Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says Crime Watch host Ian Al­leyne is a mem­ber of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC.)Per­sad-Bisses­sar made the state­ment last af­ter­noon as she de­fend­ed the UNC's de­ci­sion to se­lect Al­leyne as the par­ty's can­di­date for the No­vem­ber 4 by-elec­tion.Al­leyne's was on­ly named as the UNC can­di­date on Mon­day, hours be­fore the Elec­tion and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion dead­line for can­di­dates to sub­mit their nom­i­na­tion pa­pers.

He con­test­ed the Ch­agua­nas seat for the PNM in the 2002 gen­er­al elec­tion gar­ner­ing 4,152 votes to the suc­cess­ful UNC can­di­date Manohar Ram­saran's 16,028 votes and Cit­i­zens' Al­liance Im­ti­az Ali with 210 votes.She said there was no ques­tion re­lat­ing to Al­leyne's UNC mem­ber­ship since he joined the par­ty pri­or to the 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar, speak­ing with re­porters at a Land Set­tle­ment Agency (LSA) cer­tifi­cate of com­fort dis­tri­b­u­tion cer­e­mo­ny at her Siparia con­stituen­cy of­fice, SS Erin Road, Pe­nal, last af­ter­noon, Al­leyne has been on the par­ty's mem­ber­ship list for some time.Per­sad-Bisses­sar said al­though Al­leyne was a UNC mem­ber he still had to fill out an­oth­er mem­ber­ship form for re­new­al."He (Al­leyne) has been with the par­ty pre­vi­ous­ly and he has again re­newed his ap­pli­ca­tion which has been ac­cept­ed," she said.

She said the ex­ec­u­tive al­so de­cid­ed to waive the par­ty's one-year stip­u­la­tion for nom­i­na­tion as a can­di­date to al­low for Al­leyne's can­di­da­cy. Per­sad-Bisses­sar said that was al­so done for for­mer St Joseph MP Her­bert Vol­ney.The Prime Min­is­ter al­so de­nied al­le­ga­tions that the UNC "bought" the Crime Watch host so he would con­test the St Joseph by-elec­tion for the par­ty.

She was re­spond­ing to jeers of "sell-out" that were hurled at Al­leyne on Mon­day by mem­bers of the pub­lic as he filed his nom­i­na­tions pa­pers to con­test the No­vem­ber 4, St Joseph by-elec­tion on a UNC tick­et.The Prime Min­is­ter said: "For my part and my par­ty there was no buy­ing out of any­one to con­test this elec­tion, whether at the lo­cal lev­el or at the by-elec­tion lev­el. Not from our par­ty, not from our ex­ec­u­tive, no buy­out took place what­so­ev­er."