Raphael John-Lall

The T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute (TT­TI) has wel­comed the "prompt ac­tion" tak­en in the mat­ter in­volv­ing Mary King, for­mer Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic, So­cial Re­struc­tur­ing and Gen­der Af­fairs and a Gov­ern­ment sen­a­tor. The in­sti­tute's state­ment came yes­ter­day fol­low­ing King's dis­missal. The state­ment said: "We trust that this is one step in a com­pre­hen­sive range of in­ves­ti­ga­tions that would es­tab­lish if oth­er per­sons should be held ac­count­able for not dis­charg­ing their du­ties prop­er­ly in this mat­ter. "We al­so hope if it is es­tab­lished any laws have been bro­ken, due process will be quick­ly im­ple­ment­ed and the ap­pro­pri­ate sanc­tions car­ried out."

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar met yes­ter­day with Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards and ad­vised him to re­voke King's sen­a­tor­ship. The dis­cus­sions be­tween Per­sad-Bisses­sar and Richards in­volved me­dia re­ports im­pli­cat­ing King in the award of a $100,000 Gov­ern­ment Web site de­vel­op­ment con­tract by King's min­istry in No­vem­ber 2010 to Ix­anos, a com­pa­ny in which King's fam­i­ly has an in­ter­est.

A state­ment from the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce yes­ter­day al­so said:

"The cham­ber sub­scribes to the be­lief that at all times trans­paren­cy of the ten­der­ing process and ob­ser­vance of the rules of good gov­er­nance are para­mount and must pre­vail. "This in­cludes the ba­sic and time-worn stan­dard of self-dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion from the per­for­mance of any func­tion what­so­ev­er re­gard­ing the ten­der, se­lec­tion and award of con­tract for any­one with an in­ter­est in the trans­ac­tion." Pres­i­dent of the Point Lisas Cham­ber of Com­merce, Nal Ram­s­ingh, be­lieves the Prime Min­is­ter made the best de­ci­sion. "The Prime Min­is­ter has made the best de­ci­sion by ask­ing the Pres­i­dent to re­voke her ap­point­ment as min­is­ter," he said. He added King had been preach­ing against cor­rup­tion for a long time and should have known what was eth­i­cal be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice. "Mary King made her de­ci­sions, know­ing what her po­si­tion is in the Gov­ern­ment. She has been in­volved in trans­paren­cy for years and so knows what should or should not be done." he said.