Mick­ela Pan­day has crit­i­cised the Pres­i­dent of the Sen­ate, Wade Mark, af­ter he ruled that mo­tions of priv­i­lege brought against Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar did not meet the re­quired thresh­old. Pan­day made the com­ments in a so­cial me­dia post fol­low­ing Mark’s de­ci­sion to shut down mo­tions filed by In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor An­tho­ny Vieira and Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Dr Amery Browne.

In the post, Pan­day said the Prime Min­is­ter had been con­tact­ed four days ear­li­er and asked whether she in­tend­ed to name two In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors she had ac­cused of cor­rup­tion.She said the Prime Min­is­ter re­spond­ed in a What­sApp ex­change with a sin­gle word, “No.”

Pan­day re­ferred to the role of the Priv­i­leges Com­mit­tee, which ex­ists to up­hold the pow­ers and priv­i­leges of Par­lia­ment and to en­sure mem­bers can car­ry out their du­ties with­out im­prop­er in­ter­fer­ence.She said the com­mit­tee ex­am­ines re­ferred mat­ters to de­ter­mine whether a breach of priv­i­lege has oc­curred, in­ves­ti­gates the facts and makes rec­om­men­da­tions.

She ques­tioned why Mark would not al­low the mat­ter to be ex­am­ined, ar­gu­ing that al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion against sen­a­tors in the per­for­mance of their du­ties, with­out par­tic­u­lars or ev­i­dence, amount to a pri­ma fa­cie breach of priv­i­lege.Pan­day de­scribed Mark as the longest-serv­ing mem­ber of the Sen­ate and said he should be ful­ly aware of the se­ri­ous­ness of such ac­cu­sa­tions.

In her post, Pan­day ac­cused the Sen­ate Pres­i­dent of aban­don­ing the prin­ci­ples he once de­fend­ed while in Op­po­si­tion, in­clud­ing trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty.She said his rul­ing pro­vid­ed no mean­ing­ful ex­pla­na­tion and sug­gest­ed that stan­dards had changed now that he oc­cu­pied the chair.

Pan­day warned that al­low­ing al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion to go un­ex­plored with­in Par­lia­ment would wors­en what she de­scribed as a na­tion­al cri­sis of trust.She said the coun­try now faced a sit­u­a­tion in which two sen­a­tors were par­tic­i­pat­ing in de­bates and votes on leg­is­la­tion while un­der claims by the Prime Min­is­ter that they were pre­pared to trade favours for their votes.

Ac­cord­ing to Pan­day, if the al­le­ga­tions were true, Par­lia­ment would be com­pro­mised at the high­est lev­el.If they were false, she said the Prime Min­is­ter had mis­led the coun­try.She con­clud­ed, “There is no mid­dle ground.”