Justice handcuffed

There has been a real hullabaloo over the alleged leniency of the prisons authorities and the police towards Thilini Piyamali, a suspected swindler, currently being held in custody. They usually handcuff inmates taken out, on court orders, but Piyamali was recently seen without handcuffs while being taken by the CID to her office at the World Trade Centre, Colombo 01. The Department of Prisons and the police have trotted out some lame excuses, and now the press is not given access to the places where Piyamali is taken purportedly for investigative purposes. They however will have a hard time trying to convince the public that they have not given her preferential treatment; their critics’ argument that they do not treat other suspects leniently and are under pressure from some government politicians to give Piyamali kid-glove treatment resonates with the people.

The most important question that should be posed to the police, in our book, is not why Piyamali is not handcuffed when she is taken out; instead, it is why her WTC office was not sealed immediately after her arrest to prevent others from helping her cover her tracks by removing or destroying vital documents, etc., which could be used as evidence to prove charges against her.

When the CID launches a probe into a fraud, especially a mega scam, it does not leave anything to chance if it is given a free hand; it promptly seizes phones, computers, documents, etc., from the suspects and seals their offices. This is the standard practice, and the police should be asked to explain why they deviated therefrom in the case of Piyamali. One should not be accused of concocting conspiracy theories if one asks whether the police are working according to a plan to leave an escape route open. They are notorious for doing so. It may be recalled that the criminal conviction rate has remained extremely low (about 4%) in this country.

Handcuffs are usually used as an instrument of public humiliation when the suspects in custody happen to be ordinary people, or the rivals of the politicians in power. Opinion may therefore be divided on whether Piyamali should be handcuffed every time she is taken out of the remand prison, but everyone, who cherishes the rule of law and is desirous of having justice done, wants the police to elicit from Piyamali all necessary information about her alleged frauds and customers and enable her victims to recover their lost funds.

Several finance companies have cheated their customers out of billions of rupees during the past several years, and Piyamali’s customers should have known better than to trust her with millions of rupees, or even their life savings. But that does not mean justice should not be served expeditiously for them.

According to what has been reported of the scam at issue, some shady characters are among the aggrieved depositors; there is reason to believe that they have been laundering their black money. They have to be traced, made to explain how they acquired the funds deposited with Piyamali’s company and prosecuted if they fail to prove that they have not violated the law. Piyamali must be made to furnish a full list of her customers with amounts ‘invested’.

In this country, whose rulers are ‘more equal than others’ like their porcine counterparts in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the bigger the crook, the greater his or her chances of getting away with his or her crimes if he or she is in the good books of the powers that be. Everybody knows that politicians have amassed colossal amounts of ill-gotten wealth sufficient for several generations to come; they and their progeny live in the lap of luxury without declaring their assets or revealing the sources of their income. The taxman and the anti-graft commission officials look the other way. So, if Piyamali has political connections or politicians have deposited money with her company, as claimed in some quarters, then the state machinery will be manipulated in her favour. Hence the need for those who are seeking justice to be on the qui vive.