Gail Alexan­der

Half of the his­toric $1.1mil­lion award­ed to the State in 1997 for pay­ment by then Op­po­si­tion Leader Patrick Man­ning–now Prime Min­is­ter–has been paid, ac­cord­ing to fig­ures from At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie yes­ter­day. And the PNM Gov­ern­ment will be adopt­ing pol­i­cy and may con­sid­er pro­pos­als by for­mer UNC at­tor­ney gen­er­al Ramesh Ma­haraj to waive costs award­ed to the State in cer­tain is­sues, Je­re­mie said. How­ev­er, Je­re­mie said the mat­ter was not press­ing and he could not give a time­frame for such pol­i­cy fi­nal­i­sa­tion.

The $1.1m costs award­ed to the state in April 1997, stemmed from court ac­tion when Man­ning–then Op­po­si­tion leader–sought the court's in­ter­ven­tion for an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Cross­ing of the Floor Act. This fol­lowed a de­ci­sion by for­mer PNM MPs Ru­pert Grif­fith and Vin­cent Lasse to join the UNC Gov­ern­ment. Je­re­mie, in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, said the orig­i­nal costs award­ed to the state to­talled $1,153,811 with a statu­to­ry in­ter­est rate of six per cent from April 1997. Je­re­mie added, "A sum of $555,000 was paid on ac­count of the award on De­cem­ber 27, 2002. "In 1997 there was no oth­er mat­ter in which a sum of mon­ey even re­mote­ly sim­i­lar to this has been ei­ther award­ed to or col­lect­ed by the state as costs. No equiv­a­lent sum has ever been re­ceived by the state as costs in any ac­tion ever."

Je­re­mie said the av­er­age quan­tum of costs award­ed to the state in any one mat­ter which has gone to tri­al is nor­mal­ly in the vicin­i­ty of $12,000 to $15,000. "Very of­ten it is pre­sumed that the costs of re­cov­ery may out­weigh the costs award­ed," Je­re­mie said, adding that mat­ters such as the $1.1m costs award­ed in Man­ning's ac­tion, were ex­treme­ly rare and con­sid­ered an aber­ra­tion, Je­re­mie said, "At present the State has no of­fi­cial pol­i­cy po­si­tion with re­spect to the re­cov­ery of costs owed to it. Fur­ther, the state does not have a stat­ed of­fi­cial po­si­tion to treat with the vary­ing cir­cum­stances in each case in which costs are award­ed."

Asked by the Op­po­si­tion whether Gov­ern­ment would for­mu­late a pol­i­cy which would write off Man­ning's debt, Je­re­mie said the State would nev­er for­mu­late pol­i­cy to favour the Prime Min­is­ter or di­rect­ed at any per­son in par­tic­u­lar. Je­re­mie said pol­i­cy may be adopt­ed to treat with the gen­er­al is­sue of costs and that may in­clude the Prime Min­is­ter as well as oth­er per­sons. He said Gov­ern­ment may con­sid­er some of the pol­i­cy pro­pos­als which his pre­de­ces­sor Ma­haraj had draft­ed in 2000 re­gard­ing col­lec­tion of costs award­ed to the state. Je­re­mie said since the court award in­volv­ing Man­ning was in 1997, Ma­haraj's pol­i­cy pro­pos­als of 2000, would have in­clud­ed Man­ning. He said oth­er mat­ters in which out­stand­ing costs were owed to the State, in­clude mat­ters in­volv­ing Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day, for­mer UNC fi­nanciers Steve Fer­gu­son and Ish Gal­barans­ingh and UNC MP Chan­dresh Shar­ma and one Bal­ram Singh.