Gail Alexan­der

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er might be breach­ing the In­tegri­ty in Pub­lic Life Act if he bought the Mir­ror or News­day, ac­cord­ing to Op­po­si­tion MP?Colm Im­bert. Im­bert was com­ment­ing on Tues­day on re­ports that Warn­er was in­ter­est­ed in buy­ing those news­pa­per com­pa­nies. He said there could be some prob­lem with the sit­u­a­tion, as the pro­vi­sions of the act stip­u­late that a min­is­ter is sup­posed to arrange his per­son­al busi­ness in a man­ner that would not un­der­mine pub­lic con­fi­dence. Im­bert said, "He's sup­posed to avoid sit­u­a­tions with con­flict of in­ter­est and I would think his state­ments to buy the Mir­ror and News­day would put him in con­flict with those sec­tions (of the act). "It's not a busi­ness ven­ture in the true sense. In my opin­ion he's buy­ing those pa­pers to print favourable things about him and his gov­ern­ment. "I don't think there is a com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tion as a pri­ma­ry ob­jec­tive, and what he's do­ing is a breach of the code of con­duct in the In­tegri­ty in Pub­lic Life Act."

PNM trea­sur­er and for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Mar­i­ano Browne said the Op­po­si­tion didn't view Warn­er's plan for the news­pa­pers as a pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ment. Sec­tions 24 (1) C and 24 (2) B of the act state that a per­son in pub­lic life must arrange his or her pri­vate in­ter­est, whether pe­cu­niary or oth­er­wise, in a way to main­tain pub­lic con­fi­dence or trust and any­thing they do-trans­ac­tions or oth­er com­mer­cial in­ter­ests-must not be in­com­pat­i­ble with their of­fi­cial func­tions.

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue, the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion said it had not­ed the de­vel­op­ment and "will con­sid­er and re­spond in due course." A par­lia­men­tary of­fi­cial said the par­lia­men­tary code of con­duct did not show any re­stric­tions on MPs con­cern­ing out­side em­ploy­ment. They not­ed guide­lines in the UK, Cana­da, New Zealand and oth­er Com­mon­wealth states that say the same. They said the sit­u­a­tion would ap­ply more to MPs who had no port­fo­lio, since MPs who are min­is­ters are em­ployed full-time. While there might be prece­dent with for­mer Citadel own­er Louis Lee Sing own­ing shares at News­day and Ken Gor­don at CCN, T&T?Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA) vice-pres­i­dent Yaseen Ra­haman said TTP­BA had not dis­cussed the is­sue and he could not com­ment on it. TTP­BA head Ki­ran Ma­haraj is out of the coun­try. Me­dia vet­er­an Jones P Madeira said he had no lo­cus stan­di to com­ment on the mat­ter. Therese Mills, ed­i­tor-in-chief of News­day, was out of the of­fice.