Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is ex­pect­ed to break his si­lence on the crim­i­nal charges against for­mer Min­is­ter Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald at two fo­rums on Thurs­day.

PNM sources said Row­ley is ex­pect­ed to at­tend Thurs­day's post-Cab­i­net me­dia con­fer­ence.

He will al­so be speak­ing at a PNM meet­ing lat­er that day at City Hall, Port-of-Spain which is in Mc­Don­ald’s Port-of-Spain South con­stituen­cy.

Mc­Don­ald is on sev­en al­leged cor­rup­tion charges.

Four oth­ers, in­clud­ing her com­pan­ion, Micheal Carew, are on a to­tal of 49 re­lat­ed charges.

Row­ley did not take me­dia ques­tions on the mat­ter at Wednes­day’s en­er­gy sec­tor pro­gramme launch at Hy­att Re­gency ho­tel. Nor did he do so at Wednes­day’s swear­ing-in func­tion of new Pub­lic Util­i­ties Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary Adri­an Leonce at Pres­i­dent’s House.

And when Row­ley ar­rived at Bal­isi­er House head­quar­ters for last night’s screen­ing ex­er­cise, he on­ly waved at me­dia cam­eras.

The screen­ing was done by the PNM for the nine elec­toral ar­eas in the Diego Mar­tin cor­po­ra­tion plus out­stand­ing ar­eas in Port-of-Spain, San­gre Grande and Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co Cor­po­ra­tions.

The screen­ing team mem­bers PNM chair­man Colm Im­bert and PNM deputy leader Ro­han Sinanan both de­clined to com­ment on Mc­Don­ald.

A bright spot pri­or to screen­ing was when new­ly-ap­point­ed Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary Adri­an Leonce ar­rived at Bal­isi­er House to ap­plause and hugs from PN­Mites.

PNM sources said Row­ley’s state­ments are al­so ex­pect­ed to in­clude Gov­ern­ment’s plan to deal with gangs get­ting state con­tracts.

The is­sue was ex­posed via a Guardian Me­dia in­ves­tiga­tive re­port last month which pro­vid­ed in­for­ma­tion that al­leged gang mem­bers were get­ting state con­tracts from Port-of-Spain and Diego Mar­tin cor­po­ra­tions over 2015-2017.

Moru­ga/Table­land MP Lovell Fran­cis al­so com­plained pub­licly that crim­i­nal gangs were try­ing to ex­tort mon­ey from con­trac­tors re­pair­ing roads in his con­stituen­cy and had al­so threat­ened his life.

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith had com­plained that rev­enue from the con­tracts was be­ing used by gangs to buy guns and drugs and the sit­u­a­tion had fu­elled turf wars for state con­tracts and led to a spike in the mur­der rate.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi sub­se­quent­ly said he was meet­ing with the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er on the is­sue. Af­ter that, he said Gov­ern­ment was for­mu­lat­ing a plan to deal with the mat­ter and he had ex­pect­ed it would have been dis­cussed at the next Cab­i­net meet­ing.

That was two weeks ago. There was no Cab­i­net meet­ing the week af­ter he said that. How­ev­er, Cab­i­net meets on Thurs­day.