Money from Bellevue firm figures in Fiji allegations

SUVA, Fiji - Allegations of influence peddling following questionable payments from a Bellevue, Wash., company may have had a role in triggering a coup attempt in this South Pacific island nation.

George Speight, who says he took the prime minister captive to resurrect Fijians' trampled rights, was booted out of a government job last year after receiving payments from Timber Resources Management (TRM), a Bellevue firm that was bidding for Fiji's lucrative mahogany crop. At the time Speight ran the agency that oversees Fiji's timber plantations.

The payments contributed to the rejection of the American bid and the dismissal of Speight. Public revelation of the payments came just weeks before Speight and his armed band stormed parliament.

Neither Speight nor officials of TRM deny he received money from the company. All say a $10,000 payment from TRM to Speight was a consulting fee for work Speight did before he took the timber job.

In a paid newspaper statement three days before the May 19 raid, Speight said he'd acted "in a responsible manner and with absolute integrity."

Todd Campbell, TRM's chief in Fiji, called any accusations of impropriety "a lot of garbage."

"Mr. Speight certainly didn't afford us any special treatment," he said.

TRM Chairman Marshall Pettit, reached at his office in Bellevue, said, "Two payments of $5,000 were made . . . for a year's worth of consulting."

Speight's stated motives for deposing Mahendra Chaudhry, Fiji's first prime minister from its Indian minority, include Chaudhry's refusal to raise rents charged to Indians who grow sugar cane on land owned by indigenous Fijians. He says Chaudhry's governing style was insensitive to Fijians.

Chaudhry, who is among 27 hostages Speight still holds, had campaigned to clean up corruption in Fiji. One of his first acts after taking office in May 1999 was to sack Speight as chairman of Fiji's timber board.

An audit of the bids in February 1999 by PricewaterhouseCoopers favored the bid by a British company, but once the findings were reported, the government fired the accounting firm, according to a report last month in the Sydney Morning Herald. Three months later, no decision had been made, and a new government was in power.

By this March, it was clear that Chaudhry was supporting the British company's bid. At the same time, Speight was trying to stir up the trust board against the British company's bid, which plunged the government into a crisis, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Speight was "trying to get a good deal for himself out of all of this," said Satendra Prasad, a commissioner of public works in Chaudhry's government.

The main contenders vying for rights to manage the harvest and sale of the 40-year-old mahogany trees were TRM and Britain's state-owned Commonwealth Development.

"He was acting as a consultant to TRM, and his job was not that," said Prasad. "He cannot be a consultant . . . to one of the companies bidding for the government tender. That would be a quite severe conflict of interest. Under any type of normal circumstances, you would have expected the guy to resign automatically."

Another former Chaudhry official told The Associated Press the main reason TRM lost out on the bid was its plan to raise most of its funds through a bond sale in the United States. The British company was putting up its own money.

But the second ex-official, a respected Fijian leader who asked not to be identified because he fears for his and the hostages' safety, also said Chaudhry's government had investigated payments Speight received during the bidding. He said those transactions figured in the TRM rejection.

Speight has not been charged in connection with the mahogany affair. The first public report implying Speight took improper payments came April 17 in a TV report about a letter from the National Australia Bank in Brisbane, where Speight has an account. The broadcast said the document was supplied by former Speight business associates. Dated March 26, 1999, when Speight was overseeing Fiji's mahogany interests, the letter confirmed a $5,000 deposit from the Washington First International Bank in Seattle, "by order of Marshall W. Pettit." The AP has a copy of the letter.

Subsequent newspaper articles expanded on reports of payments. The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia said Speight wrote to Pettit after his appointment as timber chairman in November 1998 and attached an invoice charging TRM $26,000 in fees and office costs.

On May 16, Speight paid for space in The Fiji Sun to deny accepting any improper payments and insist he had acted honorably. Three days later, he and his men stormed parliament. Several days later, a fire gutted the office building that houses the mahogany board, destroying many records.