The State has de­cid­ed to chal­lenge a $20 mil­lion award to nine men who were freed of the mur­der of busi­ness­woman Vin­dra Naipaul-Cool­man.

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s Of­fice re­vealed the lat­est de­vel­op­ment in the mat­ter via a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day.

“By way of con­tin­u­ing up­date, Sen­a­tor the Ho­n­ourable Regi­nald Ar­mour SC, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Min­is­ter of Le­gal Af­fairs, wish­es to in­form the pub­lic that on the ad­vice of re­tained lead coun­sel Mr Rol­ston Nel­son SC, an Ap­pli­ca­tion has to­day (yes­ter­day) been filed in the High Court on be­half of the State in the mat­ter of CV2020-01243 Sher­von Pe­ters & Oth­ers v The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al of Trinidad and To­ba­go, to set aside both the de­fault judg­ment and the award of dam­ages made against the State in favour of these Claimants,” it said.

It added that AG Ar­mour awaits the fix­ing of the date for the hear­ing of the ap­pli­ca­tion “and re­mains con­sis­tent in his com­mit­ment to en­sur­ing that the pub­lic con­tin­ues to be up­dat­ed on the progress of this mat­ter.”

In Jan­u­ary, High Court Mas­ter Martha Alexan­der or­dered the com­pen­sa­tion for Sher­von and De­von Pe­ters, their broth­er An­tho­ny Gloster, Joel Fras­er, Ronald Arm­strong, broth­ers Kei­da and Jameel Gar­cia, Mar­lon Trim­ming­ham, and An­to­nio Charles dur­ing her de­ci­sion in their ma­li­cious pros­e­cu­tion case.

The group filed the law­suit al­most four years af­ter they were freed of the charges in late May 2016.

The Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al en­tered an ap­pear­ance in the case but failed to de­fend it, lead­ing the group’s le­gal team, led by Anand Ram­lo­gan SC, suc­cess­ful­ly ob­tain­ing a de­fault judg­ment against it in Jan­u­ary 2021.

Based on the orig­i­nal judg­ment, the nine for­mer Diego Mar­tin ac­cused were each set to re­ceive $2.1 mil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion.

Soon af­ter the rul­ing, AG Ar­mour an­nounced that the rea­son the state did not mount a de­fence was due to the fact that the case file went miss­ing af­ter it was de­liv­ered to the So­lic­i­tor Gen­er­al’s Of­fice.

Amidst a pub­lic out­cry, the AG launched a probe in­to the mat­ter and hired re­tired High Court judge Stan­ley John to probe the mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of the file. Dur­ing the ear­ly stages of the probe, how­ev­er, John said it was re­vealed that the file had been re­turned to the So­lic­i­tor Gen­er­al’s Of­fice.