Patrice Baker - Haiti Observer Blog

Leo Joseph, the owner of the Haiti Observateur Group has agreed to the dismissal of a lawsuit brought against them by the Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and Patrice Baker, Lamothe's former business partner. The Haitian Prime Minister Lamothe and Baker sued the online paper in 2012 for publishing an article that alleged them for pressuring "Haitel", a bankrupt telecom company, to sell its assets below market price to an investment company named 'Nord Citadel' who was seeking investment opportunities in Haiti.

The main allegation against Lamothe and Baker was that they forced Nord Citadel to make a down payment as full purchase price to buy the assets of Haitel for $25 million though its market value was somewhere around $80 million. The online paper published the story, as per their earlier declaration, on the basis of an interview with Michael Charles, the founder and managing partner of Nord Citadel.

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Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe won what, to some, was an unsurprising victory in his libel suit against New York based website Haiti Observateur. In two articles published in August of 2012 the website, through its reporter Leo Joseph, extended theories about the prime minister and his business partner Patrice Baker's role in the sale of the telecommunications company Haitel that U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro has now declared to be false and malicious.

The articles posited that the company, which shut down after an inability to pay its debts, was bought by the Haitian government in a deal brokered by Lamothe in which he fixed its sale price of $25 million, and positioned himself to receive, what they described as, the 'lion's share' of the profit. Upon noting the libelous nature of the articles Lamothe and Baker filed a lawsuit in September 2012, citing the damage done to their political and business profiles after the implications of corruption and conspiracy made by Joseph and the newspaper which has reported its weekly circulation within the Haitian Diaspora to reach 75,000.

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