29 Jan 2014

Tahiti opposition politician decries colonial justice

4:29 pm on 29 January 2014

The French Polynesian opposition politician, Oscar Temaru, says it is a disgrace that a corruption trial scheduled for this week has not gone ahead.

The president, Gaston Flosse, and five others have been accused of helping a leading pearl producer, Robert Wan, by paying him five times the value of Anuanuraro atoll when it was bought for nine million US dollars in 2002.

The trial was called nearly ten years after Mr Temaru lodged a complaint for alleged embezzlement.

He says he doesn't believe the argument that the trial was put off because the father of the lawyer of one of the accused had died.

"It has been postponed again until next June. It's a colonial system. We are in a hurry to be free, a free country with real justice in this country."

Oscar Temaru says the politicians being charged should have been jailed a long time ago.

He says by contrast the pro-independence advocate Pouvanaa a Oopa was jailed in 1958 for no reason.