Salone Ambassador fights arrest …govt disowns him

Sierra Leone’s “Goodwill Ambassador”, now in a Panamanian jail and fighting extradition to Canada to answer to allegations of criminality, claims his arrest was illegal.
Arthur Porter, who flashed a diplomatic passport from Sierra Leone when he was arrested, says he was on a “diplomatic mission to Antigua” as Sierra Leone’s “ambassador plenipotentiary.”
However, a high-ranking official in the government of Antigua and Barbuda told The Gazette in Montreal, Canada that her country was unaware of any imminent diplomatic visit by Porter.
“We don’t know anything about that”, said Cicely Solomon, chief of protocol in Antigua’s ministry of foreign affairs.
“We weren’t expecting him here.”
Solomon added that she was aware of Porter’s arrest on money-laundering and conspiracy charges in Panama City on Monday, but repeated that her Caribbean nation had no planned meetings with Porter of any kind.
Porter, former chief executive officer of the McGill University Health Centre, has played up his political connections in Sierra Leone, noting on his CV that he was appointed as an adviser to the president of Sierra Leone, Ernest Koroma.
Police found in Porter’s hotel room airplane tickets to Trinidad and Tobago for a flight the next day.
For the past two days, The Gazette has attempted to confirm through the Sierra Leone embassy in Washington D.C., which also represents the country in Canada, whether Porter was on a diplomatic mission to Antigua.
On Friday, an embassy official said that Sierra Leone’s high commissioner to Canada, Ambassador Bockari Kortu Stevens, was trying to contact Freetown to nail down Porter’s travel plans.
In March, after a warrant was issued for Porter’s arrest arising from the $1.3-billion contract to build the MUHC superhospital, Ambassador Stevens told the Canadian Press that Porter was never formally employed as a diplomat for Sierra Leone but was, in fact, a volunteer goodwill ambassador.
“It’s a disappointment, what is happening now, of all that is coming out,” Stevens said at the time.
In 2010, shortly after Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Porter as chairman of Canada’s spy watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), Porter lobbied for a diplomatic position in the Côte d’Ivoire with the goal of registering a bank in the country, the National Post reported on Thursday. His application was rejected. In November 2011, Porter resigned from SIRC amid revelations of questionable business dealings and his offer to Senator David Angus, at the time chairman of the MUHC board of directors, of a diplomatic position on behalf of Sierra Leone.
Angus, now retired from the Senate, declined Porter’s offer.