The Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) is plan­ning to chal­lenge At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi's claim that for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan spent $1.4 bil­lion dur­ing his time in of­fice.

A key part of the UNC's ar­gu­ment comes from Al-Rawi's re­sponse to Sen­ate ques­tions in which he not­ed that for the years 2011-2015, Ram­lo­gan's AG of­fice "used" $522 mil­lion.

This fig­ure is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from Al-Rawi's pre­vi­ous state­ment that the AG's of­fice spent some $1.4 bil­lion un­der Ram­lo­gan's watch.

On Thurs­day, Sun­day Guardian re­ceived a doc­u­ment de­tail­ing Al-Rawi's re­sponse to ques­tions in the Sen­ate one year af­ter he as­sumed of­fice.

"The to­tal le­gal fees al­lo­ca­tion used by the UNC Gov­ern­ment in pe­ri­od 2010-2015, $522,314,155.00," Al-Rawi said in his Sen­ate re­sponse.

Sun­day Guardian spoke with a high-lev­el in­sid­er at the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's of­fice who con­firmed the fig­ure and then sought to clar­i­fy the AG's Sen­ate re­sponse.

"That was the AG of­fice (Ram­lo­gan's tenure)," he said.

"To­tal Gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­ture un­der Anand's (Ram­lo­gan) con­trol is large­ly 1.6 bil­lion."

He list­ed high pro­file cas­es such as Ram­lo­gan's law­suits against Petrotrin, Eteck, Ude­cott, and T&TEC.

He said even though those larg­er State en­ter­pris­es have le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, Ram­lo­gan "took con­duct and con­trol" of them.

"They nor­mal­ly func­tion in­de­pen­dent­ly—un­der UNC Anand took con­duct and con­trol eg, Mal­colm Jones/Petrotrin mat­ter, Calder Hart/Ude­cott mat­ter etc."

The spend­ing out of the AG's of­fice has been a bone of con­tention since Ram­lo­gan was fired.

In fact, in 2015 his suc­ces­sor Garvin Nicholas was forced to cor­rect mis­in­for­ma­tion in the pub­lic do­main.

"In the in­ter­est of trans­paren­cy, it must al­so be not­ed that some $80 mil­lion in for­eign pay­ments had been omit­ted from the ini­tial re­port of which $45.3 mil­lion was paid to De­loitte and Touche and $7.7 mil­lion to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s long-stand­ing Privy Coun­cil agents, Charles Rus­sell. This brings the to­tal paid out dur­ing the pe­ri­od to $408,260,340.48," Nicholas said then.

"These 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. I am as­sured that no over­pay­ments have ac­tu­al­ly been made," Nicholas said then.

MIN­ISTRY OF THE AT­TOR­NEY GEN­ER­AL AL­LO­CA­TIONS (2011-2015)

2011: $199 Mil­lion

2012: $230 Mil­lion

2013: $235 Mil­lion

2014: 270 Mil­lion

2015: $271 Mil­lion

5 YEARS TO­TAL = $1.235 Bil­lion

MIN­ISTRY OF THE AT­TOR­NEY GEN­ER­AL AL­LO­CA­TIONS (2016-2019)

2016: $376 Mil­lion

2017: $303 Mil­lion

2018: $317 Mil­lion

2019: $318 Mil­lion

4 YEARS TO­TAL = $1.314 Bil­lion