Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has con­firmed he has hired Queens Coun­sel Richard Clay­ton to head the de­fence team in a li­bel law­suit filed against him by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, over al­le­ga­tions he made in Par­lia­ment con­nect­ing Row­ley to the A&V fake oil scan­dal.

Speak­ing to the me­dia at the Smara Can­cer Sup­port Group fash­ion show and tea par­ty at Na­pari­ma Col­lege yes­ter­day, Mooni­lal said Clay­ton has long been recog­nised as an au­thor­i­ty in the fields of ad­min­is­tra­tive law, hu­man rights and civ­il lib­er­ties and lo­cal gov­ern­ment.

“I have con­firmed a few hours ago that my de­fence team will be led by Richard Clay­ton Queens Coun­sel and will in­clude Anand Ram­lo­gan se­nior coun­sel and for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al. Clay­ton will be lead­ing the de­fence team and I ex­pect with­in a few days he will be in Trinidad and we will have a prop­er con­fer­ence with him. We fear ab­solute­ly noth­ing con­cern­ing that law­suit,” Mooni­lal said.

Say­ing he was in fact ex­treme­ly ex­cit­ed about the law­suit, Mooni­lal said, “I am ea­ger to hear Dr Row­ley in the wit­ness box on this mat­ter. Apart from that, I will like to read the foun­da­tion of such a claim giv­en the le­gal, con­sti­tu­tion­al and po­lit­i­cal in­ter­est in this mat­ter.”

Mooni­lal said he al­so took note of a news­pa­per re­port in­di­cat­ing the cheques in­volved in the al­leged fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tion he raised in­volv­ing A&V Drilling ap­pear to be fraud­u­lent.

He added, “It may well be that there are peo­ple out there print­ing cheque books with ma­chines that can stamp the monies and of course coun­ter­feit doc­u­ments. They have mon­e­tary in­stru­ments that are be­ing ped­dled which are coun­ter­feit, so fol­low­ing my state­ment in the Par­lia­ment we have al­ready reaped some­thing pos­i­tive.”

If the cheques are fake, Mooni­lal said there was still room for crim­i­nal charges against fraud­sters.

“The mat­ters are not con­nect­ed di­rect­ly to the Prime Min­is­ter, but if it is fake it sug­gests there is a coun­ter­feit ring out there do­ing some das­tard­ly acts and that by it­self is a se­ri­ous crim­i­nal of­fence. If some­one is sign­ing off cheques and ped­dling off cheques as if it be­longs to com­pa­nies in ques­tion then this is a se­ri­ous mat­ter.”

Say­ing pieces of the puz­zle are com­ing to­geth­er, Mooni­lal said the Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit, po­lice and oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies should look in­to the mat­ter. He re­it­er­at­ed that all ev­i­dence re­lat­ed to the fake oil scan­dal must be pre­served and all those im­pli­cat­ed should be charged.