By Hilbert Haar
The Emerald-trial is formally about companies that did not file returns for income and turnover taxes by not reporting income they received from the Harbor Group of Companies to the tax office. Altogether, the six suspects that have so far been in court fleeced the tax office for 5.7 million guilders.
The public prosecutor maintains that the companies did not even do all the work they claimed on their invoices and qualified their actions simply as “stealing from the harbor.”
Attorneys balked at the suggestion, saying – correctly – that their clients have not been charged with submitting fraudulent or forged invoices.
But what is really gong on here?
O’Neal Arrindell, the director of Checkmate Security, instructed his bookkeeper to compose invoices for the companies whose owners are now in court. Those invoices went to the harbor, where director Mark Mingo approved them.
That’s already not a normal way of doing business, but it gets even more peculiar. The harbor wrote checks for invoices the size of a small soccer stadium. Who is writing checks these days for, say, $25,000 or more?
To me, that does not make sense at all. When that kind of money is involved you make a bank transfer.
It does not help to clarify the picture when defendants tell the court that, yes, they cashed the checks, and then continue saying that they used the money “to pay people from French Quarter and St. Peters.”
This whole game was possible because two main players were involved: O’Neal Arrindell – whose company has a controversial security contract with the harbor – and the now ousted harbor director Mark Mingo who apparently never thought it odd to write checks for huge amounts while the normal procedure would have been a bank transfer.
So far, nobody has been charged with fraud but that could change when Mingo and Arrindell come to court in April. The whole case stinks to high heaven and proves once more, based on what we know and suspect now, that large-scale fraud becomes easy once the right people in the right places are involved.
The higher your function, the more trust an organization puts in you and the easier it becomes to steal. We know that the registrar of the court in Philipsburg is under suspicion of “irregularities” with a third party bank account and we also know that Mark Mingo must be up to his eyeballs in the Emerald-scandal.
There is of course another side to these stories. Opportunity makes a thief and it is up to any organization to put systems in place that make theft if not impossible than at least as difficult as possible.
How did that work at the court? We hear that attorneys who had to deposit money into the court’s third party bank account, had to write a check to the name of the registrar. That’s a bit like leaving a hundred dollar bill on the bar while you go to the bathroom.
The court has now established stricter controls, but that’s a bit late because from what we gather, the fraud has been going on for a very long time.
At the port, the question remains: who controlled Mark Mingo? I’m not sure about this, of course, but I strongly suspect that Mark Mingo controlled Mark Mingo.
When the harbor proudly announced a couple of years ago that it had established an integrity committee, who was on board? Right, Mark Mingo – and the supervisory board apparently thought nothing of it.
That brings us in the case of the harbor to the role of the supervisory board. Of course, it should not meddle in the day to day affairs of the harbor, but it could have taken some action when the port extended a generous security contract to Checkmate Security a couple of years ago. It could also have asked some questions about the way large invoices were paid by check.
None of that happened as far as I know.
It is small comfort that sleeping supervisory boards are not unique to St. Maarten. In the Netherlands – a country rife with “professional supervisory board members” – it appears at times that these members are fast asleep when management busies itself with taking disastrous decisions.
Knowing that does not help us right now, but it should give the government some food for thought about the way these boards function as a control mechanism against fraud and grand theft.
