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Voreqe attacks corrupt lawyers
Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama used the Attorney-General’s Conference to launch a scathing attack on lawyers, making general accusations of judge shopping, being amoral, crooked and condoning corruption.
Opening the ninth annual conference at Nadroga, Commander Bainimarama said the legal profession was closely linked to corrupt activities.
No large scale fraud or corruption can succeed without a group of obliging, amoral and ambitious lawyers, ready to launder money in overseas bank accounts, ready to evade taxes, ready to cook the books, ready to set up companies with dubious motives and ready to confuse the court system when their clients are eventually charged and tried.
The investigations currently conducted into a number of suspicious activities in Fiji throw up the names of a group of the same lawyers, over and over again. Judge shopping is not done by lay people.
It is done by lawyers, who either play the case allocation system to get a judge of their choice or bribe court staff to get that result. Preliminary investigations show that a number of very ‘respectable’ law firms have been engaged in such activity.
These same lawyers and law firms are the most outspoken against the interim Government supposedly in the protection of the rule of law. Lawyers who behave corruptly, who counsel their clients to evade the law, who find ways to obstruct police investigations and who bribe court staff to get certain results, do more damage to the rule of law than any member of the military has ever done.
Society no longer trusts lawyers. It is time for the legal profession to clean up its act. People in glass houses cannot throw stones. There is a long backlog of lawyers waiting to be disciplined.
Lawyers who have helped themselves to trust funds are re-admitted to practise, and one was made the Attorney-General because we sat back and let it happen.
We stopped expecting our lawyers to be honest and for dishonest lawyers to be disciplined by the Fiji Law Society.
The last Law Society conference spent a lot of time pontificating about the rule of law yet failed the rule of law by not asking how the organization had tolerated dishonesty and corruption among its members.
The society expected lawyers to be honest and neutral, to pay lawyers and get service in return.
People did not want to have to write 20 letters to get their money out of a lawyer’s trust fund or pay huge sums of money to a lawyer and get bad service in return.
The society needs professional, objective, hard working and respectful lawyers.
Today we see lawyers lost their neutrality and use their profession and the Law Society for their own political agenda.
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