Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford

He vowed to turn Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day in­to a poor man, by su­ing him for slan­der. But yes­ter­day, the dis­si­dent deputy po­lit­i­cal leader of the UNC Jack Warn­er backed down on his threat and said he had de­cid­ed not to pro­ceed with le­gal pro­ceed­ings against Pan­day.

It was on­ly on Tues­day that British Queen's Coun­sel Alan New­man ar­rived in Trinidad to rep­re­sent Warn­er. In a news re­lease yes­ter­day, Warn­er stat­ed that pleas from Ca­roni East MP Dr Tim Gopeesingh, Fyz­abad MP Chan­dresh Shar­ma and UNC gen­er­al sec­re­tary Fazal Karim, to­geth­er with many more calls, were in­stru­men­tal in him chang­ing his mind not to take Pan­day to court. "I have giv­en se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to the nu­mer­ous pleas made to me by mem­bers of the UNC," he stat­ed. "Since I al­ways put the in­ter­est of the mem­ber­ship of the par­ty and the par­ty first in my ac­tions, I have de­cid­ed to hold my hands and not to pro­ceed to com­mence the ac­tion for li­bel against Pan­day, but with­out prej­u­dice to my fu­ture le­gal rights in re­spect to this mat­ter. "I am not in­ter­est­ed in get­ting per­son­al gain at the ex­pense of the par­ty and I have al­ways ded­i­cat­ed my time and every re­source which I pos­sess to the par­ty. "

Warn­er, how­ev­er, stat­ed clear­ly that his de­ci­sion did not change his calls for change of lead­er­ship with­in the par­ty. "This change is manda­to­ry if the par­ty is to win the next gen­er­al elec­tions," he said. "Based on the ac­tions of Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning and his par­ty, this coun­try needs to res­cued from the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment. When in­formed of Warn­er's de­ci­sion, Pan­day replied: "Warn­er is ir­rel­e­vant...Warn­er is ir­rel­e­vant to the UNC and to the pol­i­tics of T&T." How­ev­er, his col­leagues, who for the past months have called on Warn­er to re­sign from the par­ty, were in high praise of him. Prais­ing Warn­er for let­ting good sense pre­vail, Shar­ma said: "Warn­er has good in him. He has lis­tened lis­ten to a groundswell of peo­ple. Politi­cians are the movers and they add val­ue. Warn­er is an in­ter­na­tion­al play­er and peo­ple were of the view that the mat­ter was cre­at­ing neg­a­tiv­i­ty for the par­ty and not adding val­ue. He is good man but some­times evil con­t­a­m­i­nates the good."

Gopeesingh, who al­so opt­ed to set aside the po­lit­i­cal pi­cong, tele­phoned Warn­er on Tues­day and plead­ed with him not to sue Pan­day. "I called him in a per­son­al ca­pac­i­ty not on be­half of par­ty nor on be­half of Pan­day or any­one else," he said. "I thought the is­sue was go­ing on to long. It was look­ing dirty in the eyes of the pub­lic. It had to come to and end." Mean­while, Warn­er said he had in­struct­ed his team of lawyers to take the nec­es­sary steps re­gard­ing what he called the un­law­ful ac­tions by the na­tion­al ex­ec­u­tive of the par­ty to take dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion against him­self, Ma­haraj and Ma­yaro MP Win­ston "Gyp­sy" Pe­ters.