Female immigration officer
facing corruption charges
PHILIPSBURG--Allegations of corruption keep running through the ranks of the Immigration Department. Immigration officer A.Z.P. (34) of Aruba is accused of being another rotten apple in the department. She stood trial in the Court in First Instance Tuesday on charges of bribery, forgery and revealing classified information.
Prosecutor Dikran Sarian considered it proven that P. had provided her friends on several occasions with visa application forms and other (travel) documents to which they were not entitled and that she had received money for doing so.
He also considered it proven that she had informed a friend of hers that the police knew he was attempting to smuggle drugs into St. Maarten on board his sailboat Blue Moon. The Prosecutor dropped the charge that P. herself had also been actively involved in the drug trade.
Sarian asked Judge Luis de Lannoy to impose a conditional sentence of nine months with two years’ probation, with reduction of 67 days spent in pre-trial detention, and 240 hours of community service.
P.’s friend Simon Jones (30) of St. Lucia received a four-year prison sentence on drug smuggling charges on August 24.
The Prosecutor said P. was “unreliable” and should therefore be fired by the Immigration Department. “She is negatively affecting the service’s integrity,” Sarian said.
P. denied all allegations, stating that she was an “excellent” Immigration officer and had never done anything illegal. “I’m not involved in such nonsense,” she told the judge on Tuesday.
She had only wanted to be helpful in rendering services to friends and she denied that she had ever received payment for her services.
Attorney-at-law Jairo Bloem requested his client’s acquittal on all charges because in his eyes the evidence in this case was “as thin as air.”
“There is no evidence that my client had actually been bribed. In corruption cases persons are paid on delivery, but that has not been so in my client’s case,” Bloem said.
The judge will present his ruling in this case on Friday, November 16.
