President of the Caribbean Maritime University Professor Fritz Pinnock and several others will go to trial

In Jamaica, Judge Chester Crooks has just ruled that former senator and education minister Ruel Reid, president of the Caribbean Maritime University Professor Fritz Pinnock and several others will go to trial for allegations of fraud brought against them.

Law enforcement agencies in October 2019 arrested and charged Reid, his wife and daughter during early-morning raids at their homes in a coordinated strike, acting on allegations of financial improprieties in which funds were supposedly siphoned off from the university and the Ministry of Education.

Their Attorney Hugh Wildman has been lobbying the court to throw out the case against Reid and Pinnock on the basis that his clients were arrested by officers of the Financial Investigation Division (FID), which has no jurisdiction to carry out arrests, so to do as they are purely an investigative body.

Wildman has maintained that by arresting both applicants, the FID acted outside of its statutory powers and therefore what it did was a “nullity”.