Man not guilty of jury tampering in CIFA case

(CNS): A jury took just over ten minutes on Wednesday to find a local man not guilty of attempting to defeat the course of justice after he was accused of trying to influence a member of a jury that tried two former Cayman Islands Football Association executives for fraud in 2022. Allen Kennedy Ebanks from George Town had denied the allegation, stating that he spoke with the juror only in his capacity as a mechanic.

Ebanks was charged after a juror in the fraud case claimed he had tried on several occasions to influence him during the trial, which took place over September and October of 2022.

The defendants in that case were former CIFA executives Canover Watson and Bruce Blake, who were both found guilty of different crimes and later jailed.

Ebanks, who took the stand in his own defence, admitted talking to the juror in person and calling him, but it was because he needed his help with the purchase of a new vehicle after his own had been involved in a crash. Ebanks said he had not tried to sway the juror and had not even spoken about the trial.

Ebanks, a taxi driver and a former football coach, said he had attended the trial as a spectator, as he often went to court or parliament to watch proceedings from the public gallery between picking up passengers.

After the collision, he received a settlement for the damage to his car, and he approached the juror to ask him to review a new car that he wanted before he bought it. He told the court that when he called to ask the juror what he thought of the vehicle, he had hung up on him.

The juror claimed that when they first spoke, Ebanks asked him how the case was going, so when he called, he hung up because he knew what he was asking was wrong. The juror then notified the judge in the case, Chief Justice Margaret Ramsay-Hale, which eventually led to Ebanks being charged.

However, Ebanks’ attorney, Richard Barton, raised a number of inconsistencies on the part of the juror. He said the juror had not been truthful about what his client had said.