Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine is en­gag­ing in “games of des­per­a­tion” and adds that he has no ap­petite for it.

In a What­sApp mes­sage fol­low­ing a re­quest by Guardian Me­dia last night for a re­sponse to Au­gus­tine’s state­ment in the THA yes­ter­day, Dr Row­ley said that he couldn’t com­ment in de­tail as he had not heard what Au­gus­tine said.

How­ev­er, he said the mat­ter had al­ready been ex­ten­sive­ly dealt with ear­li­er in the week.

“I did not hear. I spoke on this mat­ter with great clar­i­ty in To­ba­go on Mon­day. I con­clud­ed by ex­plain­ing that noth­ing has ever reached me per­son­al­ly, but some­thing came to my PS (Mau­rice Suite), Head of the Pub­lic Ser­vice, and im­me­di­ate­ly it was with­drawn from him by the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion be­cause the of­fi­cer be­ing ad­vanced by the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion had to be hasti­ly with­drawn be­cause that per­son was in­ter­dict­ed on al­le­ga­tions made by the THA (this of­fi­cer has since been sus­pend­ed),” Dr Row­ley said.

He added, “I made it quite clear that I ex­pect­ed any­time this week, as the Com­mis­sion does its work, that a name should be pro­posed to me seek­ing my “No Ob­jec­tion”. So far, that has not yet hap­pened. What this means is that through­out this en­tire process/saga, noth­ing has ever reached me EX­CEPT the Chief Sec­re­tary ap­proach­ing me with a name that he would like to see hired in­to the po­si­tion.”

Dr Row­ley said that on that par­tic­u­lar name, “one can say that there was con­tact and con­sul­ta­tion be­tween the Chief Sec­re­tary and my­self but as of tonight, I know of no name hav­ing been ad­vanced by the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. We await the nec­es­sary cor­re­spon­dence.”

The Prime Min­is­ter went on to add, “In the mean­time, I re­al­ly don’t have the ap­petite for the Chief Sec­re­tary’s games of des­per­a­tion. I wish he would grow up and stop treat­ing se­ri­ous busi­ness like mak­ing ‘mud­dy pot’.”