Postby bluefete » October 21st, 2013, 7:34 pm
Sunday 8th June, 2003
Cuffie denies con claims
By ROBERT CLARKE
Nothing on paper says the $160,000 signed over to Miracle Ministries by a young Chaguanas couple was a loan and not a donation.
But, according to Kayode and Sarrah Clarke, the terms of the loan were discussed: the church would repay the money when it emerged from supposed financial trouble.
Now, 22-year-old Kayode wants his money back. But Miracle Ministries’ leader Pastor Winston Cuffie claims no knowledge of the loans.
“You don’t want to speak out,” said Sarrah, stating why more don’t come forth, “because you think you are going to lose your blessing.”
It is Tuesday evening and Sarrah and Kayode are sitting on the balcony of Sarrah’s father’s home in Edinburgh 500, Chaguanas.
Sarrah’s father, Hakim Ghany, was a senior minister at Miracle Ministries.
He claims he was kicked out over the money dispute, after standing up for “the children”.
“I warned them,” Ghany said, “but to no avail.
“I know Kayode and them ent fabricate nothing, but they was stupid to do what they do.”
Kayode said around September 2000, he began attending Miracle Ministries’ services seriously. He met Sarrah there.
Cuffie, owner of a Chaguanas restaurant (Brilliant Bargain Food Paradise) and a clothes store (Brilliant Bargain Store), married the couple in 2001.
Kayode started a foreign-used car business, Shekinah Co.
He said after a “brash advertising campaign”, the business met “good, good, good success in two months.”
Kayode said around February 2002, he spoke to the Pentecostal church’s co-pastor and offered to help the church “pick up the slack with bills”.
“We trusted them. We didn’t ask for official documents,” said Kayode.
He said they were told “once we call for the money, we getting it back one time”.
Between March and June 2002, the couple gave $146,305, recorded in a series of Republic Bank cheques.
Kayode said Cuffie’s wife, Angela Cuffie, had resorted to calling Sarrah in tears, asking for money and saying utility bill cheques would bounce without the Clarkes’ immediate assistance.
The cheques started out small ($2,000, $200) but grew into hefty sums ($30,000, $20,000).
From April 2001 to May 2002, Sarrah signed over $150,005 in cheques to Miracle Ministries or Angela Cuffie.
Kayode said they also loaned the ministry cash, in the amounts of $20,000 and US $5,000. Only one cheque for $30,000, he adds, was a gift rather than a loan.
The couple claims they were “befriended”.
Cuffie, usually inaccessible to parishioners, became their close companion, they claim.
Kayode brewed coffee at the Cuffies’ home. One evening, he briefly dozed off on the Cuffies’ couch. Kayode and Sarrah vacationed with the pastor and his wife.
As an ordinary, tithe-paying follower, it was unheard of to have such a close relationship with the pastor.
Ghany, who claims to have been a founder of the church in the early 80s, said he went to the $15 million Christ Castle church one day, to see his son-in-law on the pulpit, dressed in a “cutting” suit. Kayode looked, Ghany says, “like a shiny dollar”.
Ghany went home and told the family he hoped Kayode wasn’t giving money to the church outside of his regular tithes.
“Doh take your seed or your blessing and give it away just so,” he had earlier warned his son-in-law.
The foreign-used car business began to slow down. The couple said they asked for their money. Clarke said Cuffie argued he could not disburse the money because of “checks and balances” in accounting procedure.
After pressing for the money, the Clarkes were urged to sign a document saying they had borrowed $56,000 from Miracle Ministries.
The cheque, part payment of the $160,000 owed, was released. But, said the Clarkes, this was only part of the money — $104,000 was still outstanding.
“Things were going bad for us financially,” said Sarrah.
“They (her parents) started to intervene. They didn’t know we gave pastor any money.”
Kayode’s mother, Olive Clarke, herself a one-time Cuffie follower, stormed the pulpit asking what the pastor had done with “the children money”.
She said she was bodily removed from the church by four men.
Olive said she now has to repay and fend off her son’s debtors.
Kayode said he was upset about some things Cuffie said about his mother being possessed by a jezebel spirit after the incident.
But Cuffie was still the leader.
“Kayode was real repentant,” said Sarrah, “thinking he (Cuffie) is a man of God and he must know better.”
Relations deteriorated rapidly after that.
Cuffie allegedly used his bodyguards to screen him from the Clarkes. Legal letters were traded. One, from Cuffie’s lawyer Hugh Jacobs, alleges that Ghany threatened Cuffie.
It cites Ghany as persona non grata at the church.
According to the three discontented parishoners, it’s not the first time the unwitting have been conned at the Miracle Ministries Pentecostal Church. It happens all the time, they said.
But few of the cheated will talk.
“People believe a curse will fall upon them. They will grieve the Holy Spirit and drop down dead.” Ghany said.
“How you think you raise $15 million?” asked Kayode.
“You take people money and then send them packing. We are the only people who are not brainwashed enough to believe we are not going to drop down dead.”
Cheques signed over to
Miracle Ministries by the
naive Chaguanas couple
April 2, 2001 $2,000
Nov 3, 2001 $400
Nov 4, 2001 $1,000
Dec 10, 2001 $200
Dec 10, 2001 $100
Feb 28, 2002 $30,015
Mar 4, 2002 $4,000
Mar 17, 2002 $4,000
Mar 17, 2002 $1,000
Mar 19, 2002 $30,015
Mar 21, 2002 $20,015
Mar 27, 2002 $20, 015
Apr 2, 2002 $2,000
Apr 9, 2002 $200
May 20, 2002 $20,015
May 17, 2002 $15,030
TOTAL $150,005
Pastor Cuffie responds
In a telephone interview, Pastor Winston Cuffie claimed no knowledge of the sizeable donations from the Clarkes.
“I don’t know about Kayode and Sarrah Clarke,” he said.
“This is strange. That’s a complete joke to me. A loan to the church?”
He said the church gets its loans from banks and not individuals.
“That sounding like a kind of joke to me,” he repeated.
He continued incredulously: “Somebody is making such a charge, one hundred and something thousand dollars in loans and they don’t have documents? This sounding so remote.
“If people gave donations to the church, it would come through the donation containers and that’s it.”
Asked again if he knew the couple, Cuffie said: “They had some people here sometime ago...”
Sarrah’s father, Hakim Ghany, said all his children graduated from the Miracle Ministries school. He was astounded that Cuffie claimed not to know Sarrah.
Ghany showed the Sunday Guardian photographs of Cuffie with his (Ghany’s) children.
©2003-2004 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited
An them spending money to put up billboards on the h'way...... 
