For­mer Hous­ing Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has re­quest­ed a copy of the judge­ment made by High Court Judge James Aboud in the mat­ter in­volv­ing the Es­tate Man­age­ment and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (EM­BD) and a group of con­trac­tors.

Mooni­lal made the state­ment yes­ter­day as he not­ed that he was not a par­ty to the mat­ter, in which the con­trac­tors were seek­ing to get the law­suit against them over con­tracts award­ed in the run-up to the 2015 Gen­er­al Elec­tion dis­missed at the pre­lim­i­nary stage

Not­ing what he said were, mis­lead­ing and mis­chie­vous state­ments by peo­ple as­so­ci­at­ed with the PNM on so­cial me­dia re­gard­ing the judg­ment, Mooni­lal said, “I wish to clar­i­fy that I had no ap­pli­ca­tion that was for de­ci­sion be­fore the court.

“These ap­pli­ca­tions were brought by ag­griev­ed con­trac­tors who were ad­vised and rep­re­sent­ed by British Queens Coun­sel and will no doubt de­ter­mine whether they wish to ap­peal the de­ci­sion dis­miss­ing their ap­pli­ca­tions. I am yet to file my de­fence in this mat­ter be­cause the court had it­self or­dered that I was not to do so un­til it had heard and de­ter­mined these very ap­pli­ca­tions.”

Mooni­lal said his le­gal team in­tend­ed to look at the rul­ing to see whether they need­ed to act on it.

“My le­gal team has re­quest­ed a copy of the judg­ment and the tran­script of the Judge’s oral de­liv­ery of his judg­ment. I have re­ceived pre­lim­i­nary ad­vice and in­tend to for­ward same to my lawyers in Lon­don to de­ter­mine whether I will join in any ap­peal which may in­clude the is­sue of bias,” he said.

“I look for­ward to hav­ing my say and day in court. I have noth­ing to fear and I am con­fi­dent that these spu­ri­ous and base­less po­lit­i­cal al­le­ga­tions will not pre­vail and that I will be vin­di­cat­ed. In­deed, Min­is­ter Stu­art Young has con­fessed re­cent­ly, in re­la­tion to his record 57 cab­i­net re­cusals, that he is per­son­al­ly in­volved in these po­lit­i­cal civ­il ini­tia­tives.”

Mooni­lal said the ma­li­cious com­ments by PNM so­cial me­dia trolls sug­gest­ing he will now have to face crim­i­nal charges and pros­e­cu­tion had al­so caught his at­ten­tion, not­ing they were “ridicu­lous and demon­strate a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of the le­gal sys­tem” be­cause the case was a civ­il mat­ter.

“In their rush to score cheap po­lit­i­cal points, they may al­so find them­selves in court over the defam­a­to­ry re­marks and char­ac­ter as­sas­si­na­tion,” he said of the so­cial me­dia com­men­ta­tors.