Former Minister of Health and Education, Lillian Boyce
Former Cabinet minister and short time deputy premier Lillian Boyce has used her husband’s newspaper and other online media to claim she is not only innocent of the charge of conspiring to defraud the Turks and Caicos Island government but that she herself is the victim of a conspiracy.
In an article in the TCI Sun, Boyce confirmed she has been arrested and interviewed twice by the special investigation and prosecution team (SIPT), once with her attorney.
“They know deep in their hearts I am innocent,” Boyce maintained.
The charges reportedly stem from the sale of Crown land from which Boyce and/or other members of her family made a profit of one million dollars in a relatively short time.
There are a number of other former ministers and persons closely related to Boyce’s Progressive National Party (PNP) who also benefited from similar sales known as land flips, during the PNP administration.
In several cases, the 2008-2009 Commission of Inquiry into allegations of widespread government corruption found that, following the land flips, loans or finder’s fees of approximately $100,000 each were paid to former premier Michael Misick. During the Inquiry Misick claimed these “loans” had no terms of repayment.
Misick himself has yet to be charged and is reported to have taken refuge in the Dominican Republic. In a separate article, the Sun newspaper had reported the SIPT may have difficulties extraditing Misick and other persons of interest now in the Dominican Republic.
However, according to local sources, authorities in the Dominican Republic have reportedly assured their British and American counterparts that they will hand over Misick if called upon to do so.
In the Boyce article, the former minister of education and health claimed that the SIPT is a politically motivated move to bring down former ministers and high profile persons. However, she did not indicate what political entity was behind what she described as a conspiracy.
The former education minister went on to suggest that the millions being spent on the SIPT and interim administration were a move by Britain to provide an “all expenses free paid vacation costing millions” while leaving the TCI financially “broke”, apparently ignoring the fact that the SIPT was actually fully funded up to 2011 by Britain not the TCI government.
