Célestin among the few remaining elected officials in Haiti, with a powerful say in determining how the country should be led after the brazen assassination of Mr. The lower house of Parliament is entirely vacant, and the head of the nation’s highest court died of Covid-19 in June. The terms of the other 20 expired, and new elections were never called.
Only 10 senators out of 30 remain in Parliament. Célestin could help play a pivotal role in the nation’s future. “Haiti is a poor country where people are dying of hunger, and here you have rich people trying to take their money out of the country and buying mansions in cash,” said Frantz André, a leading Haitian human rights advocate in Montreal, who has led protests outside the Haitian consulate in recent months.īecause Haiti, a country of 11 million people, has so few functioning institutions, Mr. Anger over the mansion became so pitched that some members of Montreal’s Haitian community hid in the bushes around the home in Laval, an affluent suburb, and sneaked onto the grounds, hoping to confront Mr. His lawyer declined to provide details about his businesses with the anticorruption inquiry in Haiti underway. Some appear to operate on a much smaller scale than he claimed, if at all in some cases. Célestin cites as the source of his great wealth. “I have enough influence, if I wanted to make her an ambassador, that would happen,” he told The New York Times.īut The Times found little or no indication in Haiti of the thriving businesses that Mr. Célestin vehemently denies any wrongdoing, describing himself as a savvy entrepreneur whose success and donations to the election campaign of the assassinated president, Jovenel Moïse, have afforded him a variety of privileges, including the ability to pay for the villa and get his wife a job at the Haitian consulate in Montreal. Célestin’s ownership has incited outrage over capital flight - legal and illicit - that drains money from Haiti and weakens the country’s institutions. The villa has become emblematic of the chasm between the gilded lifestyles of Haiti’s elite and the majority of the population, who on average earn less than $2.41 a day. The sprawling $3.4 million villa, with its 10-car garage, home cinema and swimming pool overlooking a lake, was among the most expensive homes ever sold in one of Quebec’s most affluent neighborhoods, and the purchase set off a corruption investigation into Mr. Célestin has been parrying accusations of corruption from Haitian activists over his purchase of a mansion almost 2,000 miles away in Canada. In recent months, as the country erupted in protest over abuse of power by the political elite, Mr. Célestin is also a symbol of one of their biggest grievances: a ruling class that enriches itself while so many go hungry. MONTREAL - He is one of the few lawmakers left in Haiti, a close ally of the assassinated president who has kept his seat while the country’s democratic institutions have been whittled away.Īs one of only 10 remaining members in all of Haiti’s Parliament, Rony Célestin, a swaggering figure who styles himself as a self-made multimillionaire, belongs to a tiny circle of leaders with the legal authority to steer the nation out of crisis now that the president is dead.īut to many Haitians, Mr.
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