Richard Lord

Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley is tak­ing full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the May 15 meet­ing with chair­man of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion Ken Gor­don at his home in Glen­coe.Row­ley said he ac­cept­ed re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­cause it was he who had asked for the meet­ing.Speak­ing at a pub­lic meet­ing of the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) in east Port-of-Spain on Tues­day, Row­ley dared the Gov­ern­ment to charge him for mis­con­duct and mis­be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice. He said that ad­vice was giv­en to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar by her at­tor­ney in the Sec­tion 34 e-mail probe, Is­rael Khan, SC."Come, Mr Is­rael, come. You name Is­rael, well I am from the land of Ju­dah," he said.

Row­ley pre­sent­ed 31 e-mails on the Sec­tion 34 procla­ma­tion dur­ing a mo­tion of no con­fi­dence in the Prime Min­is­ter in Par­lia­ment on May 20. He has since been re­ferred to Par­lia­ment's Com­mit­tee of Priv­i­leges for in­ves­ti­ga­tion.The po­lice are al­so in­ves­ti­gat­ing the email mat­ter.Khan hired a US IT ex­pert Jon Berry­hill to look at the e-mails which were al­leged­ly sent from ad­dress­es of the PM, AG Anand Ram­lo­gan and oth­er gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in Sep­tem­ber last year.Row­ley said the coun­try was "on one tail­spin, the Gov­ern­ment is in dis­ar­ray and there is noth­ing pro­duc­tive hap­pen­ing in T&T be­cause the Gov­ern­ment has aban­doned its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and is fo­cus­ing on self-de­fence."

In re­count­ing the Sec­tion 34 e-mail is­sue, Row­ley in­sist­ed the doc­u­ments were not pre­pared by him."Some­body who had ac­cess to where those e-mails were, in one form or the oth­er, that per­son put them all to­geth­er on two pages. I re­ceived tha...it was a com­pi­la­tion of these con­ver­sa­tions."He in­sist­ed he did not get any e-mail."I re­ceived no e-mail trans­mit­ted from one ma­chine to my ma­chine. I re­ceived two pages pre­pared by some­body," the Op­po­si­tion Leader said.He said by pre­sent­ing the in­for­ma­tion to Par­lia­ment he was sim­ply do­ing his job as pro­vid­ed for un­der the Con­sti­tu­tion and "I am now in dan­ger of be­ing charged for mis­be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice."

He said the PM was ac­cus­ing him of pre­sent­ing the e-mails to bring down her gov­ern­ment."That is an ad­mis­sion on the part of the Prime Min­is­ter and the Gov­ern­ment that those e-mails, if found to be true, mean that the Gov­ern­ment has to go out of of­fice," Row­ley said.He again ex­plained the rea­sons for his meet­ing with Gor­don at the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion chair­man's home.

"I want­ed to know whether in fact when I stand up in the Par­lia­ment I can say that the mat­ter is be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed. I al­so want­ed to know if noth­ing was hap­pen­ing with it," he said.Row­ley said on May 15, in the af­ter­noon, he asked his staff to con­tact com­mis­sion staff to arrange the meet­ing but with no im­me­di­ate suc­cess. He said lat­er that evening Gor­don con­tact­ed him and in­vit­ed him to meet at his home. "So he called me. He said I am home you can stop by, so I stopped by the chair­man. So if there is a prob­lem here as there ap­pears to be, I will take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for ac­cept­ing go­ing to the chair­man's home," the Diego Mar­tin West MP said.