“Take your evidence to the police.”
That’s the advice of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar in response to claims by Opposition leader Dr Keith Rowley that an employee in the Office of the Prime Minister has links to a $644 million dollar drug bust.
Addressing supporters at a People’s Partnership meeting in Mayaro on Sunday night, Persad-Bissessar chalked Rowley’s claims up to hearsay.
“I am reading in today’s paper he is asking a question and what he is saying he says “Listen, I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else, who knows somebody else who knows somebody else, who say that somebody else working in the Office of the Prime Minister working with some other company,” she said.
“But listen man, if you have any type of wrong doing whether you work in my office, in your office or anywhere else, take your evidence to the police, take it to the police.”
At a People’s National Movement (PNM) meeting in Moruga on Friday night, Rowley challenged Persad-Bissessar to tell the nation whether there is an employee of the Prime Minister’s office with ties to the 2013 $644 m drug bust, where 7,000 pounds of cocaine were found in juice tins.
But Persad-Bissessar said her track record shows that she supports no wrongdoers.
“I will protect no wrong doers, my track record shows when there was impropriety even at my own personal pain, I fired them. I fired those who were not acting properly, who were not working in accordance with law.”
She equated Rowley’s claims with the 2013 Emailgate scandal.
“You know it is the same thing he did with Emailgate, the fabricated false emails he brought to the Parliament. When he brought it, why did he do it so? If you think that I and other ministers were conspiring to do the things you say, why did you not take it to the police?”
She threw out her own question to Rowley, asking him what he had done as MP for Diego Martin West during his decades-long tenure.
“For decades you have been the MP for Diego Martin West, point something, touch something, show us one thing you did for the people of Diego Martin West. Show us,” she challenged.
“Because it was my government and it was me that opened the Carenage Health Facility right in Diego Martin West. It was the Partnership government that did the dualling of the Diego Martin Highway and many other projects done in his own constituency.”