Gail Alexan­der

A con job fab­ri­cat­ed by the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).With that dis­missal, Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship (PP) House leader Roodal Mooni­lal yes­ter­day de­tailed what he said were glar­ing in­con­sis­ten­cies in the e-mails which Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley pro­duced in Par­lia­ment on Mon­day.

Row­ley, pi­lot­ing his no-con­fi­dence mo­tion against Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Gov­ern­ment, had read out ex­cerpts of the e-mails to sup­port his claim of "high crimes and con­spir­a­cy" by the Gov­ern­ment on the Sec­tion 34 is­sue.Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Part­ner­ship lead­ers from the UNC and COP "roast­ed" Row­ley's claims, de­fend­ing the Gov­ern­ment against his state­ments.

UNC deputy leader Mooni­lal, speak­ing in yes­ter­day's de­bate, said noth­ing about the mo­tion on the agen­da had pre­pared him for what was read out on Mon­day.He said if he looked shocked in pic­tures in the print me­dia yes­ter­day, it was be­cause he was shocked, in awe and dis­be­lief that the Par­lia­ment had sunk to an all-time low and Row­ley could try to base his mo­tion on a "few pages of type­writ­ten script."

"This is an at­tempt to demon­strate and ar­gue that the Sec­tion 34 mat­ter has deep­er, dark­er ori­gins," Mooni­lal said."The Op­po­si­tion would like to keep that mat­ter alive and they've reached a point where they don't know what to do, so they got their hands on this and con­coct­ed, af­ter the event, a se­ries of e-mails to syn­chro­nise with events that oc­curred.

"So these e-mails are a fab­ri­ca­tion and the way it's cut and past­ed, he (Row­ley) may know the fab­ri­ca­tor. So I brought a hel­met, gloves and gog­gles–this is for you, as a fab­ri­ca­tor," Mooni­lal told Row­ley in the House.Row­ley protest­ed that Mooni­lal was ac­cus­ing him of fab­ri­cat­ing the e-mails.Mooni­lal said the Gov­ern­ment had passed the e-mails to the rel­e­vant ex­perts who knew about such things.

List­ing in­con­sis­ten­cies found, he said the sub­ject of one e-mail came first, and was some­thing that was not done. He said in an­oth­er, an ad­dress, "anan@gmail.com," was un­usu­al, since a min­i­mum of six char­ac­ters was need­ed.Mooni­lal said: "Those who know about these things con­firmed that when you ap­ply for a gmail ac­count you need to use six char­ac­ters min­i­mum. The 'anan' name is four char­ac­ters on­ly."

He added: "Al­so on the e-mail en­ti­tled 'Help Need­ed,' the doc­u­ment comes from 'anan@gmail.con'–now that's a con job. I don't know which e-mail could be trans­mit­ted with '.con.' This is no ty­po or smudge."He said the stan­dard in e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tion is ".com."Mooni­lal said the e-mail writ­ers al­so got dates wrong.He said: "One had Tues­day when that was an­oth­er day. They al­so had two days with the same date–a Mon­day and a Tues­day. Al­so the Wednes­day 11 on one e-mail was re­al­ly Tues­day 11 of Sep­tem­ber."

He said an­oth­er sig­nif­i­cant in­con­sis­ten­cy is that one e-mail was be­ing sent from two ad­dress­es at the same time."How can you send an e-mail from two ad­dress­es at the same time?" he said."You know this is a fake as it's im­pos­si­ble to do that.

"I al­so saw an e-mail pur­port­ed­ly ad­dressed to the Prime Min­is­ter from the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al be­gin­ning 'My la­dy.' But the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al doesn't talk like that. I don't think he could talk like that. I don't even think he would talk like that if you put it on a piece of pa­per for him; he won't say it–but that is how they con­coct­ed this mat­ter."They al­so had an e-mail which al­leges the Prime Min­is­ter used foul lan­guage. So you knew im­me­di­ate­ly this was not the Prime Min­is­ter.

"That lan­guage doesn't em­anate from her. As pro­voked as she might be at the time, those of us know the bound­ary of that lan­guage and it is nowhere close to that."Then there's ref­er­ence to some­one al­leged to be a US em­bassy of­fi­cial and the al­le­ga­tions were on Sep­tem­ber 10 in the e-mail. But the gen­tle­man ar­rived in T&T in late No­vem­ber of the same year. So this was a cut-and-paste job placed on a let­ter and copied."

Not­ing that Row­ley did not take the e-mails to his col­leagues, me­dia or the au­thor­i­ties, Mooni­lal said al­though the e-mails in­volved very se­ri­ous al­le­ga­tions of a con­spir­a­cy to com­mit mur­der, il­le­gal wire­taps at the DPP's of­fice and per­vert­ing the course of jus­tice, Row­ley nev­er took the mat­ter to the po­lice even to try to pro­tect any­one's life.Row­ley, who is ex­pect­ed to wind up de­bate to­day, is ex­pect­ed to shed more light on the e-mails, the PNM stat­ed yes­ter­day.

Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at his Ca­bil­do Cham­bers of­fice in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Ram­lo­gan chal­lenged Row­ley to en­gage him in a pub­lic de­bate on the 31 "bo­gus" e-mails he pre­sent­ed in Par­lia­ment on Mon­day.