Gail Alexan­der

While COP lead­er­ship can­di­dates Ver­non de Li­ma and Prakash Ra­mad­har be­lieve Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er should step down while the FI­FA probe against him is in op­er­a­tion, their col­league Anil Roberts be­lieves Warn­er should not re­sign. COP MPs, Roberts and Ra­mad­har and COP vice chair­man Ver­non de Li­ma are in a three-way race for COP's lead­er­ship on Ju­ly 3 af­ter the in­cum­bent Win­ston Dook­er­an said he would not con­test the top post. Ra­mad­har on Tues­day said Warn­er should re­sign.

De Li­ma al­so says Warn­er should re­sign:

"Ab­solute­ly. Warn­er is in­no­cent un­til proven guilty but the West­min­ster sys­tem we use de­mands that when you're charged with any­thing as a crim­i­nal of­fence, the cor­rect thing to do is step aside 'til the mat­ter is re­solved in the same way as Mary King was made to step aside." "Warn­er should al­so step aside of his own ac­cord and the COP has said so. Our po­si­tion has been con­sis­tent, it's the same po­si­tion we took on the King is­sue." De Li­ma is part of COP's ex­ec­u­tive which is­sued a state­ment re­cent­ly call­ing for Warn­er to step down af­ter the FI­FA bribery al­le­ga­tions is­sue broke.

But de Li­ma's and Ra­mad­har's ri­val, Roberts said: "Gov­ern­ment has to wait un­til the out­come of the FI­FA probe on Jack Warn­er is com­plet­ed be­fore act­ing in any way on Warn­er. Any de­ci­sion on Warn­er ahead of that would be pre­ma­ture and im­ma­ture," Roberts said the re­spec­tive cas­es of Warn­er and ex-min­is­ter Mary King are dif­fer­ent. Roberts had called for King to re­sign last month fol­low­ing al­le­ga­tions and state­ments by her. King was even­tu­al­ly fired by the Prime Min­is­ter and her is­sue is be­ing probed by the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion. Roberts said: "King's is­sue is dif­fer­ent to Warn­er's. King ad­mit­ted she didn't dis­close her in­ter­est, was present at the open­ing of a ten­ders box and ap­point­ed her per­son­al po­lit­i­cal as­sis­tant to an eval­u­a­tion team.

"In Warn­er's case, all we have are al­le­ga­tions which Jack says is rub­bish. So we can on­ly await the out­come of FI­FA's probe." Roberts added, "If the find­ings are neg­a­tive, I'm sure the Prime Min­is­ter will act ac­cord­ing­ly and so will Warn­er if con­vict­ed. If we all have to re­sign on every al­le­ga­tion sub­ject to com­ple­tion of a probe, who will run T&T?" "Why didn't Kei­th Row­ley re­sign on the Scar­bor­ough hos­pi­tal is­sue and when his leader asked where the mon­ey went?" On an­oth­er is­sue, de Li­ma be­lieves the COP's leader should not be in Cab­i­net-bound by col­lec­tive re­spon­si­bil­i­ty-and should be free to build the par­ty and en­sure its in­tegri­ty stance. But Roberts says: "The idea of the leader re­main­ing out­side the Cab­i­net is good for any­one who wants to re­main in Op­po­si­tion. You have to be in the Cab­i­net to make de­ci­sions and plans and be ef­fec­tive."