(Trinidad Express) Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley has lodged a number of complaints against National Security Minister Jack Warner with the Integrity Commission, as part of a plan to have him removed from the Government’s Cabinet.
Rowley said yesterday he wrote to the Commission last week and will give it “reasonable time” to respond before he pulled more “arrows from his quiver” against Warner.
Speaking at a media conference at the People’s National Movement’s Balisier House headquarters in Port of Spain, Rowley argued for Warner to be removed from the Cabinet.
Among the list of concerns raised to the Commission was the question of Warner’s alleged foreign bank account.
“This brings us immediately to whether in fact such account is known to the Integrity Commission of Trinidad and Tobago. For insofar as any account existed since 2007 when Mr Warner became a person in public life, any such account in which he had any interest, one dollar or more immediately fell under the interest of the Integrity Commission,” Rowley said.
“Mr Warner is not above the law. We have enough of Jack Warner and his bombast, we have enough of the Prime Minister and her silence and encouragement, and we on this day, on behalf of the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, we demand that the Prime Minister remove Jack Warner from the Cabinet where he is a constant embarrassment to the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” Rowley said.
Rowley said while the local Police Service remained “silent and ineffective and impotent and incompetent” on Warner’s investigations, an external international investigation by the Asian Football Federation unearthed what were described as “significant cash payments” made to Warner in 2008.
“Mr Warner became a person in public life in 2007, so therefore such a payment and a gift would have to have been reported to the Integrity Commission,” Rowley said.
He said Warner avoided questions both by the media and the Opposition, but warned that he was still accountable to the Public Accounts Enterprise Committee, chaired by Opposition Senator Fitzgerald Hinds and the Parliament’s chairman of the Public Accounts Committee Opposition Senator Colm Imbert.
“And this Minister of Government, this acting Prime Minister, tells the country and the world that he will have nothing to respond to from the three of us and the media and anybody who seems to be concerned about any allegations of misconduct; in short, we can all go to hell,” Rowley said.
Rowley said in the face of these issues, the PNM has also called on Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to break her continued silence on all Warner-related issues.
“In the face of this the Prime Minister who promised to act when info was available to her is absolutely silent. In fact by her silence she has indicated and by her words that she stands in support of her Ministers,” he said.
Warner, in a brief response to all the issues Rowley raised, would only say yesterday: “Let the jack… bray. And I want you to print that.”
“I am not even remotely concerned about Rowley’s threats,” he said, adding that he would be happy to sue Rowley if he made those accusations about him.
