Richard Lord

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said a foren­sic au­dit is to be car­ried out in­to the award of schol­ar­ships un­der the for­mer PNM Gov­ern­ment. She said an Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion (EOC) re­port on the mat­ter is to be sent to the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion and the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions for con­sid­er­a­tion and de­ter­mi­na­tion. Dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion she re­mind­ed Man­ning of his pre­vi­ous state­ment that "jail eh nice." She ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of dis­crim­i­nat­ing against cit­i­zens of this coun­try in its schol­ar­ship fund un­der the then Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment. She said that was based on a Ju­ly 2011 find­ing by the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion af­ter a mat­ter was tak­en to it by for­mer pres­i­dent of Go­pio, De­vant Ma­haraj, in 2009. Ma­haraj is now Trans­port Min­is­ter.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said un­der the pro­gramme sev­en per cent of East In­di­ans were award­ed schol­ar­ships while 93 per cent were non-In­di­ans. Per­sad-Bisses­sar said schol­ar­ships were award­ed not on a needs ba­sis but on the ba­sis of rec­om­men­da­tions from min­is­ters, in­clud­ing then prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning. She dis­played a copy of one such ap­pli­ca­tion, which was ad­dressed to then min­is­ter Joan Yuille-Williams. She said Man­ning wrote at the top of the ap­pli­ca­tion: "Please han­dle this qui­et­ly." Gov­ern­ment MPs re­spond­ed with: "What? What? Shame!" She al­so read out part of an­oth­er ap­pli­ca­tion from the daugh­ter of for­mer SU­ATT di­rec­tor, Brigadier Pe­ter Joseph, in which Man­ning said: "Does not qual­i­fy un­der needy. How­ev­er, some as­sis­tance is rec­om­mend­ed."