 Laurent
Lamothe is Haitian President Michel Martelly’s brain, just as
political strategist Karl Rove was to former U.S. President
George W. Bush.
Lamothe was the guy who figured
out how to finance Martelly’s presidential campaign, and who
brought in the professional Spanish public relations firm Ostos
& Sola to run it. Now he is President Martelly’s nominee to be
Haiti’s next prime minister.
“The man is a financial
genius,” exclaimed musician Richard Morse, who manages
Haiti’s famed Oloffson Hotel and is Martelly’s cousin and part
of the president’s inner circle. “He knows how to take a
little from over here, a little from over there, put it together
with this over here, and make it all work out.”
Lamothe’s prowess for financial
wheeling and dealing stands out when one reviews his business
history with Martelly over the past decade.
Lamothe, 39, has been close to
Martelly since 2002 when he recruited the former lewd konpa
singer known as “Sweet Micky” to be a partner and the
advertising front-man for NoPin Long Distance, a calling-card
alternative service which became wildly popular in Haiti and
spawned several imitators. In fact, according to Florida State
corporate records, the original name of One World Telecom, Inc.,
the parent company of NoPin, was “Sweet Micky Long Distance
Services, Inc.”
Lamothe, along with fellow
NoPin founders Patrice Baker and Gilbert Pasquet, were all
directors with Martelly in another Florida corporation, Coco
Grove Holdings, Inc., of which Martelly was made president in
2008. Coco Grove Holdings, in turn, was owned by a British
Virgin Islands shell corporation, Lightfoot Ventures Limited,
again directed solely by Lamothe and Martelly.
Lamothe learned his financial
skills studying business management at Miami’s Barry University
and later earning a Masters in the field at another Miami
Catholic school, St. Thomas University. In Haiti, he went to
high school at the College Bird.
Born in Port-au-Prince on Aug.
12, 1972, he, like his older brother Ruben, became a Davis Cup
tennis player in 1994 and 1995, representing Haiti. But, while
his brother stayed in the sport, the lure of business drew
Laurent away.
In the late 1990s, he tried to
start up a business importing wood to Haiti from Suriname’s
Amazon forest, but that never took off.
So in 2000, Lamothe launched
Global Voice Telecom, Inc. with tennis buddy Patrice Baker.
While his business in Haiti thrived, he also made inroads into
Latin America and Africa, being fluent in both French and
Spanish. He built Global Voice into a major telecommunications
player, especially in the Third World, and became very wealthy,
keeping pricey homes in Cape Town, South Africa, and Miami,
Florida.
But he began making enemies as
well. The France-based website Le Griot.info published a
Nov. 11, 2010 article charging that Senegal’s president
Abdoulaye Wade had been “manipulated by Laurent Lamothe... to
be able to establish Global Voice in Senegal.” Lamothe “corrupted
the authorities with sums of money and voyages to South Africa
arranged by him, to have passed the project of the presidency,”
the journalist Steven Addamah asserted. “Several people
including a minister, an advisor of the president, a woman
senator, and a Director General should make $29 million on the
backs of the Senegalese taxpayers and Sonatel (the national
telephone company) after signing the contract.”
In July 2011, another
Senegal-based website, Dakaractu.com, reported similar charges
of Global Voice corruption, in countries across Africa,
including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, and the
Central African Republic. “In Gambia, where there reigns a
despot as absolute as he is predatory, [Lamothe] managed to get
the telecom market through a deal ensuring that Yaya Jammeh, the
strongman of the country, gets millions of dollars into his
personal account and that the telephone communications of
Gambians is monitored by his listening devices,” journalist
Cheikh Yérim Seck wrote.
Global Voice formally denied
the second article, which was reprinted in Haïti Liberté,
saying that the “slanderous article” was filled with “gossip
and lies” in “an attempt to destroy Laurent Lamothe’s
reputation” and “damage Global Voice Group’s image.”
Lamothe’s nomination for PM
will now go before the Haitian Parliament for ratification. His
first, and highest, hurdle will be to prove that he meets the
Haitian Constitution’s residency requirement, under which the
prime minister must have continuously lived in Haiti for the
past five years. This provision has disqualified several PM
nominees over the years, and almost sank the nomination of Garry
Conille, Martelly’s first prime minister who resigned Feb. 24
after only four months on the job (see Haïti Liberté,
Vol. 5, No. 33, 02/29/2011). (Conille only avoided the pitfall
because his overseas residency as an NGO official was equated
with being on diplomatic assignment, although it was nothing of
the sort.)
Another hurdle will be that
Lamothe has been Suriname’s Honorary Consul to Haiti in recent
years. Martelly’s first PM nominee, Daniel Rouzier, was felled
in part because he was an Honorary Consul for Jamaica in Haiti.
