Richard Lord

?Tabaquite MP Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj said the ap­point­ment of Ch­agua­nas West MP Jack Warn­er as Chief Whip was flawed as MPs were not con­sult­ed on the mat­ter. He said so in a let­ter, dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 3, sent to the gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Glen Ramd­hars­ingh short­ly be­fore the start of the par­ty's par­lia­men­tary cau­cus yes­ter­day at Rien­zi Com­plex. Ma­haraj said MPs were en­ti­tled to know the name of the per­son be­ing pro­posed for the post and al­so be al­lowed to ex­press their views in sup­port or against the in­di­vid­ual.

He said those views must be gen­uine­ly con­sid­ered be­fore a de­ci­sion was tak­en.

Ma­haraj added: "This was not done in the ap­point­ment of the Chief Whip. It is im­por­tant there­fore for this pro­ce­dur­al flaw to be cor­rect­ed. "If it is not cor­rect­ed it would be un­fair not on­ly to the Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment but to the MP who was ap­point­ed Chief Whip. "The flawed process can­not gen­er­ate the con­fi­dence of mem­bers in the ap­point­ment which was made." He then called on the cau­cus to con­sid­er the mat­ter as "it can have ad­verse ef­fects on the par­ty in Par­lia­ment."

Ma­haraj al­so said in his let­ter that the con­duct of the par­ty's na­tion­al ex­ec­u­tive elec­tions should be in­ves­ti­gat­ed be­cause of the "gross ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties" as­so­ci­at­ed with it. He said the pur­pose of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was "not to change the re­sults of the elec­tions but to give mem­bers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to air their con­cerns and for them to be as­sured that their con­cerns would be tak­en in­to ac­count in cre­at­ing a fair elec­tion ma­chin­ery for the fu­ture." Ma­haraj said the right of mem­bers to vote in the Jan­u­ary 24 polls was "fla­grant­ly de­nied."