Today, Minister of Immigration Godwin Hulse was corralled by the media and subjected to a grilling usually reserved for Prime Minister Dean Barrow. We have it all, but first the passport which was issued to South Korean national, Won Hong Kim. The scandal broke in mid-September 2013. It is now mid-May 2014, and the document which started it all hasn’t even left Taiwan yet. Tonight, there is not even confirmation that it has been cancelled. According to Minister Godwin Hulse, Kim’s passport should be back in Belize sometime this month. We expect it will be cancelled at that time, along with nine others which were allegedly facilitated by Elvin Penner. So why has this dragged on? Well, eight months into the scandal, Minister Hulse says they are waiting on the Director of Public Prosecutions for what he calls the final legal documentation.
Godwin Hulse, Minister of Immigration
“We have quite a few to be cancelled. We haven’t cancelled any yet, because we are waiting on the D.P.P. to do the final legal documentation for this sort of thing, but there’s a lot of passports that we have recovered. So far we have nine.”
Reporter
“But that he signed nationality certificates for exceeds that number?”
Godwin Hulse
Godwin Hulse
“Well, I don’t know that yet because that is a matter that we are still looking to see. There is also an issue that we have to say. The passports that we have for cancellation are not necessarily all that were signed by Minister Penner. Some of them have different irregularities. But one of the issues that is important to note is that in this process of cancelling nationalities, etc., attorneys have already been saying to us that the rights of natural justice for people prevail, and you have to give them a chance, because they may have said well I did everything right and there is no reason why I would not have qualified. So we have to bear that in mind as well. It’s not just a matter of saying to people no, no, no, no, no…we have to go through that process as well.”
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