To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine says they are now in­ves­ti­gat­ing al­le­ga­tions that a con­trac­tor who was award­ed a con­tract by the As­sem­bly had made racist state­ments to a jour­nal­ist.

Au­gus­tine made the an­nounce­ment in a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing an ar­ti­cle in the News­day that al­leged that a Cou­va con­trac­tor had made a racist re­mark while be­ing ques­tioned by the jour­nal­ist on how he ob­tained a con­tract for road­works in To­ba­go.

The re­porter in ques­tion had sup­pos­ed­ly con­tact­ed the con­trac­tor re­gard­ing his re­cent ac­qui­si­tion of the con­tract to con­struct Mil­ford Court/Pi­geon Point Con­nec­tor Road. The com­pa­ny, la­belled as a roof­ing en­ter­prise, is not known for road con­struc­tion, which sparked the ini­tial in­quiry in­to the con­tract ac­qui­si­tion.

The con­trac­tor re­port­ed­ly told the re­porter to con­tact the THA be­fore say­ing: “Sir, you heard what I just told you? Eng­lish lan­guage hard for you n**** re­porters to un­der­stand?”

Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease, the in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­gan the same date the ar­ti­cle was pub­lished.

The Of­fice of the Chief Sec­re­tary said the coun­cil has ad­vised pro­ceed­ing with cau­tion, since the mat­ter can at­tract le­gal ac­tion and must be looked over suit­ably.

“So far, the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil is ad­vised that the mat­ter may at­tract some le­gal ac­tion. As a re­sult, due dili­gence must be tak­en be­fore the THA acts. Notwith­stand­ing, Chief Sec­re­tary Au­gus­tine con­sid­ers this al­le­ga­tion a se­ri­ous moral and eth­i­cal in­fringe­ment. The THA is pre­pared to go as far as ter­mi­nat­ing the con­tract once the al­leged state­ment is du­ly ver­i­fied,” the state­ment said

The ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the state­ment and mat­ter is ex­pect­ed to­day, the THA said.