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Thursday, July 24, 2025

AG: Political mischief in old OPV story

by

20140817

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan has con­demned an ar­ti­cle mak­ing the rounds on so­cial me­dia on the Gov­ern­ment's pur­port­ed mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar loss­es through the Off­shore Pa­trol Ves­sel (OPV) con­tract.In an e-mail yes­ter­day, Ram­lo­gan de­scribed the elec­tron­ic ar­ti­cle, Clyde ship­yard boss­es win �130m com­pen­sa­tion bat­tle, as "po­lit­i­cal mis­chief of the high­est or­der".

"It seeks to re­vive an old ar­ti­cle that was pub­lished in the Evening Times news­pa­per on No­vem­ber 15, 2012, at a time when Op­po­si­tion Leader Kei­th Row­ley was pub­licly an­nounc­ing that the Gov­ern­ment had lost the OPV ar­bi­tra­tion and was or­dered to pay British Aero­space En­gi­neer­ing (BAE) hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars.The ar­ti­cle in the Evening Times news­pa­per con­firmed the er­ro­neous state­ments that were be­ing made by Dr Row­ley here in Trinidad," Ram­lo­gan said.

The ar­ti­cle, he said, was im­me­di­ate­ly re­tract­ed af­ter he threat­ened to sue the news­pa­per."A re­trac­tion was in fact pub­lished the fol­low­ing day by the Evening Times news­pa­per on the 16 No­vem­ber, 2012," he said."Much to the sur­prise, dis­ap­point­ment and cha­grin of the Op­po­si­tion, the Gov­ern­ment emerged vic­to­ri­ous in the OPV ar­bi­tra­tion with BAE agree­ing to pay the sum of TT $1.4 bil­lion to the state. This set­tle­ment was ar­rived at af­ter I tes­ti­fied and was cross ex­am­ined over a two-day pe­ri­od in the Ar­bi­tra­tion in Lon­don," he said.

Ram­lo­gan said the "mis­lead­ing ar­ti­cle has sud­den­ly resur­faced on var­i­ous PNM so­cial me­dia sites and is be­ing for­ward­ed to me­dia per­son­nel as part of a wider cam­paign de­sign to dis­cred­it me".


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