Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an says his Gov­ern­ment act­ed with­in the law with re­gards to pay­ing out Cli­co de­pos­i­tors, so he was not wor­ried about fac­ing le­gal ac­tion from for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj. In a let­ter sent to Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Ewart Williams on Thurs­day, Ma­haraj said the Dook­er­an's plan for Cli­co was il­le­gal and would de­prive the pol­i­cy­hold­ers of prop­er­ty. He al­so said he would chal­lenge Dook­er­an's plan legal­ly as it was against the Cen­tral Bank Act of 2009 for Gov­ern­ment to de­cide when and how pol­i­cy in­vestors would re­cov­er their in­vest­ments in Cli­co.

But speak­ing to re­porters af­ter at­tend­ing an Eid cel­e­bra­tion yes­ter­day, Dook­er­an said Gov­ern­ment act­ed with­in the law. He al­so said that some at­tor­neys had to re­sus­ci­tate their ca­reers and would use the Cli­co is­sue to do this. "A lot of peo­ple will try to pro­mote their ca­reers as a re­sult of the sit­u­a­tion," he said. "I be­lieve the Gov­ern­ment had a fun­da­men­tal right to deal with this mat­ter and it has done so with­in the con­text of the laws of the coun­try." With re­gards to Ma­haraj's as­ser­tion that the Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion was a clear con­tra­ven­tion of the Cen­tral Bank Act, Dook­er­an re­spond­ed: "I have not seen the al­le­ga­tions that have been made, I've just heard of it, so I will ob­vi­ous­ly look at it to see what if there is any mer­it in it at all."

He said that he did not think that the ar­gu­ment put forth by Ma­haraj was cred­i­ble. Asked whether he be­lieved that Ma­haraj's threat of le­gal ac­tion could cre­ate an over­haul of the bud­get, Dook­er­an said: "I rather don't think that would not be so. It's on­ly one gov­ern­ment in Trinidad and To­ba­go. So no, ab­solute­ly not! (I am not wor­ried about le­gal ac­tion)." He said peo­ple had to make their ca­reers and re­sus­ci­tate their ca­reers and this was prob­a­bly why Ma­haraj had jumped on board the Cli­co is­sue.