob their tails they are arrogant about it. They go to court, lose, appeal and if necessary go all the way to the high courts. Because of not being convicted they continue governing, which interferes and disrupts a whole lot of the procedures.
All of this in my opinion is the recipe to be accused of corruption. Mind you, fraud was committed by all, but some chose to wisely and humbly bow out and we never hear anything else about it. Our people choose to be arrogant about it and end up with a criminal record.
Russell A. Simmons
