DEREK ACHONG

The Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T (Ude­cott) has threat­ened to sue Pro­gres­sive Em­pow­er­ment Par­ty (PEP) leader Phillip Alexan­der for defama­tion. 

In a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter sent to Alexan­der, yes­ter­day, Ude­cott’s lawyer Deb­o­rah Peake, SC, stat­ed that Alexan­der de­famed the State project man­age­ment com­pa­ny in a video post­ed on the par­ty’s so­cial me­dia ac­counts on Jan­u­ary 3. 

In the video, ti­tled “A PEP Spe­cial In­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the cost of Pres­i­dent’s House Part 1”, Alexan­der and a guest iden­ti­fied as Stephan Reis dis­cussed the $89 mil­lion in ren­o­va­tions per­formed on the build­ing for ap­prox­i­mate­ly one hour and two min­utes. 

Peake said: “No­tably, through­out the video you made it clear that you were speak­ing from a lack of knowl­edge and did not even know the size of Pres­i­dent’s House but nev­er­the­less pro­ceed­ed to make a num­ber of false, ill-in­formed state­ment con­cern­ing the project and my client’s han­dling of same.” 

Peake stat­ed that the “egre­gious al­le­ga­tions” were whol­ly un­jus­ti­fied and ma­li­cious. 

“You knew and/or ought to have known that the false state­ments made by you are in­dica­tive of mal­ice and a clear in­ten­tion to bring Ude­cott’s and its of­fi­cers and em­ploy­ees in­to pub­lic ridicule, scan­dal, odi­um, con­tempt, and dis­re­pute and low­er the rep­u­ta­tion of my client in the opin­ion of right-think­ing mem­bers of so­ci­ety, its clients, con­trac­tors and con­sul­tants, Her Ex­cel­len­cy, the Pres­i­dent of the Re­pub­lic her­self as the end-user of the fa­cil­i­ty and the pub­lic at large,” Peake said. 

Peake re­quest­ed that Alexan­der pub­lish a com­plete re­trac­tion in at least two dai­ly news­pa­pers, give an un­der­tak­ing not to re­peat the al­le­ga­tions, and pay Ude­cott’s le­gal costs and com­pen­sa­tion for the defama­tion. 

In the let­ter, Peake not­ed that in May, last year, High Court Judge Car­ol Gob­in made strong state­ments on Alexan­der’s con­duct as she or­dered to pay busi­ness­man An­drew Gabriel $775,000 in com­pen­sa­tion for defama­tion. 

Alexan­der was giv­en un­til to­mor­row to re­spond to the let­ter be­fore Ude­cott files the law­suit. 

When Guardian Me­dia checked PEP’s Face­book and Youtube pages, there were no videos post­ed on Jan­u­ary 3 but one which ap­peared to be a sec­ond in­stall­ment, post­ed on Jan­u­ary 7. 

On Jan­u­ary 10, Alexan­der and his par­ty wrote to act­ing Ude­cott chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Tam­i­ca Charles-Phillips un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act for the scope of works for the project and copies of in­voic­es for work per­formed.