DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Days af­ter the Trinidad and To­ba­go Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute (TT­TI) urged the Gov­ern­ment to in­tro­duce cam­paign fi­nance re­form, Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) deputy po­lit­i­cal leader San­jiv Bood­hu has added his voice, cit­ing new al­le­ga­tions that San­gre Grande busi­ness­man Dan­ny Guer­ra fi­nanced the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’s (UNC) 2025 cam­paign in the con­stituen­cy.

Guer­ra, pre­vi­ous­ly de­tained un­der the last State of Emer­gency in con­nec­tion with a plot to as­sas­si­nate a gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial, has al­so been linked to fi­nanc­ing a gang. The al­le­ga­tions raise fresh ques­tions about the sources of po­lit­i­cal fund­ing and the need for trans­paren­cy in cam­paign fi­nanc­ing.

Bood­hu yes­ter­day crit­i­cised De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge for his lack of com­ment, de­scrib­ing the si­lence as “trou­bling.”

Speak­ing with re­porters out­side the Red House yes­ter­day, he said: “I think the si­lence of, in par­tic­u­lar the Min­is­ter of De­fence, on this is­sue—which aris­es as a re­sult of his cam­paign specif­i­cal­ly—is one that has to be ad­dressed by the Gov­ern­ment.”

Re­flect­ing on the PNM’s record in of­fice, Bood­hu ac­knowl­edged that he was not in gov­ern­ment and could not de­fend the par­ty’s fail­ure to in­tro­duce cam­paign fi­nance re­form, though he not­ed the par­ty had pur­sued ‘ex­plain your wealth’ leg­is­la­tion to track il­lic­it funds. He cit­ed quar­ry­ing fines, which his­tor­i­cal­ly fell far short of po­ten­tial earn­ings, as an ex­am­ple of en­force­ment gaps.

With the new al­le­ga­tions sur­round­ing the UNC’s 2025 cam­paign, Bood­hu said the is­sue of cam­paign fi­nanc­ing has gained re­newed ur­gency.

“I have read in the me­dia that Mr Guer­ra was a fi­nancer of the UNC. What we have seen from the UNC them­selves is that Mr Guer­ra was cer­tain­ly an as­so­ciate of the now Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for To­co/San­gre Grande. There are sev­er­al pho­tographs in cir­cu­la­tion, and I have not heard any de­nial that that is not the case, nor that he was not a fi­nancer of the UNC. The resur­gence of con­ver­sa­tion on cam­paign fi­nanc­ing aris­es as a re­sult of this is­sue,” he said.