Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley yesterday called for a forensic probe into the Office of the Attorney General in the wake of the legal fees payment mix-up.
He also said Attorney General Garvin Nicholas must apologise to the country and the Parliament for "misleading" and attempting to "hoodwink" everyone with his "convoluted and disingenuous" explanation of the inaccuracies over the fees presented to the Parliament last month.
Rowley made the call at a press briefing at the Opposition's office, Port-of-Spain, yesterday, as he said the AG's office had once again become a matter of "great concern" and that Nicholas should face parliamentary sanction.
He said the House could sanction Nicholas in various ways, including that of a reprimand or a suspension.
"Mistakes can be made in Parliament but what we had here is the AG outside of the Parliament taking the position that what he laid in the Parliament had errors. He now has to come back to the Parliament and say what the true story is," Rowley said.
The budgetary allocation to the AG's office, Rowley said, was unique in the sense that monies made to an AG for hiring private services included attorney, investigators and accountants, and the only person who had the responsibility for selecting people to be hired and determining fees was an attorney general.
The Opposition leader added that this was not the duty of a permanent secretary in the office of the AG.
He accused the People's Partnership (PP) Government of substantially raising the allocation for selected people to be hired.
"We were very concerned and we took a lot of time in the Parliament to point out that something was not right and there was just the lavishing of monies to the attorney general," Rowley said.
He said despite questions being filed in the Parliament regarding who was being hired and for how much, former AG Anand Ramlogan never answered. Rowley said for the past four years the allocation to the AG's office for private services "jumped to $100 million a year," hence the reason why Nicholas was now forced to publicly explain.
Nicholas had ordered a probe of the initial legal fee budget of $343 million he gave to Parliament last month after several attorneys complained that fees attributed to them were inaccurate and in some cases represented double payments.
Permanent secretary Marlene Juman was tasked with verifying the figures supplied by the accounts department.
In a press release last Friday, Nicholas said the review identified some $30.5 million in duplicate fees to lawyers. He said he was assured that no overpayments were made to the local attorneys.
However, he also said that during the review they realised some $80 million in foreign payments were left out of the initial report he gave to Parliament, which meant that the legal fees payment was in fact $408 million and not $343 million.
Nicholas said the errors arose as a result of using two recording systems for attorneys' fees, an official "fees register" and an "excel spreadsheet" which is meant to be updated on a regular basis.
'More question than answers'
Yesterday, Rowley, who accused Nicholas of trying to cloud the issue by presenting a confusing explanation with some "fancy footwork," said: "This is a matter where the Government is trying to once again mislead the country through the mouths of senior State officers, in this case the mouth of the attorney general, where a report is now made public outside of the Parliament in answer to a question put inside the Parliament and the report itself raises more questions than answers.
"We reject this arrangement and we are asking the Attorney General to return to the Parliament at the next sitting, apologise to the Parliament for misleading the Parliament and tell us the truth and not try to fool us by a breakdown that cannot stand scrutiny."
He also dismissed the explanation given by Nicholas, saying the release sent by the AG was "disingenuous" because it refered to the information provided as being "unprecedented" and sent under the guise of being "transparent."
"The 'transparent' press release refers conveniently to matters that are cherry picked for maximum political mileage. It omits the spend on the fiasco of the Proman arbitration which the State lost and in so doing lost control of one of the most valuable energy assets of the country.
"It seeks to justify the spend of close to a half a billion of our dollars on what it describes to be 16 investigations. Not one of these investigations has led to a criminal prosecution," Rowley said.
He said what was also "disingenuous" was that the public was told that the actual amount paid to some local attorneys were overstated because of a problem with an excel spreadsheet and fee register.
"Yet not once does the report explain exactly whose fees are mentioned in this 'transparent' report. Whether the information is kept on a spreadsheet or in a manila folder the AG is just playing smart by throwing out foolish statements," Rowley said.
He said Nicholas had also disaggregated the figures in the "most disingenuous" way so as to create doubt and satisfaction in the public's mind that there was nothing to worry about as the $408 million could be explained.
"He is now putting numbers in the public domain which have not been made available to the Parliament. I want to see what he is going to tell the Parliament now that he has admitted that his Government misled the Parliament on this very serious matter of allocation and reporting for public monies spent by the AG's office," Rowley said.