Wall Street Journal: Unfinished Haiti Business December 18, 2009
Annette
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Wall Street Journal: Unfinished Haiti Business
The allegations didn't get much media attention outside of Haiti, but
the U.S. Department of Justice is finally moving on a long-running
investigation of corruption at Haiti's government-owned telecom
monopoly after the Clinton administration sent U.S. troops to restore
controversial Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power.
Indicted last week were two executives of a Florida telecommunications
company and two former high-ranking officials of Haiti Teleco. One of
the Haitians was extradited on Saturday and is being held on $1
million bail. The Haitian Diaspora in the U.S. is legendary for
calling home, generating plenty of phone traffic. The indictment
claims that the Florida company "executed contracts with Haiti Teleco"
whereby it enjoyed "preferential telecommunications rates" for
connecting those calls and in return paid bribes to Haitian officials.
Now we're getting somewhere. Haiti's own post-Aristide interim
government filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Aristide and several Teleco
employees of "looting the public treasury" through such schemes.
Previous disclosures have revealed that another company, Fusion
Telecommunications, whose board included Mr. Aristide's close friend
Joseph P. Kennedy II and Bill Clinton's chum Mack McLarty, received a
1999 Haiti Teleco contract with a rate well below the FCC's mandated
official settlement rate. Ditto New-Jersey based IDT: According to a
lawsuit by a former IDT employee, IDT signed a preferential deal with
Teleco in 2003 that allegedly included an agreement to make payments
to an offshore account for the benefit of Mr. Aristide.
Revenues paid by U.S. carriers terminating traffic in Haiti are one of
the few sources of hard currency for the impoverished country. What
exactly was going on between Haiti Teleco and politically-connected
Americans in the wake of a U.S. military operation to put Mr. Aristide
back in power after a domestic coup? Those questions have never been
answered.
-- Mary Anastasia O'Grady