EXCLUSIVE: Govt lawyer accuses Brent Thomas of delaying court case over 2022 arrest

Lawyers for the Barbados government have blamed Trinidadian businessman Brent Thomas and his legal team for dragging out a long-running High Court claim in which Thomas is seeking substantial damages for what the State has already admitted was his unlawful detention and removal from Barbados in 2022.

But the Trinidad‐licensed gun dealer has countered that the case could be sooner settled out of court.

Thomas, who lodged the lawsuit before the High Court here, had previously expressed concern about the speed at which it was progressing, following Barbados’ admission of liability and its concession that officers of The Barbados Police Service acted unlawfully in his controversial arrest in Bridgetown and subsequent return to Port of Spain in October 2022.

But senior legal counsel for the government, Roger Forde, said it is Thomas and his lawyers who are to blame for the claim not being expedited in a timely manner to a final outcome.

Forde told Barbados TODAY exclusively: “They filed a claim and they haven’t followed through on it. The ball is in their court. They have not even submitted a qualified claim.

So, all they have done is filed a claim in the High Court and done nothing else.

“It is their claim. They are to progress the action. We have invited them some time ago to file documents andsubmit a claim; they have not done that.”

But, in another exclusive telephone interview, Thomas said from his home in Port of Spain that while the progress of the case is in his lawyers’ hands, he believes an easier route would be an out‐of‐court settlement, rather than wasting time in court.

“I think that we have to come back to Barbados and be dragged through the courts to waste time for the settlement, rather than just simply have a discussion and come to some sort of settlement.”

Asked how soon he expects the matter to be resolved, Thomas replied: “I don’t know. We are waiting to find out from the courts; but what Barbados should be doing is trying to wash this away, so that they stop putting them in the middle of something so ugly. It is called an out‐of‐court settlement … because they are putting themselves in the middle of something that is ugly.”

He continued: “Barbados needs to wash their hands of it…. They were misdirected, and they were forced into doing actions that, afterwards, they realised they had made a mistake. Well, let justice prevail, just give me the information that is required and move on; and let this stigma with Barbados in the middle go away. Barbados doesn’t need this. This is a Trinidad problem.”

Thomas then listed the key pieces of information he requires from the Barbadian authorities.

He said he needs to know who called the Barbadian authorities, who took the call, who authorised the police and the plane that took him back to Trinidad, and whether the Barbadian state representative who facilitated his arrest was not apprised of the relevant laws “to just let a visitor to their country be just snatched and taken away like that”.

Late last year, the Trinidad and Tobago state dropped all charges against Thomas for which the Trinidad police had issued arrest warrants and had come to Barbados to take him.

He was passing through Barbados on his way to medical treatment abroad when he was detained.

The contentious arrest of the licensed gun dealer from his hotel room by an armed squad from The Barbados Police Service on October 5, 2022 was resurrected by Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister, Kamla Persad‐Bissessar, at the CARICOM Summit in St Kitts.

She reopened old wounds by describing the businessman’s arrest as a kidnapping.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley swiftly rejected Persad‐Bissessar’s description as a “scurrilous lie”, saying that arrest warrants had been presented by Trinidad police to their Barbadian counterparts.

“To describe it as a kidnapping or to suggest that any member of Cabinet … the permanent secretary or the Government of Barbados is involved in kidnapping is scurrilous and defamatory in the extreme,” Mottley told the state‐owned Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb