At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi said the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) is trum­pet­ing Mon­day’s Privy Coun­cil rul­ing to fu­el a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry against the State’s key wit­ness against Anand Ram­lo­gan and Ger­ald Ramdeen who are fac­ing cor­rup­tion charges.

Al-Rawi pushed back at Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Mon­day’s Privy Coun­cil rul­ing, which al­lows UNC ac­tivist Ravi Ma­haraj to head back to court and try to get doc­u­ments why the State ter­mi­nat­ed a law­suit on Petrotrin’s failed World Gas-to-liq­uid project against its then ex­ec­u­tive chair­man Mal­colm Jones.

Ma­haraj brought an ap­peal to the Privy Coun­cil for ju­di­cial re­view when his free­dom of in­for­ma­tion (FOI) re­quest seek­ing to ob­tain key doc­u­ments was de­nied by the lo­cal courts.

Ma­haraj is seek­ing ac­cess to doc­u­ments on Petrotrin’s World GTL project, which cost tax­pay­ers some TT$2 bil­lion.

The civ­il suit against Jones over the col­lapse of the project was ini­ti­at­ed then at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan.

But the PNM gov­ern­ment lat­er dropped the case, on the ad­vice of Queen’s Coun­sel Vin­cent Nel­son who is now the State’s key wit­ness set to tes­ti­fy against Ram­lo­gan and Ramdeen, a for­mer Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor.

Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence on the is­sue yes­ter­day, Al-Rawi said: “Let’s call a spade a spade, let’s paint the ele­phant in the room. Every­thing else the UNC is talk­ing about is no­tice­ably di­rect­ed to one thing—an al­le­ga­tion of some kind of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in­volv­ing this gov­ern­ment and mis­ter Nel­son.…it ap­pears to me that this mat­ter is all about at­tack­ing a wit­ness who is the DPP’s (Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tion’s) wit­ness.”

Al-Rawi be­lieves that the Privy Coun­cil’s rul­ing is be­ing sen­sa­tion­alised and is not a ground-break­ing rul­ing as the Op­po­si­tion Leader claims. In fact, he says the rul­ing was sim­ply a “run of the mill ju­di­cial re­view ap­pli­ca­tion”. This means the Privy Coun­cil did not pass any judge­ment on Ma­haraj’s claims but sim­ply gave him the okay to pur­sue it in the high court.

“This is about go­ing to the court and say­ing lis­ten I have a claim that some­thing hap­pened and the some­thing is about this. Can I have per­mis­sion to go and have that claim heard in ju­di­cial re­view pro­ceed­ings? The Privy Coun­cil makes no de­ter­mi­na­tion one way or the oth­er as to the mer­it of that claim. If they did, the Privy Coun­cil would have said dis­close the state­ments,” the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al said.

Af­ter the press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Ma­haraj told re­porters the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s down­play­ing of the rul­ing was em­bar­rass­ing.

“This was the first FOIA mat­ter to be brought to the Privy Coun­cil for ad­ju­di­ca­tion and then we won it. So the fact that he is try­ing to down­play the sig­nif­i­cance of it, I think, is em­bar­rass­ing for him es­pe­cial­ly com­ing af­ter de­feats on sim­i­lar mat­ters by per­sons like De­vant Ma­haraj with re­gard to the Port Au­thor­i­ty and Na­tion­al En­er­gy Com­mit­tee,” he said.