Gail Alexan­der

To­ba­go De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Del­mon Bak­er, in­tent now on seek­ing le­gal ac­tion against in­di­vid­u­als he claims are out to tar­nish his char­ac­ter, is ob­tain­ing tapes from a ra­dio pro­gramme that car­ried al­le­ga­tions about him re­cent­ly. And he has no in­ten­tion of leav­ing the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment.He con­firmed this dur­ing yes­ter­day's sit­ting of Par­lia­ment.

Bak­er said he re­port­ed to po­lice on Mon­day that he had re­ceived an e-mailed ex­tor­tion threat al­leg­ing that he had con­duct­ed him­self "in­ap­pro­pri­ate­ly" and that there had al­so been ra­dio re­ports on the al­le­ga­tions with­out any at­tempt to cor­rob­o­rate the sto­ry.The mat­ter is now un­der po­lice probe.

He said sub­se­quent­ly in­formed Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar that he had gone to the po­lice with the in­ten­tion of de­fend­ing his char­ac­ter. He said he'll be get­ting the ra­dio tape to hear ex­act­ly what was said, es­pe­cial­ly since he'd heard some of it from peo­ple and it had caused a bit of dis­tress in To­ba­go."We're mov­ing very quick­ly to en­sure this in­ves­ti­ga­tion moves for­ward," he said, adding his at­tor­neys were Christlyn Moore and a se­nior coun­sel.

Bak­er, who said he was stay­ing in the Gov­ern­ment, added that some peo­ple would "do any­thing to get you out of the way in their quest for pow­er." He said he be­lieved per­sons were try­ing to cause mis­chief af­ter cer­tain min­is­ters were fired re­cent­ly.He said the sit­u­a­tion arose on the Mon­day fol­low­ing last Sun­day's To­ba­go Or­gan­i­sa­tion of the Peo­ple (TOP) meet­ing, where cer­tain de­ci­sions were tak­en on how TOP would go for­ward.

Bak­er de­nied that TOP mem­bers were leav­ing for the In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty (ILP). He said ILP meet­ings at­tract­ed no more than five per­sons.Yes­ter­day, ex-TOP chair­man Li­onel Coke, now with the ILP, said he had no knowl­edge of the size of TOP's fi­nan­cial mem­bers now, but at the last TOP elec­tion there were about 500 fi­nan­cial mem­bers.