Works and Transport Minister Rohan Sinanan “stepped on corns” when he began to clean up the corruption at the Port of Port of Spain and that is why there is now a concerted attack against him and calls for him to be fired, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has said.
Rowley came to Sinanan’s defence, describing him as “a man of the highest quality and the highest integrity.”
“We will hold the correct people accountable and responsible, well of course there are those who want the minister’s head, just give us the minister’s head and leave whoever else is there. That is not how we operate,” Rowley said as he delivered the feature address at the People’s National Movement’s (PNM) post-Budget public meeting at Piggott’s corner in Belmont on Friday night.
Rowley said his administration is “resolutely pursuing wrongdoing to hold white collar crime by the neck and make people accountable for their actions,” but this has caused some backlash.
“Of course we will lose one or two friends over that, but I am sure the vast majority of the people of Trinidad and Tobago want to see that done so that we don’t end up paying billions and billions that we should not be paying,” he said.
He said when the PNM won the general election in September 2015 he offered Sinanan a “senatorship,” but he turned down the offer and instead said he preferred a young person be given the opportunity. But Rowley said when he wanted to undertake a reshuffle of his Cabinet in October 2016 he again approached Sinanan and “twisted his arm” to get him to accept the job.
“And I sent him down to the port of Port-of-Spain with one instruction and the instruction is to go there and find out what is going on there and clean up that place,” Rowley said.
“Strange enough, the minute he began to deal with the port he comes under fire because there is a body of people in this country who talking about wanting corruption to be removed from the landscape, not at all if the corruption working for them it good leave it just so don’t interfere with it, if it working for anybody else well they know to stand on their high horse, they know about procurement process.”
Sinanan was the first person to alert the country to “the naked corruption process of the Galicia” and as such he “stepped on corns,” Rowley said.
His predecessor at the Works and Transport Ministry, current Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs Fitzgerald Hinds, also said Sinanan should be “applauded rather than criticised.”
Sinanan recently came under scrutiny after it was learned Kallco Limited had been awarded the contract for the first segment of Churchill Roosevelt Highway to Manzanilla extension. The wife of Kallco director Arvin Kalloo is Sinanan’s second cousin.
But Sinanan said he recused himself from the Cabinet decision to select Kallco and said the contractor had been vetted by the State agency responsible for the contract, the National Infrastructural Development Company (Nidco).
“They tried to put things on my Minister of Works and Transport. It did not work because it just was not true,” Hinds said.
Hinds said the “bottom line” is that Kallco’s bid was $110 million less than the next closest rival.
“And to the credit of my colleague Rohan Sinanan, he made history, you do not know this, but since he went to that office he has asked the lawyers to put inside of every single contract a non-corruption clause, meaning that with this clause if anyone is justifiably accused of corruption the contract is automatically terminated,” Hinds said.