More than a decade after Financial Forensic Investigator Robert ‘Bob’ Lindquist was hired by the then UPP administration to look into alleged wrongdoings of senior Antigua & Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) members, the ABLP administration is bringing him back.
This time Lindquist comes on the recommendation of the Antigua Christian Council (ACC) to look into opposition United Progressive Party (UPP) allegations of the misappropriation of up to $0.5 million in Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP) funds.
The ABLP has long criticized Lindquist’s credentials and chided his famed IHI report as “worthless,” a decription recognized by the Government Chief of Staff Lionel ‘Max’ Hurst.
“The Cabinet wanted to have someone whose credentials could not be questioned by the opposition party, because Lindquist was their boy. They selected him and they like to tout his investigative skills, although the investigation which he did was declared useless, although he has been paid millions of dollars,” Hurst said.
Despite this, Hurst said Lindquist will also be asked separately to probe an incident of “double billing” at the Public Works Department.
Former Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer, who had hired Lindquist to investigate the IHI matter involving senior Antigua & Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) members said, it is quite interesting the government which ridiculed the work of the investigator has hired him to lead such a matter.
“I find it interesting, and at the same time they must be aware that the said person that is being recommended, they themselves have gone on record as saying that other matters which this man has investigated in Antigua & Barbuda was not worth the paper it was written on,” Spencer said.
Attorney-at-law Ralph Francis also found the recommendation “peculiar,” saying, “It raises so many different points and says a lot about the government, Lindquist and the ‘fooley’ Antigua people.”
The fraud investigator is known to be a veteran in his field having a career which spans over three decades.
Aside from gaining notoriety in Trinidad & Tobago for his work with the government to probe the business dealings of John H. O’Halloran, a former Cabinet minister, he also made headlines on several occasion here as it relates to the IHI matter.
The fraud investigator was hired in May 2004, by the UPP to probe the alleged wrongdoing in a scandal which linked high-ranking members of ABLP to the alleged overpayment of millions of dollars on a Japanese loan for a power plant.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)