On mornings when the Tongan Parliament sits in Nuku’alofa, a Nissan 4WD swings past the beefy security guard at the front gates and rolls into an allocated park.

The driver, a fat man with glasses wearing traditional garb, chats with fellow members of the legislature until 10am, when he walks inside the white, wooden, church-like building where Tonga's laws are passed. That Malakai Fakatoufifita, a noble of the realm known as Lord Tu’ilakepa, can take his seat in the legislative assembly is seen by many as an outrage.

Lord Tu’ilakepa

Because when Tu’ilakepa was Speaker of the House in 2010, he allegedly accepted bribes from a Colombian drug boss named Obeil Antonio Zuluaga Gomez. Gomez wanted to use Tonga as a hub for a global conspiracy to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to Australia and China, according to Australian Federal Police. Tu’ilakepa had never met Gomez but wrote a letter to the head of the Immigration Department offering to sponsor him so he could get an urgent visa to come to Tonga. "I can also vouch that [he] is an honest, trustworthy and law abiding person," Tu’ilakepa wrote in the letter, which is part of Australian court files. In fact, Gomez had done jail time for drug trafficking. Tu’ilakepa was arrested and charged with conspiring to import drugs and unlawful possession of firearms after guns were found at his properties.

(Photo courtesy of the Kele'a newspaper)

The case dragged on for years before the Attorney General, ‘Aminiasi Kefu, announced he was dropping the drugs charges because of their complexity and because phone taps by Australian police were inadmissible under Tongan law. Kefu told media it would have taken two months to listen to the phone recordings and a jury would find it difficult to understand and “overbearing” to sit through. “They may acquit him on that, and all that effort will result in nothing. We are more confident on pursuing the arms charges, which is more...an open and shut case,” Kefu said. Tu’ilakepa, a father of six, eventually pleaded guilty to the weapons charges and last year was fined just over $6000. If he'd been sentenced to two years or more imprisonment, he would have been stripped of his noble entitlements - instead he paid the fine and remains a member of the Tongan legislature. We wanted to ask Tu’ilakepa why he wrote the letter and what right he has to represent the Tongan people, but he avoided us, hiding his face from the photographer.

He then complained in Parliament that we were harassing him. When we finally caught up with him as he left a plantation outside Nuku’alofa, he said he was angry we'd gone to his home and had no comment.

"It's strange," admits Tonga's Prime Minister, ‘Akilisi Pohiva, of Tu’ilakepa's continued presence in Parliament. "But the constitution gives the power to the nobles to elect their own representatives. He should not be elected to Parliament for obvious reasons, yet he was."

‘Akilisi Pohiva