Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for La Hor­quet­ta/Tal­paro and Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice, Fos­ter Cum­mings, is in the news to­day af­ter the con­tents of what is pur­port­ed to be a T&T Po­lice Ser­vice Spe­cial Branch re­port on him were made pub­lic on Thurs­day night.

The doc­u­ment was leaked to the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and dis­sem­i­nat­ed by Sen­a­tor Jayan­ti Lutch­me­di­al dur­ing a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing.

Es­sen­tial­ly, it re­veals that Cum­mings was the sub­ject of a po­lice probe in 2019 sur­round­ing the op­er­a­tions of busi­ness­es he was af­fil­i­at­ed with, he hav­ing been a busi­ness­man be­fore ac­cept­ing po­si­tions with­in the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment Gov­ern­ment in that same year. More im­por­tant­ly, the doc­u­ment al­leges that Cum­mings may have been in­volved in ac­tiv­i­ty sig­nif­i­cant enough to prompt a po­lice probe.

Min­is­ter Cum­mings called a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day to de­fend him­self against the is­sues high­light­ed in the doc­u­ment. While not quite con­firm­ing whether he had knowl­edge of the probe, or of the au­then­tic­i­ty of the doc­u­ment, Cum­mings de­nied the al­le­ga­tions made in the re­port. How­ev­er, he was al­so quite clear in an­nounc­ing that he was sure, giv­en that the doc­u­ment was leaked at this par­tic­u­lar point, it was a cal­cu­lat­ed at­tack on his rep­u­ta­tion and char­ac­ter, which he de­nounced.

There are a cou­ple of things which stand out in this mat­ter, the first be­ing that this doc­u­ment was pre­pared in 2019 and would have been pre­sent­ed to then-com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith.

The ob­vi­ous ques­tion is if this probe was deemed to be crit­i­cal then, why was it still lan­guish­ing on a shelf be­fore be­ing leaked by an ap­par­ent whistle­blow­er, prompt­ing cur­rent act­ing CoP Mc Don­ald Ja­cob to scram­ble to seek in­for­ma­tion on the mat­ter.

Fur­ther­more, it rais­es ques­tions as to whether Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was al­so made aware of the probe, since the in­for­ma­tion, if ac­cu­rate and proven by way of an in­ves­ti­ga­tion, would have been im­por­tant to de­ci­sions sub­se­quent­ly made on the in­di­vid­ual.

This is be­cause one of the pil­lars PM Row­ley cam­paigned on for the last two suc­cess­ful elec­tion cam­paigns was root­ing out cor­rup­tion and white-col­lar crime with­in the sys­tem. As such, PM Row­ley can­not be com­fort­able about the claims made in the re­port.

No mat­ter how stren­u­ous­ly he de­fend­ed his name yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter Cum­mings can­not feel com­fort­able now that the pub­lic has been made aware this doc­u­ment ex­ists and the al­le­ga­tions made against him. Quite frankly, as an in­di­vid­ual elect­ed to lead by ex­am­ple, the Min­is­ter and the pub­lic de­serve to know the truth in this mat­ter.

This apart, this sce­nario comes up even as the coun­try is bat­tling a surge of mur­ders by the crim­i­nal el­e­ment in re­cent months. There is an on­go­ing ar­gu­ment that a coun­try’s in­abil­i­ty to deal with white-col­lar crime may trans­late to the com­mi­tal or more se­ri­ous crimes, as in­di­vid­u­als feel more em­bold­ened by law en­force­ment’s abil­i­ty to de­tect it and bring in­di­vid­u­als to jus­tice.

As such, it is ex­treme­ly crit­i­cal now that CoP Ja­cob gets in­for­ma­tion on the sta­tus of this probe in­to Cum­mings’ ac­tiv­i­ty, with the goal of in­di­cat­ing to the pub­lic whether it was con­clud­ed or not and its find­ings, since it is on­ly then there can be clo­sure.