There are also charges that
Lamothe may hold foreign citizenship, which the Constitution
also forbids for the post. A Special Senate commission is
looking into the double-nationality charges against him,
Martelly and 37 other high government officials.
Lamothe, who acted as Haiti’s
Foreign Minister under Conille, has two young daughters by a
Colombian woman, all living in Miami, Florida, but his current
girlfriend is said to be Stéphanie Balmir Villedrouin, the
current Tourism Minister.
Lamothe’s father, Louis, was
the founder of the Lope de Vega Institute, a school in
Port-au-Prince which teaches Spanish and promotes links to the
Spanish-speaking world. During the Duvalier and post-Duvalier
dictatorships, the senior Lamothe often sponsored scholarships
for Haitian soldiers to be trained in Latin American countries,
for example on Ecuador’s Manta Air Base where the U.S. military
was also based. (In 2009, Ecuadorian President Correa closed the
U.S. base there.) 2004 coup leader Guy Philippe and several
other Haitian soldiers were trained in Ecuador during the
1991-1994 coup.
What is Washington’s reaction
to Lamothe’s nomination? So far it is muted, which suggests that
the reaction is mixed. On the one hand, Lamothe is
pro-capitalist and an architect of the Martelly government’s
“Haiti is open for business” campaign to attract foreign
investment. That he went to school in the U.S. and operated
businesses there will also work in his favor.
However, Lamothe is not
Washington’s man, as Conille was. He belongs to Martelly. He and
the president are, as Haitians say, kokott ak figaro, two
peas in a pod. This troubles Washington, since Martelly and his
clique have displayed neo-Duvalierist tendencies, being
unpredictable and uncontrollable in making their own policies,
for instance, their initiative to reestablish the Haitian Army,
demobilized by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995.
This is seen as a challenge to the U.S., which controls,
ultimately, the UN force known as MINUSTAH which has militarily
occupied Haiti since the 2004 coup against Aristide.
Most alarming for Washington,
though, is that Lamothe and Martelly have shown a troubling
tendency, as their predecessors did, of dealing closely and
warmly with Cuba and, particularly, Venezuela. They have
reinforced Haiti’s participation in ALBA, the anti-imperialist
trade front led by Venezuela and Cuba. In fact, ALBA was to meet
for the first time in Haiti, in the southeastern town of Jacmel
on Mar. 2-3; it was to be a conclave of ALBA foreign ministers.
But at the last minute, the
meeting was postponed without explanation until April, and moved
tentatively to Port-au-Prince. Nonetheless, on those dates,
Lamothe hosted Venezuela’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and
Curacao’s Prime Minister for a Summit of Haiti-Venezuela
Solidarity, which he called a “testimony to the
indestructible and immovable friendship between the peoples of
Haiti and Venezuela.” Saying that Venezuela remembers the
contributions Haiti made to the anti-colonial revolutions on the
continent, Lamothe announced that Venezuela “intends to
further strengthen its ties with Haiti by multiple bilateral
cooperation covering all areas, both economic, social, cultural,
agro industrial, commercial, educational, humanitarian and
other,” and that “South-South cooperation is crucial for
the development of Haiti.” That’s an awful lot of red flags.
Lamothe tried to reassure
Washington this week, telling the Haiti Press Network that “Haiti
is not in a position to make a political about-face, we are
simply need to provide assistance to a population that has been
neglected for 208 years.”
To drive the point home, he
assured that “the United States is and remains Haiti’s
greatest partner; we are working on several projects. We have
tremendous respect for what the U.S. does in Haiti. There is no
estrangement, but we inherited a series of relationships which
we have revitalized.”
Conille had asked Martelly to
publish Haiti’s amended constitution, which allows the Prime
Minister to replace the President if he has to step down.
Martelly knew the game that Conille and Washington were up to
and refused to set the stage for Conille to replace him.
However, last week, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-time agent,
Cheryl Mills (presently Hillary’s chief of staff), flew to
Port-au-Prince to put pressure. Martelly agreed to publish the
amendments... as soon as the prime minister, his prime
minister, is ratified.
Meanwhile, Haitian
parliamentarians have said that they will not ratify any nominee
until Martelly cooperates with their double-nationality
investigation, at which he has been thumbing his nose.
Will the U.S. hold out to see
their own candidate, a technocrat like Conille, become the PM
nominee, or will they take a chance with Lamothe?
Will Parliamentarians stand
firm on their promise to not budge until Martelly bows, or will
they succomb to Martelly’s bribes and bluster?
Stay tuned during the next few weeks for the answer. |
No comments:
Post a Comment