Gail Alexan­der

There was no is­sue with the le­gal fees which were be­ing paid to fired Cli­co at­tor­neys Fyard Ho­sein and Michael Quam­i­na, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai said yes­ter­day. He was asked about the is­sue dur­ing yes­ter­day's Sen­ate bud­get de­bate. The for­mer Cli­co le­gal team which was hired by for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an was fired last week. They were re­placed by at­tor­neys Joseph Toney (COP chair­man), Jagdeo Singh and Seenath Jairam, SC.

Howai said yes­ter­day: "We sat down and looked at it. We did a full re­view and on the ba­sis of that we de­cid­ed that it made sense to make the changes that were made. It is how we thought we would like to pro­ceed in go­ing for­ward with the mat­ter so it's on that ba­sis we made the de­ci­sion. "We con­sult­ed on whom we should choose... no I don't want to get in­to de­tail, every­body will have their own point of view but at the end of the day the client de­cides."

He said the is­sue for him in the sce­nario was to bring the lin­ger­ing Cli­co af­fair to a close. He added: "It is to try to deal with that... some of the oth­er is­sues are just nice the­atre. "But what will re­al­ly be af­fect­ed at the end of the day is the $20 bil­lion cost of the Cli­co is­sue and that's what we are try­ing to deal with."

Howai said he was work­ing on the is­sues to en­sure, for ex­am­ple, the Re­pub­lic Bank shares in­volved were freed up. He said he had some chal­lenges with the De­posit In­sur­ance Co-op­er­a­tion (DIC).?He said the DIC was hold­ing some of the shares in its ca­pac­i­ty as liq­uida­tor and had not got in­volved with the as­pect of Cli­co shares in the One Caribbean Me­dia group.

He said his main con­cern was to get the EF­PA hold­er in Cli­co sort­ed out ur­gent­ly with ref­er­ence to the Re­pub­lic Bank shares. He said ef­forts had to be made to en­sure the liq­uida­tors of CIB re­leased the shares they held.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan did not re­spond to a writ­ten query from the T&T Guardian on his view on the fir­ing of the Cli­co at­tor­neys.

Pi­lot­ing the 2013 bud­get in the Sen­ate, Howai re­it­er­at­ed some of the bud­get's con­tents, es­pe­cial­ly cost-cut­ting terms. He said the $7 bil­lion Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme would be re­viewed con­stant­ly. He said the pub­lic/pri­vate sec­tor part­ner­ship thrust by Gov­ern­ment this year would ap­ply in the first in­stance to ten projects, in­clud­ing some the Min­istries of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Trans­port, Pub­lic Util­i­ties, Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and Ed­u­ca­tion.

Not­ing the $5.5 bil­lion al­lo­cat­ed for na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, Howai warned Gov­ern­ment could not mere­ly keep throw­ing mon­ey at the sit­u­a­tion. He said CEPEP?and URP redi­rec­tion al­so was part of the an­ti-crime thrust. He a drew at­ten­tion to mon­i­tor­ing mea­sures to en­sure the GATE ed­u­ca­tion­al con­ces­sion would no longer be abused. He said $5 bil­lion would be spent over the next five years to con­vert fu­el sys­tems to CNG?gas as the fu­el sub­sidy was phased out.