Former senator Gerald Ramdeen may be in hot water for making public the details of a Court of Appeal case in which he was never involved.
On Thursday, Ramdeen held a media conference at his Port-of-Spain office to discuss the details of a medical case, now at the Court of Appeal, in which a young girl was admitted to the Mt Hope Medical Sciences Complex for anaemia and during a blood transfusion, was infected with HIV tainted blood.
The child died of complications from her anaemia and HIV.
The matter had already been ventilated in Parliament but the child’s name was kept off the record.
Ramdeen is not the lawyer on this matter but Guardian Media was told that he learned that the State was making moves to seal the case and sought to make it public.
“This is criminal,” Ramdeen said during his media conference.
He provided several of the documents in which the Mt Hope admitted liability and the State agreed to pay $6.5 million to the child’s mother for medical treatment in a foreign medical facility and agreed to cover the child’s medical expenses for the rest of her life because of the tainted blood transfusion.
But with no legal standing in the case, Ramdeen may have overstepped his bounds.
When asked about the State’s liability in this matter, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi said he may refer Ramdeen to the disciplinary committee.
“The matter came up before the Court of Appeal and was adjourned, he has no locus. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel to involve himself in the matter of a child?” Al-Rawi said.
“I think he has to be referred to the disciplinary committee for this,” he said.
“Why would you posthumously tarnish the name of a child?” Al-Rawi asked.
Ramdeen gave the details of the case and said that the State was seeking to have the matter sealed to cover their missteps.
“Why seal it? If they sealed this nobody would know the details of what happened to this child and to this family,” he said.
He said the State had agreed to pay and when the child died, they reneged.
But Al-Rawi is saying that is not the case. Though he said he needed to re-familiarise himself with the case, he could recall that the agreed payment was for medical expenses and not for damages.
Ramdeen said he is also planning to take legal action against Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh and the Ministry of Health on behalf of the 37 patients who can no longer access dialysis at the St Augustine Private Hospital (SAPH) because of an unpaid debt.