SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

For­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath is urg­ing Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to stop bring­ing up old is­sues on the po­lit­i­cal plat­form to gar­ner votes and in­stead fo­cus on cur­rent mat­ters af­fect­ing the pop­u­la­tion.

He was re­spond­ing yes­ter­day to Im­bert who took a jab at him, telling Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment sup­port­ers at a meet­ing in Barataria on Thurs­day that Bharath had “spent $30 mil­lion on dog rice.”

Bharath was the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) un­der the Bas­deo Pan­day UNC gov­ern­ment in 1997 when most of a ship­ment of rice from In­dia failed to make it to this coun­try.

He was sub­se­quent­ly fired by the chair­man of the NFM Dr An­tho­ny Elias who lat­er re­signed as re­sult of pres­sure from the gov­ern­ment.

The deal in­volved the pur­chase of 12,000 tonnes of par­boiled rice from Gan­gadas Shah and Sons Com­pa­ny-half of which ar­rived in our shores with the oth­er half too spoilt to be used.

Bharath, how­ev­er, fired back at Im­bert, stat­ing that his state­ment was a dead is­sue.

“For­tu­nate­ly, no one takes Mr Im­bert se­ri­ous­ly which is re­al­ly re­gret­table from a coun­try’s per­spec­tive.”

He said it takes a great deal of wis­dom and knowl­edge to re­alise your own lev­el of ig­no­rance.

“In my opin­ion, the re­al­i­ty is that every­one in this coun­try with half a brain knows that the NFM mat­ter was set­tled in my favour...both in the courts of the Unit­ed King­dom and in Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

NFM, Bharath said was forced to set­tled all his out­stand­ing claims and le­gal fees.

“Clear­ly, he is dig­ging up a non-is­sue that took place 25 years ago.”

With lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion around the cor­ner, Bharath said the PNM will try to grasp at every straw.

Bharath said he found Im­bert’s state­ment to be alarm­ing “know­ing that he presided over three years of eco­nom­ic fail­ure and blamed every­one ex­cept him­self.”