Director of Public Prosecutions, Anthony Armstrong, and the woman with whom he is co-accused of committing three counts of fraud, Shelly-Ann Peart Campbell, were taken back into custody by Jamaican police last week after their bail was revoked and their case transferred to the Home Circuit Court.
On Thursday prosecutors entered a motion in the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Court seeking to discontinue the fraud-related charges and have the matter commenced in the high court on a voluntary bill of indictment.
A displeased Hugh Wildman, Armstrong’s attorney, has accused the Jamaica’s DPP of undermining the Committal Proceedings Act and of perpetuating abuse of the process against his client.
Wildman has accused the Jamaican DPP of being “discourteous, oppressive, and arbitrary” and says the move to re-arrest Armstrong was designed to embarrass his client.
Armstrong was charged with conspiracy and fraudulent conversion last November when he was arrested at the Norman Manley International Airport over the alleged sale eighteen years ago of three properties that belonged to a former client of his.
The former owner of the three properties alleges that Armstrong and Peart Campbell sold them without his consent and kept the proceeds of the sales for themselves.
A complaint was made by the former client to Jamaica’s General Legal Council which found Armstrong guilty of professional misconduct for witnessing a legal document for someone who was not present.
It was also revealed that Armstrong began making payments to his former client, supposedly to reimburse him for the properties that were sold, but Armstrong stopped making those payments, on the advice of his lawyer, after he accused his former client of blackmailing him.
Armstrong has maintained his innocence throughout on the basis that proceeds of the sales of the disputed properties were paid to the complainant’s father, who was authorised to act as his son’s agent because the complainant was at the time incarcerated in the United States.
The embattled Antigua and Barbuda DPP also contends that one of the properties that was sold was owned by the complainant and his cousin, Peart Campbell.
