Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has con­firmed that J Rawl­in­son Row­ley, the man on the re­ceiv­ing end of an email from A&V Drilling, is in­deed his cousin.

Row­ley con­firmed his rel­a­tive’s iden­ti­ty yes­ter­day af­ter Guardian Me­dia for­ward­ed a pic­ture of the man and told him it was be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed on so­cial me­dia and be­ing linked to him.

“Yes, he is my cousin. His fa­ther and my moth­er are first cousins. So?” he re­spond­ed.

Row­ley was then told that his cousin’s email ad­dress, jrow­ley.rawl­in­son@gmail.com, was on the email pur­port­ed­ly sent by A&V Drilling’s Vi­vian Baksh giv­ing the bank­ing de­tails of one Char­lie Di­az.

Pressed fur­ther on this, Row­ley said, “For those who see or know of a con­nec­tion be­tween per­sons and would like to link me to any oth­er per­son re­gard­less of sim­i­lar­i­ty of our names or blood re­la­tions, just re­mem­ber that I am Kei­th Row­ley and I can on­ly speak for Kei­th Row­ley and will not hes­i­tate to take the req­ui­site ap­pro­pri­ate ac­tion against any per­son who seeks to make sub­sti­tu­tions in­volv­ing me on the ba­sis of sim­i­lar­i­ty.”

The email in ques­tion, al­leged­ly sent by Baksh but signed off on by Justin Soogrim, be­gins with the salu­ta­tion “Good morn­ing Ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter” and was pur­port­ed­ly sent to Rawl­in­son Row­ley.

The con­tents of the email to Row­ley were read out in Par­lia­ment on Tues­day as part of Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal’s Bud­get con­tri­bu­tion. Dur­ing that con­tri­bu­tion, Mooni­lal linked the PM to fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions em­a­nat­ing from A&V Drilling to a Flori­da bank.

Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to con­tact Rawl­in­son Row­ley via mo­bile phone, email and Face­book yes­ter­day. How­ev­er, his mo­bile phone was switched off and he did not re­spond to the oth­er means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Rawl­in­son’s name and the same email read out by Mooni­lal in the House on Tues­day ap­pears on a busi­ness card for Transcon­ti­nen­tal Eco­tourism & Agri­cul­ture Con­sor­tium (TEAC).

That com­pa­ny reg­is­tra­tion could not be found lo­cal­ly but search­es on Linkedin says it is reg­is­tered in T&T and is a sub­sidiary of the ‘Peo­ple Elec­tri­cal Ap­pli­ance Group’, an in­dus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny out of Chi­na.

Ac­cord­ing to on­line search­es, the Peo­ple Elec­tri­cal Ap­pli­ance Group Co Ltd. man­u­fac­tures in­dus­tri­al elec­tri­cal ap­pli­ances.

The com­pa­ny’s pro­file says the Peo­ple Elec­tri­cal Ap­pli­ance Group al­so op­er­ates ship­build­ing, en­er­gy re­source de­vel­op­ment, ur­ban con­struc­tion and mod­ern lo­gis­tics busi­ness­es.

Rawl­in­son Row­ley’s im­age is al­so at­tached to a Face­book pro­file which says he cur­rent­ly works as a fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor and was a for­mer di­rec­tor at JR Con­struc­tion Group Ltd.