Meadows fuming

Former Firearm Licensing Authority (FLA) board member Dennis Meadows on Thursday said has been “singled out and targeted” by the Integrity Commission’s decision to refer him to its director of corruption prosecutions for a ruling on whether his approval of a firearm licence for a family member was illicit.

The commission on Wednesday night released a report of its findings and investigations into allegations concerning acts of impropriety, irregularity, and corruption in the issuance of firearm licences after it convened hearings with former and present FLA officers.

According to the report, for the period February 2016 to February 2018, FLA investigators did not recommend 30 out of 52 applicants to be granted firearm user licences. It said notwithstanding the fact that these people were denied by the FLA board, they were subsequently granted the licences upon a reconsideration of the board.

It said Meadows had approved the firearm user licence application of his family member, who was convicted of attempted possession with intent to distribute cocaine in the United States. It further said there is no written record of a declaration of a conflict of interest made by Meadows, a former politician, as it regards the firearm user licence application of his family member.

“Despite the fact that Mr Dennis Meadows informed the director of investigations (DI) that a declaration of his interest concerning the firearm user licence application of his family member was made, the DI was not provided with any formal record of same. Mr Dennis Meadows provided contradictory statements to the DI regarding whether he perused the application of his family member before the affixture of his signature for approval,” the commission said in its report.

On Thursday Meadows, when contacted by theJamaica Observer,initially declined to comment on the commission’s edict, stating that he was acting on the advice of his attorney. However, he questioned the motives of FLA officials, including CEO Shane Dalling with whom he has had a war of words.

“Some people are just not seeing the machinations at play. The fact that the report has come out, the question should be asked by Mr Dalling, why was I targeted? Dennis Meadows alone can’t grant firearms, there were other players,” Meadows said.

In the report, the list of firearm user licence holders whose criminal antecedents were of particular interest to the DI, in all the instances where Meadows is named as approving an application, he acts in conjunction with at least two other individuals.

“The question is, why you chose to highlight my brother-in-law? If you notice, the report did not mention names. They were coded for specific reasons because those are confidential information,” he said. However, he pointed out that the information of his brother-in-law was previously made public, “putting my family at risk”.

“And now that the report has been made public and published, apart from the other issues it begs the question, why Dennis Meadows was singled out and targeted?” Meadows said.

“They came at me as if I had the unilateral power to grant firearms. You see his name [Dalling’s] attached to a lot of these files, so why am I singled out? That is the question that has to be asked,” he said.

“There were allegations of there being over 200 files of questionable character signed between 2014 and now. The investigations covered the period 2012 to 2016 which [saw] two boards. If you check the amount of work within the report, it’s about 70-odd files. A pronouncement was made about 200 files, and it was deliberately structured to suggest that those 200 files were related to me. A lot of overstatement was made deliberately to sensationalise and to target somebody,” Meadows said referring to a recent press conference called by the FLA.

Dalling, during that press conference, had said that when he joined the FLA in June 2017 he had noticed that people of questionable character were being granted firearm licences. He said a review by the Major Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Agency and the FLA administration, headed by him, “discovered hundreds of criminal elements from Westmoreland, St James, Trelawny, Manchester, [and] Clarendon who received gun licences although the police had warned against granting any such licences to the individuals”.

Dalling said his checks so far reveal more than 200 such cases of people with criminal trace and criminal conviction who have been granted firearm licences. Among them, he said, was a Corporate Area ‘don’ who got four gun licences.

Meanwhile, regarding the commission’s statements about actions in granting a firearm license to a relative, Meadows said “the facts are the facts. The Integrity Commission has done its work, it has made its findings and we take it from there”.

In the meantime, former ministers of national security, the Jamaica Labour Party’s Robert Montague and the People’s National Party’s Peter Bunting, who were also pinpointed in the commission’s report, did not respond to calls from this reporter but issued separate statements to the media.

Bunting said headlines and other statements in the media in relation to the commission’s finding were, in his view, defamatory. As such he said his lawyers have been instructed to examine the reports and act against media houses unless apologies are issued and retractions made.

Montague, in his statement, said the report is “grossly misrepresentative and incomplete”. According to the former national security minister, it was unfortunate that prior to the report being tabled in Parliament, and despite a request from him, he had not been allowed the courtesy of responding to that which the “Commissioner sought to assert as facts”. He said he has referred the report to his lawyers for further review.