“Right is right, even if every­one is against it, and wrong is wrong even if every­one is do­ing it” – William Penn

Wednes­day May 20, will go down in His­to­ry as a day where it was pub­lished that the Am­bas­sador to the Unit­ed States “called out” our Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and by ex­ten­sion, our Prime Min­is­ter.

In my opin­ion, Min­is­ter Young “gam­bled” that the US Em­bassy would not make a com­ment based on his ut­ter­ances. I per­son­al­ly can­not re­call any US Am­bas­sador ever mak­ing a com­ment on con­ver­sa­tions with Gov­ern­ment Of­fi­cials.

The mere fact that Mr Mon­del­lo broke with tra­di­tion em­pha­sis­es how se­ri­ous a mat­ter this is. And be­lieve you me, this mat­ter is not closed.

The mere fact that he chose to com­ment, con­vinces me that this mat­ter is be­ing pur­sued by US of­fi­cials.

Adding fu­el to the fire, the Gov­ern­ment of Aru­ba has dis­tanced it­self from the Paria fu­el deal, con­firm­ing it did not pur­chase a ship­ment of oil from T&T.

For those who do not know, it is ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to con­duct any trans­ac­tion with­out due dili­gence. Try open­ing a sim­ple bank ac­count.

The Paria Fu­el trad­ing com­pa­ny can­not sim­ply sell 150,000 bar­rels of fu­el with­out hav­ing prop­er in­for­ma­tion.

Did Aru­ba ever buy oil from us? Did the buy­er ever buy fu­el from us?

Who is pay­ing for it and did we do all due dili­gence test­ing with re­gard to mon­ey laun­der­ing and sanc­tions?

Is our pop­u­la­tion so gullible to ac­cept that our Prime Min­is­ter met with an of­fi­cial from Venezuela and a se­nior of­fi­cer(s) from Pdvsa to dis­cuss COVID-19 and this af­ter our Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty gave clear­ance for an en­tire team to vis­it our Prime Min­is­ter to dis­cuss COVID—with­out any mem­ber of the Min­istry of Health be­ing present.

Are we so gullible to be­lieve that the Prime Min­is­ter was not prop­er­ly in­formed by the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty with re­gard to the con­ver­sa­tion with the US Am­bas­sador?

Are we so gullible to be­lieve that the Prime Min­is­ter did not know the cre­den­tials of the mem­bers of the team that ac­com­pa­nied the Venezue­lan vice pres­i­dent?

The ques­tion begs then, why would our gov­ern­ment take any risk to en­cour­age US sanc­tions against us?

This sim­ply makes no sense what­so­ev­er.

Re­cent­ly, the Prime Min­is­ter said that he was ner­vous to open up some of the COVID re­stric­tions amid all these is­sues tak­ing place.

Now, he “chills” in his Gar­den of Eden whilst faced with a sud­den res­ig­na­tion and calls for his go-to min­is­ter to re­sign.

Let’s hope he re­moves the dan­ger­ous weeds from his gar­den.