OPPOSITION MP Dr Peter Phillips believes the ruling Jamaica Labour Party is trapped in the vortex of a growing crisis of trust as details of its link with American law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and alleged drug lord Christopher 'Dudus' Coke continue to leak into the public domain.

Phillips, chairman of the People's National Party's Communications Commission, was the guest of the Observer's weekly Monday Exchange forum at the newspaper's Beechwood Avenue headquarters in Kingston yesterday.

Speaking in the wake of a weekend media report on the contents of e-mails exchanged between Solicitor General Douglas Leys and the law firm, in which reference was made to Prime Minister Golding and Attorney General Dorothy Lightbourne, Phillips said the evidence was damning.

"The report confirmed the belief, contrary to what has been said before by the Prime Minister and others that high officials of Government were intimately involved, and that it was in fact a contract being carried out by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips on behalf of the Government of Jamaica. We have been led to believe otherwise," Phillips noted, while reiterating his call for a Commission of Enquiry into the matter.

"We have to resolve this if we are going to go forward as a country without the kind of fracturing of public sentiment and antipathy that we have.

"If you don't (resolve), what is going to happen are the dribs and drabs of discoveries and announcements whether out of the United States or Jamaica which is going to keep the society in a state of upheaval and turmoil and going to prevent us from coming to grips with the very real challenges," he argued.

The Jamaican Government has maintained that it was persons within the party that hired the firm to lobby the US to drop its extradition request for Coke to face drug and gunrunning charges there. It said these same "persons within the JLP" approached attorney-at-law Harold Brady in September of last year to seek his assistance in "facilitating the opening of discussions between the US authorities and the Government of Jamaica, and thereby, seek to resolve what had become a treaty dispute between the US and Jamaica". Manatt has, however, said it was working for the Government.

Dr Phillips, who was the one to bring the issue to the fore during a sitting of Parliament in March this year, said an enquiry would provide "the country with an opportunity to lift the veil behind this association with criminality and politics".

He said: "It would confirm or refute whether we were at the point where the risk of State capture by criminal elements was so great that we as a country came to the edge, and most of all, if we could use this obviously traumatic experience to find a point of coalescence; the possibility of building a new kind of consensus that would determine that as a country we never walk close to that edge ever again, and arrive at some understanding as to how we go forward," he said.

According to Phillips, who also served as national security minister when his party was in power, the fracas between the security forces and gunmen who were determined to prevent the capture of Coke which resulted in some 70 deaths in May this year was "the single most lethal police action that has occurred in Jamaica since Independence" and requires an accounting.

"I think to pretend that "annuh nutten" is to ignore the real trauma the country has been put through," he said.

Dr Phillips said the Government was yet to say what was the source of the more than US$60,000 that Manatt had claimed was paid over to it for its services, which the JLP has said was not paid from Government coffers but from 'persons within the party'.

"If they were working on behalf of the Government of Jamaica, did the Government pay and, if so, where is it reflected in the public accounts? If it was not paid by the Government of Jamaica then who did? And how come private interests are paying for the involvement of public officials in what was a private thing?" Phillips queried.

"If they were acting on behalf of the Government then the ultimate clients are the citizens of this country, and yet we are being denied the most elementary information. On the face of it there would be nothing wrong in the Government hiring a set of lobbyists, but why the denials, why the contortions?" he said.

Also in question, he said, was Manatt's claim that it was never hired in relation to the Coke extradition issue.

"The critical issue that is bedevilling the country and imperilling the administration is the growing crisis of trust which relates not only to their handling of this affair but to the more substantive issue of the handling of the extradition request itself," he said.

Also worsening the gap between the public and the Government, he said, was the handling and the treatment of public sector workers.

"Trust is really fundamental to what has been happening, and if anything, what we have been witnessing over many decades in the country is a diminishing trust in our institutions of governance. It is not something that has bedevilled just the current administration... but the last couple of years has carried us further along that path, and I daresay this has been the most blatant breach of trust," Dr Phillips said.

In the meantime, he said with the prime minister so severely compromised, it had been a mistake on the part of the Jamaica Labour Party not to accept the resignation which he was said to have tendered at an impromptu Vale Royal meeting when the matter was at its high point a few months ago.

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