TCI VERDICT MAKES HEADLINES OVERSEAS

Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer 

#TurksandCaicos, September 29, 2023 – The recently delivered Turks and Caicos Special Investigation and Prosecution Team (SIPT) Trial verdict is now making headlines internationally.

News agencies including the Associated Press, Daily Mail and ABC news affiliates  have broadcast the details of the decade long trial to their huge audiences following the mixed verdict delivered Monday September 25th.

Co Accused Jeffery Hall and Melbourne Wilson were found innocent.  The guilty parties, Floyd Hall and Clayton Greene were found to have taken bribes and laundered money respectively, in the long past Michael Misick Administration.

They, along with almost a dozen others, were accused of selling off the TCIs land for favorable prices to developers who slid them some cash on the side or for helping clean the proceeds of those transactions.

It cost the Turks and Caicos millions in losses, a painstaking land recovery process and saddled the country with scandalous reputation, a limiting constitution and restrictive public procurement processes.

At the time of the constitutional suspension in 2009, which nullified the electoral contract between the people and locally elected leaders, there was also international coverage of the Michael Misick Administration which was further exacerbated by a rape charge against the ex-premier (he was eventually exonerated), hit of hurricanes Hanna and Ike, a revealing Commission of Inquiry and the housing market crash which also sunk major projects in the TCI.