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JOEL JULIEN

The Gov­ern­ment will re­ceive the mo­tion of no con­fi­dence against At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi with "great glee," said a com­bat­ive Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley on his re­turn to T&T on Sat­ur­day night from a two-week trip abroad. He said he wasn't sur­prised by the op­po­si­tion threat to file such a mo­tion.

Row­ley al­so said as far as he knows his Gov­ern­ment had done noth­ing wrong in its han­dling of the sit­u­a­tion with tem­po­rary In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Justin Junkere.On Fri­day Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said a pri­vate mo­tion for the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to ex­press a loss of con­fi­dence in Al-Rawi was filed in the Par­lia­ment.

If ap­proved it could be de­bat­ed in about 12 days.Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the mo­tion was filed in the wake of the pas­sage of the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (Amend­ment) Bill in Par­lia­ment.

"I think the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al can de­fend him­self very well, but I will tell you one thing, we will re­ceive that mo­tion with great glee be­cause it is of no sur­prise to us that the UNC (Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress) has no con­fi­dence in the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al. You know the kind of at­tor­ney gen­er­al that they have con­fi­dence in and our At­tor­ney Gen­er­al does not fit that mea­sure so we are not sur­prised at all," he said.

Row­ley was al­so asked about the con­cern raised by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Ger­ald Ramdeen about Junkere fol­low­ing news of Junkere hav­ing a state brief from the AG's of­fice. Junkere was one of two In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors who vot­ed with the Gov­ern­ment to pass the SSA bill. Row­ley went on the at­tack against Ramdeen him­self.

"I just find it a lit­tle of­fen­sive to be re­ceiv­ing queries from Ger­ald Ramdeen. Ger­ald Ramdeen is a per­son of great in­ter­est to the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go and I have some ques­tions for him too, and one of them is whether in fact the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go should sup­port what they rep­re­sent and to the best of my knowl­edge this Gov­ern­ment has done noth­ing in­ap­pro­pri­ate with Mr Junkere.

There are some ap­point­ments that we make and some that oth­er peo­ple make and I don't know that we are hav­ing to an­swer any ques­tions from Mr Ramdeen, who as far as I know the last time I heard his name he was un­der crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion, a se­ries of them," Row­ley said.

Junkere's state brief was re­ceived un­der for­mer Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship at­tor­ney gen­er­al Garvin Nicholas.

Al-Rawi said Ramdeen and Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wayne Sturge have amassed a bill of state briefs from the AG's of­fice, amount­ing to more than $26 mil­lion and $10 mil­lion, re­spec­tive­ly.

'My dri­vers won't be do­ing more than 80'

PM Row­ley is "very scared of fast dri­ving" be­cause "speed kills" and as a re­sult of this his se­cu­ri­ty de­tail will ad­here to the coun­try's speed lim­its. He was re­spond­ing to a ques­tion of whether his en­tourage would obey the speed lim­its.

"My en­tourage? They had bet­ter be­cause I'm very scared of fast dri­ving," Row­ley said. "The dri­vers will tell you if they get be­yond my com­fort zone they will know about it," he said.

With­in re­cent weeks speed guns have been in­tro­duced in this coun­try and en­force­ment of the speed lim­its on the na­tion's road­ways, in­clud­ing the 80 kilo­me­tres per hour max­i­mum lim­it for the high­ways, have been met with some crit­i­cism from mo­torists who have called for a re­view of the laws.

Dur­ing last week's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds said an in­crease in the speed lim­it for high­ways to 100 kmph was be­ing re­viewed.

Row­ley was asked about the sit­u­a­tion on Sat­ur­day night. He said while he would leave the de­ter­mi­na­tion of the coun­try's speed lim­its to the "ex­perts," in his view "dif­fer­ent roads should car­ry dif­fer­ent speed lim­its."

"When I got my li­cence, when­ev­er that was, that's how it was. There were 30-mile zones and 50-mile zones and so on. We have dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties of roads in the coun­try and they cer­tain­ly re­quire, from a safe­ty stand­point, that they car­ry dif­fer­ent speed lim­its. The speed lim­it on the Solomon Ho­choy High­way cer­tain­ly ought not to be the same one on the East­ern Main Road," Row­ley said.

COY ON RESHUF­FLE

Asked if there were any plans for a reshuf­fle of his Cab­i­net, Row­ley said:

"You can nev­er be sat­is­fied with every­thing. There is al­ways room for im­prove­ment across the board."

"I don't want this coun­try to lose sight of the fact where we came from... we have come from a place of great chaos."

"We have a Cab­i­net made up of a lot of new peo­ple, young peo­ple and some ex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple. The ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple are new and they are find­ing their feet and we are a whole lot bet­ter off than when we came in.

"The gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go in Sep­tem­ber 2015 was a dis­as­ter zone and we have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly set about in a very sane and sober way to give gov­er­nance in Trinidad and To­ba­go that gives us the best chance to suc­ceed and that will con­tin­ue and when the time comes for ad­just­ments to be made to the Cab­i­net, we will make the ad­just­ments."