Gail Alexan­der

There is no “ex­piry date” on fraud mat­ters, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has point­ed out, par­tic­u­lar­ly to ILP leader Jack Warn­er.

Row­ley made the point dur­ing Wednes­day’s PNM Mt Lam­bert “Meet­up” cam­paign meet­ing.

He re­marked on Warn­er’s com­ments fol­low­ing Row­ley’s re­cent dis­clo­sure that the Dutch Gov­ern­ment was prob­ing the pur­chase of ves­sels which the last Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship (PP) Gov­ern­ment bought from the Dutch Damen com­pa­ny.

A for­mer Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter was men­tioned. The cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion fin­ished the pay­ments.

Warn­er who was a PP Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter (up to 2013) had tak­en is­sue with Row­ley’s com­ments on the mat­ter.

But Row­ley said Warn­er’s com­ments made it seem like he (Row­ley) wasn’t sup­posed to tell T&T about what the Dutch Gov­ern­ment told the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion on the probe they’re do­ing re­gard­ing the pur­chase of the ves­sels which the last Gov­ern­ment bought.

Row­ley said he’d seen Warn­er iden­ti­fy­ing him­self with the Dutch Gov­ern­ment en­quiry, “But I didn’t call Jack’s name, they said ‘Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter,’ but he’s on TV iden­ti­fy­ing him­self and ac­cus­ing me of call­ing his name – I didn’t know was he, when they say ‘Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty’.”

Row­ley not­ed Warn­er said he’d been speak­ing about a mat­ter of sev­en years ago.

“I didn’t know fraud had an ex­piry date. There is no ex­piry date on fraud. You’d think Jack Warn­er knows that,” he said.

He asked if a sit­u­a­tion al­leged­ly oc­curred a long time ago and if po­lice hadn’t spo­ken to any­one for five or so years, whether it made the sit­u­a­tion okay and Gov­ern­ment shouldn’t raise it now.

Row­ley claimed Warn­er’s ar­gu­ments are like UNC MP Roodal Mooni­lal’s. “And they want to re­turn to Gov­ern­ment? They refuse to ac­cept that some­thing was wrong so if they get the op­por­tu­ni­ty they will do it again! That’s what that (sit­u­a­tion) means,” he said.

“There’s no con­dem­na­tion for wrong­do­ing on their part,” he said, adding that oth­er­wise, the Op­po­si­tion wouldn’t be so chum­my with the PDP leader who’s on a charge.

“And they wouldn’t have al­lowed a man to head a re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion while he was on a cor­rup­tion charge. This coun­try will sur­vive but not on those stan­dards. You have to teach your chil­dren about dis­ci­pline oth­er­wise we’ll all be­come like pas­sen­ger pi­geons and end up like the Do­do bird (dead).”

Among Row­ley’s jabs at op­po­nents, he said no PNM can­di­date could have told him to put them back as a can­di­date be­cause they held se­crets for him and no PNM can­di­date was the screen­ing team’s girl­friend or boyfriend. Row­ley said the up­com­ing elec­tion isn’t about who can make the pop­u­la­tion more promis­es or give more things but who could take T&T in the right di­rec­tion and make the best of a bad sit­u­a­tion.

He said while the PNM’s term had been more dif­fi­cult than the pre­vi­ous, PNM’s re­sults were bet­ter than the last ad­min­is­tra­tion and have pro­duced the best chance for pos­i­tive out­comes for T&T, post-COVID.

“So when you hear two-by-four rum shop politi­cians say­ing ‘Gov­ern­ment heart­less’, they just have noth­ing to say. We left no one be­hind. Every re­quest to the Health Min­istry got a pos­i­tive re­sponse from Cab­i­net,’’ he said.

“Don’t let peo­ple fool you. We’ve been mak­ing progress and we are mak­ing progress – strong, tough peo­ple get out of dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions all the time.’’

New fer­ry ar­rives soon, oth­er in ear­ly 2021

The first of the two fast fer­ries for To­ba­go - The “APT James” - will ar­rive lat­er this year and the oth­er, ear­ly next year, Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley added.

He said the first fer­ry will be the so­lu­tion to the fer­ry prob­lems ex­pe­ri­enced. Be­cause of de­lays caused by the glob­al COVID pan­dem­ic, he said there would be a short de­lay for the sec­ond one’s ar­rival which will ear­ly in the new year. Af­ter that, the T&T Spir­it will be dis­posed of. He praised the two To­ba­go MPs and de­tailed PNM’s achieve­ments in con­stituen­cies.

He said it was pro­ject­ed that once the COVID 19 virus re­cedes, the world econ­o­my will kick start very quick­ly and re­turn to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy of how it was, with eco­nom­ic growth pro­ject­ed at 5.8 per cent. Wher­ev­er T&T - in the emerg­ing mar­ket cat­e­go­ry –ends this year, once it’s not as in­fect­ed and has to close the econ­o­my again and mar­kets pick up, it was ex­pect­ed it would be able to turn­around the di­rec­tion T&T went in 2020. Row­ley added. He not­ed Gov­ern­ment’s Re­cov­ery Roadmap team con­sult­ed 120 sub-sec­tor lead­ers to pro­duce its plan

He al­so cit­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties ahead, es­pe­cial­ly with digi­ti­sa­tion. Us­ing phone tech­nol­o­gy as an ex­am­ple, Row­ley re­lat­ed how lost and dis­con­nect­ed one could feel with­out a cell phone. But the new en­vi­ron­ment would re­quire lead­er­ship that can chart a course to take ad­van­tage of the set­backs ex­pe­ri­enced, he said

Row­ley gave a spe­cial thank you to health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyal­snigh whom he said had done T&T proud on COVID man­age­ment. He said re­gion­al Prime Min­is­ters talk about Deyals­ingh as though they know him and a lot of what oth­er is­lands have done on COVID man­age­ment has been based on guide­lines by T&T’s Health Min­istry and Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer.