Rose­marie Sant

Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter “has the full sup­port of his Cab­i­net team.”

This from At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi in the face of re­ports of a per­son­al mat­ter in­volv­ing Young and ques­tions about a con­flict of in­ter­est re­lat­ing to his pri­vate ac­com­mo­da­tion.

Re­ports are that Young’s land­lord is a top of­fi­cial of State-owned oil com­pa­ny Petrotrin, which on­ly last week ap­peared be­fore the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment on En­er­gy. The re­port said Young should have made the re­la­tion­ship known and re­cused him­self.

But Young de­flect­ed the is­sue when the ques­tion of the con­flict of in­ter­est was put to him at the week­ly post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day. He said he want­ed his “pri­vate and per­son­al life,” to re­main just that and he had no in­ten­tion of be­ing drawn in­to any pub­lic dis­cus­sion in­to mat­ters in­volv­ing his pri­vate life.

On his Face­book page on Tues­day night, Young ac­knowl­edged that he had “seen the ar­ti­cle” and con­firmed that “my re­la­tion­ship with my part­ner has end­ed and we have part­ed ways on am­i­ca­ble terms.” Young made it clear in the post that he would like his “pri­vate and per­son­al life to re­main as such and I have no in­ten­tion of be­ing drawn in­to any dis­cus­sion of same.”

In the so­cial me­dia post, Young said he ex­pect­ed that be­cause of “the work that I do, those who op­pose me, for their own rea­sons, may con­tin­ue to at­tack me.”

At yes­ter­day’s news con­fer­ence, Al-Rawi picked up the point, link­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the re­port on Young’s pri­vate life to “those per­sons who have a prob­lem with Young’s im­mense ca­pac­i­ty and abil­i­ty and his very ag­gres­sive charge to an­ti-cor­rup­tion mat­ters,” be­ing pur­sued by the AG’s of­fice. He said they “will do any­thing in their pow­er to ma­lign him.”

Al-Rawi said it was a case of “if you can’t at­tack some­one on the ba­sis of their com­pe­tence and pro­fes­sion­al­ism then you go in­to their pri­vate life.”

But Al-Rawi, who him­self was in the spot­light ear­li­er this year on an is­sue in­volv­ing two teenagers with weapons at Camp Cu­mu­to, said those who at­tack peo­ple and their fam­i­ly “ought to be viewed as cow­ards.”

Al-Rawi said Young had “the full sup­port of his Cab­i­net team.”

There is no way, he said, that any­one can crit­i­cise the work which Young does.