Former World Bank official says a government minister was threatened by an Asian company

http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56528955

Former World Bank official says a government minister was threatened by
an Asian company
Stabroek News,
Sunday, September 16th 2007

Dear Editor,

"Three years later, I [Paul Collier] found myself on a World Bank
mission in the office of a government minister in Guyana, one of the
poorest countries in South America.

The minister's telephone interrupted our conversation. On the other
end, he explained after hanging up, was an anonymous voice hinting that
his children might not arrive home safely that night.

"Earlier that day, the minister had announced plans for court
proceedings against a powerful Asian company active in the same area as
our World Bank project. 'That's why I carry this,' he said, hoisting a
leg onto the desktop to reveal a revolver strapped to his lower calf.

"As an outsider, it seemed to me that the minister was a hero engaging
villains in a high-stakes showdown to which I was largely irrelevant.

No matter how carefully we on the World Bank team did our work, what
could it achieve if we did not somehow help this man? How, exactly,
could we help him from Washington?

And anyway, how certain could we be that he was in fact a hero?"

The abovementioned (in quotation) article was written in Foreign
Affairs, September/October 2007 titled: 'Smart Samaritans' by Michael
A. Clemens, a Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development and
an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.

These statements were from a review of a book: The Bottom Billion: Why
the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by
Oxford economist, Paul Collier (Oxford University Press, 2007).

For the full commentary on this work, readers can readily access the
website: (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070901fareviewessay86509/
michael-a-clemens/smart-samaritans.html).

The abovementioned makes really disturbing reading. Here we have a
Member of Parliament and a minister allegedly being threatened by an
Asian company.

In this case the family of the official is being threatened. The
personal threats on the minister are serious enough that the minister
is armed.

This sounds like the Wild West! I find it hard to believe that any
government official would be joking about such serious matters to a
foreign official. It is difficult to see a senior minister maligning
the state of affairs of business in the country to a World Bank
official. Most likely, the minister would also not display a gun if the
threats were not real.

Normally, the police would be providing security for our civilian
officials, yet here the minister must feel unduly threatened to be
armed.

Unfortunately, the minister and the Asian company are not named in this
article. Neither was the time-frame mentioned.

Natural resource industries have a tendency to attract unsavoury
characters. They will try to bribe and corrupt local officials, and
when these actions fail they may try intimidation.

We must not allow ourselves to be bullied in our country.

These issues should therefore be clarified as early as possible because
of the serious implications of this revelation in this respected
publication by a credible former World Bank official.

Yours faithfully,

Seelochan Beharry