Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says in­for­ma­tion he re­ceived sug­gest­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go was be­ing of­fered sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, in fact, came from a scam­mer who was seek­ing to get mon­ey from him.

He said he will re­port the mat­ter to the po­lice.

The Prime Min­is­ter had told a news con­fer­ence Sun­day that he had re­ceived word from the Unit­ed Na­tions’ Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary say­ing that T&T was in place to re­ceive the fund­ing.

How­ev­er, the Prime Min­is­ter is­sued a state­ment yes­ter­day say­ing it was all a scam.

“Last Sat­ur­day whilst in Guyana, the chair­man of Cari­com com­mu­ni­cat­ed with me that the Of­fice of the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the UN want­ed to reach me and a cou­ple oth­er Cari­com Heads, to ad­vise us that he had re­ceived a sub­stan­tial grant from the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion to be dis­trib­uted among us in its on­go­ing pover­ty al­le­vi­a­tion pro­gramme,” Dr Row­ley said.

He added: “I re­turned a call to the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al on Sun­day (whose num­ber and pro­file pic­ture I have on my phone). I thought noth­ing un­usu­al of this up to this point, since the Gates Foun­da­tion had made grants to Trinidad and To­ba­go at least twice be­fore. This be­ing so, I men­tioned at the press con­fer­ence on Sun­day that I was ad­vised that we are to be al­lo­cat­ed an­oth­er grant as de­scribed.

“To­day, I at­tempt­ed to speak to the SG on the num­ber I was car­ry­ing on my phone but was on­ly able to com­mu­ni­cate by What­sApp and not voice. A per­son pur­port­ing to be the SG at­tempt­ed to en­cour­age me to use a for­eign bank to re­ceive this grant but there would be a sig­nif­i­cant pro­cess­ing fee.”

Dr Row­ley said that his sus­pi­cion was fur­ther aroused when the per­son on the oth­er end at­tempt­ed to guide him to­wards mak­ing a sub­stan­tial de­posit in a Chi­nese bank as a pre­req­ui­site to re­ceiv­ing the grant.

“Hav­ing re­quest­ed and not re­ceiv­ing any doc­u­men­ta­tion and be­ing con­tact­ed in a fa­mil­iar­i­ty not nor­mal­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the Of­fice of the SG, I was now con­vinced that this was a most brazen scam be­ing run in the shock­ing man­ner as de­scribed. I sub­se­quent­ly checked with the chair­man of Cari­com to see what was hap­pen­ing at his end. He for­ward­ed a stream of What­sApp mes­sages pur­port­ing to be com­ing from the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al at­tempt­ing to re­in­force the con­fi­dence trick, through the in­volve­ment of this oth­er high of­fice,” the PM said in the state­ment pub­lished on his Face­book page yes­ter­day.

He said he was sat­is­fied that there was no grant but that there was a “brazen at­tempt to scam coun­tries through the use of im­per­son­ation and iden­ti­ty theft.”

“I will be re­fer­ring this mat­ter to the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice and all oth­er rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties,” the PM said.

Speak­ing on his re­turn from Guyana in the VIP Lounge at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Sun­day, Dr Row­ley had said, “To­day, I have been ad­vised that we are lucky to be iden­ti­fied for a not-in­signif­i­cant share of some fund­ing to be made avail­able from the Bill Gates Foun­da­tion. I spoke to the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed Na­tions who has iden­ti­fied us for that gift that we will ac­cept and put to good use in T&T.”

He did not give de­tails on what would have qual­i­fied T&T for the funds and what the amount of it was to be, as he went on to dis­cuss oth­er mat­ters.

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