So, the entire case that the PUP is trying to make pivots on the email Elvin Penner sent to the media on September 27th. The PUP says it is equivalent to a confession. The most comprehensive review of that email so far was done here at 7News when News Director Jules Vasquez squared up Penner's e-mail against the known facts. For context, we reprise a condensed version of that story tonight:..
Jules Vasquez reporting
Citizen Kim - so far we know that the date on this nationality certificate was falsified. It says April 22, 2013, presumably to form some connection with the date of a swearing in which was held on April 26, 2013. Penner told the Prime Minister he signed it on September ninth, but never put the date on it.
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
"And so the question of who backed dated that certificate remains very much in issue."
"Whether you believe him or not that he didn't put in the date of April 22nd you will never be able to establish that in fact he didn't."
The picture, which appears in the passport, is the same as the one on the nationality document. It was not taken - as is required - at the Immigration Department. It resembles the picture that appears on WonHong Kim's South Korean Passport issued in December of 2008.
A close look at the image on the nationality certificate shows that it is not an original - nor is it from the immigration system. The top of the head is cropped out and the appearance is irregular.
Hon. Godwin Hulse, Minister of Immigration
"The difficulty we are having is how the picture got into the system, that is the difficulty we are having."
This is the man who Penner described in a mail as "a Asian person...I have known through business trips, even before I entered politics."
On the passport application, he writes that Won Hong Kim is his friend who he knew, for 3 years - which differs from the time he entered politics, which is at least six years.
But that is just one small deception within a much larger one. Penner said he was tricked by an imposter. He seized on the opportunity to do that based on the confusion started by this picture which was posted on the Interpol website and passed into Belize Media. But it is not Wonhong Kim - this is the same man in the nationality certificate; Interpol made a mistake, and Penner thought he could use it as a lynchpin to slip out from under a case of what appears to be wholesale fraud.
But in so doing, he dug himself an even deeper hole.
In his email, Penner says he had direct physical contact with Wonhong Kim - a person who was in a Taiwanese jail at the time. He writes of their meeting which took place presumably in early September when he signed Kim's application, ("Mr. Kim)…came to me for a signature so he could get his passport. He also mention that he needed it urgently since he was about to go on a trip and was more than willing to pay the regular one day service fee."
And then Penner says, Wonhong Kim presented the picture himself:
"The picture on the nationality document he presented to me, the Korean passport that he had with him…where all of the same person. The person whom I knew as Mr. Kim."
And then Penner says he even helped facilitate Citizen Kim. He writes, "Wanting to help a business person I made sure that everything was in order on the application form and personally went with him to the passport office to see to it that he would get proper attention and would get his passport the same day." That same day would be September ninth when the passport was issued.
Now let's got back over that: Penner "personally went with him to the passport office." But how could he go with Kim to the passport office when Wonhong Kim was on a Taiwanese jail awaiting extradition? That statement is the central confusion in this case:
Hon. Godwin Hulse, Minister of Immigration
"Persons have said, minister have said that a person came and sat there and the person was known to him and that that is the person appearing there. If that is so then we have a difficulty, we have tried to find out if the guy had a twin."
Of course, that is remote in the extreme - he doesn't have a twin, it is all a tissue of lies and Penner's last shred of plausible deniability is vaporized.
Bottom line? The man Penner got the passport for is the international fugitive; the man he got the passport for was in jail at the time he got his passport and at the time the passport was applied for.
The 3 immigration staffers in the passport section who are being held responsible for imposing an old picture of Citizen Kim into a Belizean passport are being recommended for termination because the requirement is that the person must appear before the clerk to take a picture. Kim could not appear because he was in jail - yet his old picture was super-imposed into the passport. Today the PUP's Legal advisor said that everyone should be held liable:..
Anthony Sylvestre, PUP Legal Advisor
"I think nobody will deny that. Everyone who was involved should be taken to task and it's not only administratively, but also criminal law should take its course."
Sylvester adds that he believes the Immigration Officers were browbeaten into issuing the passport.
