Bahamas’ top finance official is facing growing political pressure to step down after reversing his earlier denial and confirming he once held a directorship at a construction firm tied to a drug trafficking suspect linked to a fatal Election Day plane crash off Florida’s coast.
Finance Minister Michael Halkitis made the admission during an official press briefing hosted by the Office of the Prime Minister, just one day after he told local newspaper The Tribune he had never been involved with Top Notch Builders. The scandal unfolds against a backdrop of sustained public and political silence surrounding new details of the May 2017 plane crash, as well as intensifying scrutiny over claims laid out in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration affidavit that connect sitting Bahamian government officials to individuals facing drug trafficking charges.
Public records from the Bahamas’ official corporate registry tie Top Notch Builders to Eric Gardiner, the crash victim who has since been arrested and formally charged with drug offenses by U.S. law enforcement. As of Thursday evening, two major political opposition groups — the Free National Movement (FNM) and the Coalition of Independents — have both publicly called for Halkitis’ immediate resignation following his confession.
Halkitis pushed back against accusations of wrongdoing during the briefing, framing his past involvement with the firm as routine professional work. “As a private citizen I was involved in financial consulting and corporate services consulting,” he explained. “I was approached to provide consulting and directorship services to Top Notch Builders, in particular setting up proper corporate governance procedures and structures.”
The finance minister clarified that he was not recruited to the role by Gardiner directly, but was instead approached by a third-party legal representative. He told reporters his association with the company began in mid-2019, and operations were suspended by April 2020 as global COVID-19 pandemic restrictions shut down construction projects across the country. “I resigned as director of that company and all the other directorships that I held in 2021,” he added, noting that full corporate records held by the Registrar General’s Department would confirm his account of the firm’s ownership and leadership structure.
“Anybody who’s interested in the complete story can get the complete set of documents which not only show who the directors are but who the shareholders are, who the owners of the company were at the time, and they would see that it’s not who some people say it was,” Halkitis said.
Halkitis’ political career stretches back more than a decade: he served as Minister of State for Finance under the previous Christie administration from 2012 to 2017, and was sworn in as Finance Minister and Leader of Government Business in the Senate following the Progressive Liberal Party’s 2021 general election victory.
Top Notch Builders first gained public attention in 2017, when it secured a lucrative $35 million government contract to build the Eight Mile Rock administrative complex just one day before that year’s general election. Corporate filings further show the firm owns Complete Construction, the developer behind the government’s high-profile Carmichael Village affordable housing project, a flagship initiative launched during the last parliamentary term.
In a 2017 sworn statement, Gardiner testified that he held no ownership stake in Top Notch Builders despite serving as the firm’s president and director. He claimed the company is 100 percent owned by Paradise Productions Inc, an entity fully controlled by Samson Hield, who has previously been named as the lead contractor for the Eight Mile Rock public-private partnership project in local business reporting. At this time, no wrongdoing has been alleged against any other current or former officer or director of Top Notch Builders or Complete Construction, and no evidence has been presented linking the firms to Gardiner’s alleged drug trafficking activities.
When The Tribune first questioned Halkitis about his ties to the company on the floor of the House of Assembly Wednesday, he denied any formal involvement. “Never a president of the company, and I think he (Eric Gardiner) was the president of the company or someone else was the president of the company. I was never employed by the company,” he told reporters at the time. When pressed about how Gardiner, a convicted drug trafficker, was able to secure large-scale government contracts, Halkitis declined to comment, saying “I don’t want to comment on that.”
Opposition leader Michael Pintard, head of the FNM, has accused Halkitis of intentionally misleading the Bahamian public about the depth of his involvement with Top Notch Builders. Pintard argued that Halkitis did not serve as a minor consultant or outsider director, but actually held the role of company president — a position that would have put him at the center of the firm’s daily operations and corporate decision-making.
Pintard further raised conflict of interest concerns, noting that Complete Construction secured tens of millions of dollars in government housing contracts after Halkitis joined the national Cabinet, and that Halkitis never publicly disclosed his past leadership role with the parent company or recused himself from related discussions. “This immediately places him in a direct conflict of interest position, especially in light of the fact that as a sitting Minister and then Senator, he never made the public aware of his role in that company and the steps he took to recuse himself from any consideration,” Pintard said. Closing his statement, the opposition leader reiterated the demand for Halkitis to step down: “Halkitis must go!”