Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) po­lit­i­cal leader, David Ab­du­lah, be­lieves the gov­ern­ment is suf­fer­ing from a case of "stick break in their ears." He said Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ig­nored a tem­plate for pur­su­ing mat­ters of cor­rup­tion he and two for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­als gave him when he as­sumed of­fice in 2015, the con­se­quence of which, he said, will fall on tax­pay­ers.

Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Sun­day, Ab­du­lah said along with him­self, the Prime Min­is­ter was of­fered the tem­plate for pur­su­ing these mat­ters by for­mer UNC At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj and for­mer PNM At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie. At the helm of the ig­nored ad­vice, he said, was for an in­de­pen­dent spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor to be ap­point­ed and fund­ed to chase af­ter cor­rup­tion al­le­ga­tions.

"They would have then, who­ev­er the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor was, would then have been re­spon­si­ble for get­ting the in­for­ma­tion and ev­i­dence and on the ba­sis of that, pro­vid­ing the po­lice and the DPP with the ev­i­dence to charge or not to charge per­sons," he said.

He said spe­cial pros­e­cu­tors were ap­point­ed at least twice be­fore, Desmond Al­lum to pur­sue cor­rup­tion al­le­ga­tions in the Scott Drug Re­port, and Karl Hud­son-Phillips for what be­came known as the Pi­ar­co Air­port fi­as­co. He said this ap­proach should have been em­ployed in treat­ing with the lat­est cor­rup­tion fi­as­co in­volv­ing for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan and at­tor­neys Ger­ald Ramdeen and Vin­cent Nel­son.

"And it would not have on­ly re­lat­ed to Vin­cent Nel­son. It would have re­lat­ed to oth­er mat­ters that al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion and bid rig­ging were swirling around. But stick break in their ears and they didn't fol­low that ad­vice."

He said now that the ad­vice was dis­re­gard­ed, both the ac­cused in the mat­ter where Nel­son was ex­pect­ed to tes­ti­fy will "get off scot-free."

"Tax­pay­ers' mon­ey may have been cor­rupt­ly tak­en be­fore, we don't know, but if it was cor­rupt­ly tak­en- we lost mon­ey that way as tax­pay­ers...and then we pay­ing mon­ey to try to pur­sue le­gal bat­tles and those le­gal bat­tles have hit a dead end at the mo­ment. Maybe they could be re­sumed but at the mo­ment they have hit a dead end and we are pay­ing out mon­ey as a re­sult of that," he said.

"So, we los­ing both ways and this is un­ac­cept­able and is the re­sult of a gov­ern­ment that does not lis­ten to good ad­vice."