Renu­ka Singh

Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj says he has been bom­bard­ed by threat­en­ing text mes­sages from a woman who has been try­ing to "ex­tort fi­nan­cial favours" from him.He said the fall­out with Trinidad Ex­press colum­nist Shirley Hall has left him no oth­er op­tion but to re­port it to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith.Ma­haraj told the Guardian that Hall has been us­ing her po­si­tion in the me­dia to "ex­tort fi­nan­cial favours" from him and when frus­trat­ed by his re­fusal, took to tex­ting him threats on his cell­phone.

He said Hall was ex­pect­ing him to pur­chase her book for his min­istry, but when his tech­ni­cal staff shut that down, he has since faced "ha­rass­ment and threats" from Hall.The mes­sages, which Ma­haraj for­ward­ed to the Guardian, say he will be­come a crip­ple by Feb­ru­ary 27. The mes­sages spoke about Freema­sons and a high priest, who can re­verse the curse, if he agreed to meet by Feb­ru­ary 11.

Hall, in a sub­se­quent tele­phone in­ter­view, de­nied these claims, say­ing that Ma­haraj was us­ing his min­is­te­r­i­al po­si­tion and con­nec­tions to in­tim­i­date her and shut her up. She said the two clashed be­cause Ma­haraj has been us­ing ex­cerpts from her book, A New Caribbean Home­gar­den Hand­book, in his speech­es with­out her per­mis­sion and with­out cred­it­ing her for the in­for­ma­tion.

Threat­en­ing texts

How­ev­er, Hall de­nied she threat­ened Ma­haraj. She said the book was pub­lished in 2011 and has been used by min­istries and in schools to teach lo­cal agri­cul­ture is­sues. Hall said her book was of­ten quot­ed by peo­ple in In­dia and Lon­don and they all sought per­mis­sion."What makes him dif­fer­ent? He feel be­cause he is a min­is­ter he could do what he wants?" she said.Ma­haraj has since sent copies of the of­fend­ing texts to both Grif­fith and Health Min­is­ter Fuad Khan.

"I sent the texts to the Health Min­is­ter be­cause I be­lieve the woman may be in need of psy­chi­atric as­sis­tance," Ma­haraj said."She can­not de­ny send­ing me those texts, I have them saved on my phone for any­one to see," he said.The texts are some­what ob­scure, con­tain­ing no punc­tu­a­tion, sev­er­al spelling er­rors and stat­ing that he al­ready con­sumed a "bad po­tion" that would leave him numb from the neck down.Ma­haraj said Grif­fith would ad­vise him on his next step, which would like­ly lead to a po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Un­hinged:

"The whole thing is un­hinged," he said.When asked about the charges of pla­gia­rism, Ma­haraj said he "did not know the woman's book at all" and as such could not quote or cite from it.He said he was not afraid of the pend­ing le­gal ac­tion from the au­thor."I'm say­ing let her bring the proof that I stole her work...I have proof that she threat­ened me when I re­fused to use her book," he said.