Brent Zephyrine

Vice Chair­man of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) Ver­non De Li­ma has pub­licly de­nounced the de­ci­sion of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment to sup­port its em­bat­tled Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er amidst al­le­ga­tions of bribery made against him. "In Mrs Mary King's case, the COP took a po­si­tion and she was moved aside and now Jack Warn­er's case has come. What is good for the goose is good for the gan­der and the fun­da­men­tal vein that runs through both of the cas­es is bobol," he said.

De Li­ma made the com­ments yes­ter­day dur­ing the launch of his can­di­da­cy for the po­si­tion of po­lit­i­cal leader of his par­ty at the COP Op­er­a­tion Cen­tre in Char­lieville, Ch­agua­nas. He was re­spond­ing to Warn­er's view that King's mat­ter (the al­leged in­volve­ment in the process lead­ing to the award of a $100,000 gov­ern­ment con­tract to a com­pa­ny owned by her fam­i­ly) was "to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent" from the FI­FA probe in­to al­le­ga­tions that he arranged for US$1 mil­lion in bribes to be of­fered to 25 Caribbean as­so­ci­a­tions at a spe­cial meet­ing held in Trinidad last month.

De Li­ma re­it­er­at­ed the COP's "ad­her­ence to prin­ci­ples and val­ues" and said they had to be the "watch­dogs" who en­sured that "hon­esty, in­tegri­ty and trans­paren­cy" reigned supreme. He said: "I promise the na­tion that as po­lit­i­cal leader of the COP, this par­ty will nev­er ever tow the line with any­one or any par­ty when their po­si­tion is wrong and not in ac­cor­dance with the core val­ues which ad­here to the mantra that what is right is right and what is wrong will al­ways be wrong." In en­dors­ing De Li­ma's can­di­da­cy, fel­low deputy po­lit­i­cal leader Robert May­ers echoed his sen­ti­ments when he al­lud­ed to cer­tain min­is­ters who ap­peared to be "high­ly favoured" de­spite be­ing "ac­cused of be­ing on the wrong side of eth­i­cal be­hav­iour."