At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour’s lat­est state­ment on his dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion from a Mi­a­mi court in re­la­tion to a Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port fraud mat­ter has raised more ques­tions than it has an­swered, ac­cord­ing to Op­po­si­tion MP Di­nesh Ram­bal­ly.

Ram­bal­ly has al­so ex­pressed deep con­cern about Ar­mour’s mem­o­ry af­ter the AG ex­plained that he de­tailed his in­volve­ment in the Pi­ar­co Air­port case based on his “best rec­ol­lec­tion.”

“Mr Regi­nald Ar­mour, SC, has failed his Of­fice, the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple. His con­duct as a lawyer, and more so as an At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, war­rants ad­mo­ni­tion and re­buke,” Ram­bal­ly said af­ter Ar­mour broke his si­lence on Mon­day via a me­dia re­lease, af­ter his ini­tial re­sponse to con­cerns.

Ram­bal­ly added: “The Law As­so­ci­a­tion’s con­tin­ued si­lence would be per­plex­ing and rep­re­hen­si­ble in light of (his) sec­ond re­lease.”

Ar­mour sought to ad­dress con­cerns re­volv­ing around his in­volve­ment in the Mi­a­mi civ­il case on mat­ters stem­ming from the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port probe.

The Mi­a­mi courts in May dis­qual­i­fied him from that.

Ar­mour pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed Bri­an Kuei Tung in crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings on the Pi­ar­co mat­ter but stat­ed on af­fi­davit that he had a ju­nior role when, in fact, he had a greater in­volve­ment. The AG ex­plained ear­li­er this week that at the time, he was re­call­ing events some 14 years ago and at the time of sign­ing the af­fi­davit, he was on va­ca­tion in Eu­rope.

Gov­ern­ment has ap­pealed the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

Ram­bal­ly said Ar­mour’s lat­est state­ment comes as pres­sure mounts for him to re­sign.

“He con­sid­ers the con­cerns em­a­nat­ing from the pub­lic do­main to be plain­ly le­git­i­mate, now, and not be­fore, as he was tak­ing shel­ter in the sub ju­dice prin­ci­ple,” he said.

“Now that he’s spo­ken, try­ing to ex­plain his glar­ing mis­con­duct in a for­eign court, his sec­ond re­lease has raised more eye­brows and even more ques­tions than it has an­swered.”

He added that Ar­mour’s most re­cent ex­pla­na­tion “ap­pears to be a clever at­tempt to put in the pub­lic do­main what he may have want­ed to have put on the court record” re­gard­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the is­sue.

“He makes ref­er­ence to re­cus­ing him­self from act­ing on T&T’s be­half. But his first me­dia state­ment makes clear he was ‘walled off’ from cer­tain as­pects of the case, while he kept con­trol of oth­ers. One would hard­ly call that re­cusal,” Ram­bal­ly said.

“He al­so stat­ed his pri­or in­volve­ment in Kuei Tung’s de­fence was ‘im­ma­te­r­i­al’ to the ex­tent he re­cused him­self from the mat­ter. Well, the US judge didn’t think so in the least.

“Nei­ther do we in T&T. It goes to the heart of a ‘con­flict of in­ter­est’—the ba­sis of the oth­er par­ty’s suc­cess­ful ap­pli­ca­tion for dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion.”

Ram­bal­ly added that Ar­mour signed an af­fi­davit con­tain­ing a “brief” de­scrip­tion of his in­volve­ment in Kuei Tung’s de­fence. He said maybe Ar­mour didn’t un­der­stand it was the de­scrip­tion that was meant to be brief, not that his in­volve­ment need­ed to be craft­ed as such.

“In any event, for a per­son who’s qual­i­fied to be the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine he could not ap­pre­ci­ate the full im­pli­ca­tion of such an af­fi­davit. In an at­tempt to em­phat­i­cal­ly min­imise his in­volve­ment in Kuei Tung’s de­fence, he goes on to take refuge in his lapse of mem­o­ry.”

Ram­bal­ly said it was in­fan­tile, “to sug­gest that mem­o­ry de­pends on hav­ing your pa­pers with you at all times, or on be­ing in a par­tic­u­lar lo­ca­tion, as such mem­o­ry is ex­pect­ed to dim with ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­tance.”

“More con­cern­ing, how­ev­er, is the AG’s ap­par­ent strug­gle with his abil­i­ty to re­mem­ber and re­tain in­for­ma­tion,” Ram­bal­ly added.

He al­so ques­tioned:

Does the AG re­mem­ber cross-ex­am­in­ing per­sons in the mat­ter?

“If no, we should be wor­ried. If yes, we should be con­cerned. Can Ar­mour tru­ly ex­pect to jus­ti­fy how he del­e­gat­ed the giv­ing of in­struc­tions to the for­mer AG, in the cir­cum­stances as de­scribed by him?

“The AG in­sin­u­at­ed that whilst on hol­i­day, he couldn’t find a No­tary Pub­lic, so he was on­ly able to sign and email the doc­u­ment with dis­patch. It is not clear whether he meant to say that be­cause of the pres­sure of time, and the ur­gency of the sit­u­a­tion, his mem­o­ry failed, and he ren­dered an in­ac­cu­rate af­fi­davit,” Ram­bal­ly said.

He al­so not­ed that it might have made sense for Ar­mour to ap­ply for an ex­ten­sion of time, that is un­less, as Ram­bal­ly put it, the AG didn’t re­call he could have ex­er­cised such an op­tion.

“It still doesn’t ex­cuse him from the stun­ning mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the truth on be­half of the un­wit­ting pop­u­la­tion,” the UNC MP added.