The le­gal team for the claimants in the saga of the miss­ing case file has heav­i­ly crit­i­cised the find­ings of the re­port in­to the mat­ter call­ing it a “damp squib” and claim­ing it may now cost the State $25 mil­lion in dam­ages.

Se­nior Coun­sel Anand Ram­lo­gan told Guardian Me­dia, “It failed to an­swer the burn­ing ques­tions raised in the terms of ref­er­ence and was clear­ly de­signed to save face and do po­lit­i­cal dam­age con­trol. It failed to sat­is­fy the terms of ref­er­ence as no one has been held ac­count­able. No one is to blame for any­thing that went wrong, it would have us all be­lieve.”

Ram­lo­gan ques­tioned why there were no rec­om­men­da­tions for dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion or men­tion of any re­port to the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP).

But Ram­lo­gan claimed the re­port did em­bar­rass the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour.

“Since an elec­tron­ic file could not sim­ply ‘go miss­ing’ or worst yet, as he in­sin­u­at­ed, ‘stolen’ be­cause it can be eas­i­ly re­trieved from the email in­box, he has wast­ed hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on this po­lit­i­cal pap­py show of an in­ves­ti­ga­tion,” he said.

Ram­lo­gan said sev­er­al ques­tions re­main unan­swered.

“Who was re­spon­si­ble for the State’s fail­ure to file a de­fence in this mat­ter? Since the court doc­u­ments were served on the AG’s of­fice, who is to blame for the State’s fail­ure to at­tend court? Why did the AG pro­pose to the court that each claimant should re­ceive be­tween $750,000 to $1.2 mil­lion? Such a pro­pos­al could on­ly have been made with the knowl­edge and ap­proval of Ar­mour; what is the ex­pla­na­tion for this?”

Ram­lo­gan’s le­gal team in­cludes Ganesh Sa­roop and Renu­ka Ram­na­jan.—Akash Sama­roo