Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma has dis­missed me­dia re­ports of a rift be­tween San Fer­nan­do may­or Mar­lene Coudray and deputy may­or Dr Navi Mu­radali over the use of $54,000 of the City Cor­po­ra­tion funds for Coudray's MBA. Shar­ma, in an in­ter­view on Sun­day night at his an­nu­al Di­vali cel­e­bra­tions at Old Siparia Road, Siparia, said he spoke to both Coudray and Mu­radali about the is­sue and it was a non-is­sue.

"I have spo­ken with both of them and there is no fall­out. I do not know where the sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed from. The mat­ters were raised and treat­ed with the may­or in­di­cat­ed that (MBA) was a cou­ple of years ago. The Gov­ern­ment spends mil­lions of dol­lars in the re­train­ing of pub­lic of­fi­cers and pri­vate of­fi­cers," Shar­ma said.

On Sun­day, the T&T Guardian re­port­ed that a bit­ter feud erupt­ed be­tween Coudray and Mu­radali over a $54,000 Mas­ters of Busi­ness Ad­min­is­tra­tive (MBA) pro­gramme which the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment fund­ed for Coudray. Mu­radali, COP coun­cil­lor for Les Ef­forts East/Cipero, ac­cused the may­or of us­ing mon­ey from the cor­po­ra­tion's cof­fers to fund the MBA. The is­sue was raised in a May 19, 2011 statu­to­ry meet­ing and was list­ed in the cor­po­ra­tion's ac­counts of 325/10/11. The fees, which fell un­der the ac­count code "net rev­enue," was list­ed as a re­quest for tele­graph­ic trans­fer from Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd (High Street) branch to RDI (USA) Ltd re: "Pay­ment of MBA fees on be­half of HW (Her Wor­ship) the May­or Mar­lene Coudray."

But Shar­ma said there was no is­sue with the fund­ing since, "Through GATE (Gov­ern­ment As­sis­tance for Tu­ition Ex­pens­es Pro­gramme) you would have seen we have spent over half a bil­lion so far. Any­body can ac­cess GATE. It is not re­al­ly an is­sue." He said both Coudray and Mu­radali would con­tin­ue to work to­geth­er.

He added: "There is ab­solute­ly no need to re­place the may­or and any­one. What I can as­sure you of is that all of our cor­po­ra­tions are ex­treme­ly in­de­pen­dent. "They are free to crit­i­cise the min­is­ter on is­sues. I en­cour­age and tell them we should not have se­crets. "I told them while our pref­er­ence is we do not want to wash our dirty linen, and I do not con­sid­er this to be dirty linen, in pub­lic, I want that kind of in­de­pen­dence. That is how I get the cor­po­ra­tions to per­form," Shar­ma added.

He de­lib­er­ate­ly moved the an­nu­al cel­e­bra­tions from his con­stituen­cy of­fice at Uni­ty Court, Fyz­abad, to old Siparia Road, next to the 160-year-old mud hut be­cause he want­ed to host fes­ti­val cel­e­bra­tions at dif­fer­ent ar­eas in the Fyz­abad con­stituen­cy.