(Trinidad Express) The appointment of Trinidad Government Senator and Minister of Planning, Restructuring and Gender Affairs, Mary King will be revoked by President Maxwell Richards this afternoon.
This comes following a meeting Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar held with President Richards at 11.30 a.m. today to discuss evidence that implicated King in the inappropriate awarding of a TT$100,000 contract to a company, Ixanos, in which King’s family has an interest.
Persad-Bissessar was quoted as saying “new evidence came to light following an investigation conducted into the matter by the Attorney General Anand Ramlogan”. She explained that her decision to remove King as both a senator and government minister was based on that new evidence.
The Prime Minister said she will formalise King’s removal by sending a written request to President Richards later this afternoon.
Pressure was mounting for senior Government Minister Mary King to go, as yesterday her own Cabinet colleague and Congress of the People (COP) ally, Sport Minister Anil Roberts, called on her to resign “without further delay”
Roberts’s call came in the face of revelations published exclusively in the Sunday Express that she participated in the invitation and evaluation process of the award of a TT$100,000 contract to a company, Ixanos, in which her family has an interest, a matter deemed “highly inappropriate” by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
Roberts called a news conference yesterday at his Ministry’s office specifically to give his views on the King controversy.
He said the COP must ensure that the highest standards of corporate governance, integrity, accountability and transparency are upheld at all times. He said King, a member of the COP, contributed to the development of COP’s principles and it therefore gave him no pleasure to “call on Senator Mary King, …to do the right thing without further delay”. “And the right thing is to resign immediately,” he said.
Roberts, who said he was speaking for himself as well as for his “team” of COP supporters, explained that since he had put his hat in the ring for the COP leadership, he thought it incumbent on him to speak on the issue.
“There has been a deafening silence from the leadership of my party,” he said. The party’s internal elections are due to be held on July 3.
King, he pointed out, had breached the COP’s stated principles in three ways.
First breach: By her own admission she did not disclose at any time, her interest or her family’s interest during the tender of a contract, Roberts noted. King told the Sunday Express that on the opening of tenders she became aware that a company in which her family had an interest was tendering for a contract and she chose to do say or do nothing- i.e not to disclose that fact.
Second breach: Roberts said the mere presence of King at the opening of the bid/tender documents is not a COP position. Roberts said any minister who did not know that they should not be “anywhere around” any tender process, “does not deserve to be in a position of responsibility”. The third breach of “the principles of accountability and transparency”, and therefore the COP’s principles, was the fact that King admitted that she put her personal assistant, a political appointee on the evaluation committee “even though she (King) attempted to justify it saying that she was an engineer”, Roberts said.
Asked if Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar should fire King if she fails to resign, Roberts said he would be “very perturbed and upset” if King, “who was head of Transparency International (T&T) and who wrote many columns…sees no need to resign. “I don’t think any of us should put the Prime Minister in a position where she has to make a strong move to fire us. If we know we are wrong, we should do the right thing,” he said.
Roberts said the COP endorsed the principle of integrity in public life as reflected in the Integrity in Public Life Act which states in (Section 29 (1)) that a conflict of interest arises where in the making of a decision there is an opportunity either directly or indirectly to further the persons’ private interest or a member of his family and (Section 29 (2)) that where there is a possible or perceived conflict of interest a person should disclose his interest and disqualify himself from any decision-making process.
Stressing that the matter never came to Cabinet, Roberts said the first time he learnt about King’s actions was when he read the Sunday Express exclusive.
