Carisa Lee

Four mem­bers of the Phar­ma­cy Board of T&T are re­quest­ing in­for­ma­tion from pres­i­dent An­drew Ra­haman ahead of the next An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing (AGM) due in Feb­ru­ary.

They in­clude Min­istry of Health-ap­point­ed mem­bers Ju­nia Wal­cott and Clin­ton Sa­hadeo, the Med­ical Board ap­pointees Dr Aruna Singh and Dr Neil Singh.

The coun­cil has ten mem­bers, with the oth­er six elect­ed by the mem­bers of the Phar­ma­cy Board.

In three-page let­ter sent yes­ter­day, the group asked sev­en ques­tions of Ra­haman seek­ing in­for­ma­tion ahead of the AGM, in­clud­ing how many reg­is­tered phar­ma­cists there were in the coun­try up to 2022.

When Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed Ra­haman yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, he said he was yet to re­ceive any let­ter or email.

He ad­mit­ted to not be­ing hap­py about the Feb­ru­ary 7 dead­line giv­en by the mem­bers.

Claim­ing he had al­so been threat­ened by some mem­bers, Ra­haman said, “So, I would say pub­licly to hell with them with giv­ing me dead­lines. Who are they? I am the chair­man of this board, I am the one with the le­gal knowl­edge, I am not let­ting non-elect­ed mem­bers come and rule this thing, you know.”

Ra­haman said he had made a re­port at the Crim­i­nal In­ves­ti­ga­tions De­part­ment (CID) about re­cent threats.

The Phar­ma­cy Board pres­i­dent said this was one of the rea­sons he was yet to sched­ule a date for the AGM.

Ad­dress­ing this, ap­point­ed board mem­ber Sa­hadeo said it’s im­por­tant that they get in­for­ma­tion about the board’s op­er­a­tions be­fore they at­tend the AGM and are blind­sided.

“All we ask­ing is that we get the in­for­ma­tion about the pro­fes­sion,” Sa­hadeo said.

The im­passe be­tween the ap­point­ed mem­bers and Ra­haman stemmed from the board’s fail­ure to sub­mit the prac­tis­ing cer­tifi­cate ap­pli­ca­tions of phar­ma­cists to the Min­istry of Health on time.

The li­cens­es ex­pired on the week­end of Jan­u­ary 14-15 be­fore the min­istry gave phar­ma­cists an ex­ten­sion to en­sure there was no dis­rup­tion of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ser­vices in ei­ther the pub­lic or pri­vate health sec­tor.

Ra­haman came un­der fire for the sub­mis­sion fail­ure but in­stead blamed the min­istry of the de­lay, not­ing it was not recog­nis­ing board sec­re­tary/reg­is­trar Suann Joseph-Mout­tet’s el­i­gi­bil­i­ty to con­duct the process.

Ra­haman re­vealed that they had paid off the $TT236,250 in rent owed to Group of Pro­fes­sion­al As­so­ci­a­tions Ltd for their head­quar­ters.

“We paid off the debt plus $16,875 be­cause a new month rent be­came due...We owe ze­ro dol­lars as of a few weeks ago,” he said.

The group is al­so ques­tion­ing Ra­haman’s $10,000 con­sul­tan­cy fee and his hold­ing the of­fice for 20 years.

But Ra­haman said he has done every­thing ac­cord­ing to the act and reg­u­la­tions.

“I won the elec­tion on the year 2000. We had elec­tion in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022 and I won all...the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic process oc­curred,” he said.

He ex­plained that the dur­ing the last elec­tion, five peo­ple’s nom­i­na­tions were in­valid and the sixth per­son made a mis­take on her nom­i­na­tion form.

He said the min­istry’s ap­pointees were in­vit­ed to an emer­gency meet­ing on Mon­day but re­fused to meet. He ex­plained that the Med­ical Board ap­pointees al­so told him they were not avail­able for the meet­ing.