Papel, Please: A Reply to Freddie Kissoon on the President’s Farm

Papel, Please: A Reply to Freddie Kissoon on the President’s Farm

The 592 Guardian — July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon is back defending the President’s farm, and once again the defense rests less on documentation than on the character of the people asking for it. His latest column — reaching for John Compton’s banana farm, Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm, and Silvio Berlusconi’s football club as historical cover — deserves a point-by-point answer, because the precedents he cites don’t say what he thinks they say, and the number at the center of his piece doesn’t hold up either.

On Compton, Carter, and Berlusconi as precedent

Kissoon treats the mere existence of a head of government’s business interests as settling the matter. It doesn’t, and the comparison collapses on its own terms. Carter placed his peanut warehouse in a blind trust specifically to avoid the appearance of conflict — the opposite of concealment. Berlusconi’s business holdings were, in fact, one of the defining controversies of Italian politics for two decades, prompting later legislative attempts — imperfect ones — to regulate exactly this kind of conflict. Kissoon cites the exceptions as if they were the rule, and cites the controversial cases as if they were uncontroversial. If anything, the international record argues for disclosure regimes, not against scrutiny.

On “no one has produced evidence of state funds”

This inverts the actual question. The controversy was never solely about state funds — it is about acreage, provenance, and disclosure. Kissoon collapses three distinct accountability questions — how much land, how it was acquired, whether it was disclosed — into a single strawman he can declare unproven and then move past.

On the 70-acre figure

This is the load-bearing number in Kissoon’s entire column — “a mere 70-acre farm,” “modest farm,” repeated for emphasis. Satellite measurement work carried out for this publication arrived at approximately 155 acres, corroborating the opposition’s own estimate of roughly 150 acres — more than double what Kissoon asserts without citing any source. If that measurement holds, Kissoon is not editorializing about a settled fact. He is asserting a contested figure as settled, in the President’s favor, without evidence. That is the column’s central vulnerability, and it undermines everything built on top of it.

On Christopher Ram’s call for a Commission of Inquiry

Kissoon frames this as self-evidently absurd — a head of state “belittling himself” by submitting to scrutiny. But Commissions of Inquiry into a leader’s private financial dealings are not exotic mechanisms. They are a standard accountability tool precisely when self-disclosure is contested or incomplete — which, by the President’s own press conference, where no supporting documentation was produced, is exactly the situation here.

On the GHK Lall / Gold Board tangent 

This is the column’s weakest structural move: a lengthy attack on a critic’s past conduct at the Gold Board that, however accurate, does nothing to establish the acreage or disclosure facts about the farm itself. It is deflection dressed as rebuttal — discrediting the messenger on an unrelated matter rather than engaging the measurement dispute at all.

On “the President did not provide documents during his address”

Kissoon quotes this observation only to mock those making it as insatiable. He never actually contests its accuracy. That concession is worth naming plainly: the column accepts the core factual claim — that no documentation was produced — and then attacks the motives of whoever noticed.

The closing “papel” line

Kissoon’s final line preemptively frames any future skepticism as bad faith, regardless of what documentation eventually emerges.

That is not a defense of the President. It is an attempt to inoculate against all future scrutiny in advance — including scrutiny of numbers that, on the evidence so far, do not add up.

The 592 Guardian