British Virgin Islands demands release from US custody

The Premier of the British Virgin Islands has asked that he be released immediately from US jail, claiming that he is exempt from prosecution on cocaine-smuggling accusations since he is the elected and constitutional head of government of the British overseas territory.

On Monday, an attorney representing Andrew Fahie filed the motion in federal court in Miami.

Fahie, 51, was apprehended last week while ready to board a private plane in Miami during a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raid.

According to a federal complaint, Fahie and his ports director, Oleanvine Maynard, were at the airport to meet what they thought were Mexican drug smugglers but were actually undercover DEA agents. Maynard describes Fahie in the criminal complaint as a “little crook occasionally” who would not hesitate to profit from a plot devised with the assistance of self-proclaimed Lebanese Hezbollah operatives to transit large amounts of cocaine and narcotics revenues via the Caribbean island.

The arrest shook the British Virgin Islands, where Fahie was already facing charges of widespread corruption, and appeared to boost calls by London authorities to suspend the constitution for two years in order to clean up government and restore to home rule.

Fahie’s attorney did not reply to a request for comment and did not disclose information regarding her client’s immunity claim in her two-page document. Fahie, who also acts as finance minister, was claimed to have flown to Miami to attend a cruise industry convention and had nominated a deputy to operate as premier in his absence before of his departure.

However, any struggle to establish immunity is likely to encounter a slew of roadblocks.

“Diplomatic immunity does not protect you if you’re on your own little boondoggle,” said Dick Gregorie, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who arrested the prime minister of Turks and Caicos, another British colony, and then Panamanian strongman Gen Manuel Noriega on cocaine charges in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, prosecutions of foreign leaders are uncommon, and going after the Caribbean island’s top elected official would almost probably have been approved at the highest levels of the US justice and state departments given the possible consequences.

For example, federal prosecutors in New York waited for Honduras’ President Juan Orlando Hernández to resign this year before indicting him on drug trafficking charges that surfaced during his brother’s trial.

“This isn’t done haphazardly. Prosecutors are certainly confident in the evidence,” Gregorie stated.

The 35,000-person island chain east of Puerto Rico is now governed by a 2007 constitution that grants it limited self-government.

Governor John Rankin, the Queen’s representative to the islands and the ultimate executive authority, said the arrests forced him to issue a report by a commission of inquiry created in January 2021 to examine claims of widespread government fraud a year earlier than planned.

According to Rankin, the review concluded that millions of dollars were spent on projects, some of which were tied to the premier’s cronies, that were abandoned or judged to be of little public use.

“Some of them were obviously fake,” the governor remarked.

According to Rankin, the panel determined that “unless the most urgent and dramatic remedies are taken, the existing scenario with elected officials knowingly rejecting the tenets of good governance would continue indefinitely.”