Fri | Apr 26, 2024

Bond hearing for BVI premier set for next week

Published:Friday | April 29, 2022 | 4:43 PM
This photo released by the Department of Information and Public Relations of the government of the British Virgin Islands on April 22, 2022, shows British Virgin Island Premier Andrew Alturo Fahie. (Department of Information and Public Relations of the government of the British Virgin Islands via AP)

MIAMI (AP) — The premier of the British Virgin Islands appeared in federal court in Miami on Friday after his arrest on cocaine smuggling charges.

At the same time, Britain's governor of the Caribbean territory announced that a corruption inquiry found ample reason to suspend the islands' elected government.

The arrest of Premier Andrew Alturo Fahie, 51, in Florida prompted the UK-appointed governor of the British Virgin Islands to release a damning report Friday from a probe into separate wide-ranging allegations of corruption.

The dramatic developments place the immediate future of the British overseas territory into doubt. The string of islands inhabited by 35,000 people east of Puerto Rico is currently under a 2007 constitution giving it limited self-governance under a governor who is the ultimate executive authority as the representative of Queen Elizabeth II.

Fahie was arrested Thursday at a Miami-area airport along with his territory's director of ports, Oleanvine Maynard, in a US Drug Enforcement Agency sting. Maynard's son, Kadeem Maynard, faces the same changes in the alleged scheme.

According to a criminal complaint, Fahie and Maynard had been at the airport to meet Mexican drug traffickers, who in reality were undercover DEA agents.

A DEA confidential source had previously met with Maynard and her son after being introduced by a group of self-proclaimed Lebanese Hezbollah operatives, according to the complaint. They started arranging plans to ship cocaine through the port at Tortola, and they both talked about involving Fahie.

“You see with my premier, he's a little crook sometimes,” Oleanvine Maynard told the DEA source, according to the complaint.

The day of the arrest, a meeting was called to see a shipment of $700,000 in cash the British territory officials expected to receive to help smuggle cocaine from Colombia to Miami and New York, the complaint said. The money was fake.

The DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement these arrests show the “DEA's resolve to hold corrupt members of government responsible for using their positions of power to provide a safe haven for drug traffickers and money launderers in exchange for their own financial and political gain.”

At a Friday hearing conducted via Zoom, Assistant US Attorney Frederic “Fritz” Shadley asked US Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman to keep both Fahie and Maynard detained prior to their trial.

Shown in a tan prison uniform, Fahie did not speak other than to state his name and date of birth and agree for the hearing to be conducted online.

A bond hearing was set for next Wednesday.

Fahie's attorney Theresa Van Vliet did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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