Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

Calder Hart is "ready to re­turn" to Trinidad and To­ba­go, his lawyer, De­vesh Ma­haraj, says.

Ma­haraj dis­missed state­ments that Hart fled T&T over the week­end. "The state­ment...that Mr Hart had fled the coun­try on a one-way tick­et to Flori­da is false and ma­li­cious," Ma­haraj wrote in a news re­lease yes­ter­day. "Mr Hart, who has no rea­son to flee the coun­try, left T&T for Flori­da on Sat­ur­day on a reg­u­lar re­turn econ­o­my tick­et. "More­over, Mr Hart has giv­en the as­sur­ance to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties that he is ready to re­turn home to T&T at short no­tice, if re­quired." Hart left T&T hours af­ter he re­signed from five state boards on Sat­ur­day. He was ac­com­pa­nied by his wife Sher­rine and daugh­ter Jean. Their de­par­ture came less than 24 hours af­ter High Court Jus­tice Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er re­ject­ed re­quests on Fri­day from Hart's lawyers to stop sub­mis­sion of the re­port of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to Ude­cott and the Lo­cal Con­struc­tion Sec­tor. Hart has been em­broiled in al­le­ga­tions un­der his tenure as ex­ec­u­tive Ude­cott chair­man. It was al­so al­leged that the Cana­di­an-born Hart fun­nelled hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in­to the pock­ets of rel­a­tives of his wife's Malaysian fam­i­ly, through the award of Ude­cott con­tracts.

At least one Ude­cott board mem­ber, An­tho­ny Cher­ry, ex­pressed no reser­va­tions about Hart's abrupt de­par­ture from T&T. "He (Hart) goes out of the coun­try all the time. He is prob­a­bly stressed out. Quite frankly, I sup­pose he just wants to sit down and hang out and pad­dle in a pool for a cou­ple of days be­fore he comes back to the same fren­zy," Cher­ry told the Trinidad Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day af­ter­noon. When Cher­ry was asked about re­ports that Hart flew out to Flori­da on a one-way tick­et, he laughed. "I do not think that is so, but in any event, he (Hart) has dual na­tion­al­i­ty. I think he can go to the States with a one-way tick­et," Cher­ry said. "If he went on a one-way tick­et, that was just prob­a­bly quite ad­min­is­tra­tive. He prob­a­bly came in (to Trinidad) on a two-way tick­et and he just used the tick­et to come back out." Cher­ry added that Hart and an­oth­er Ude­cott board mem­ber, In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Michael An­nisette, ap­peared to be tar­gets be­cause of their po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tions. Both Hart and An­nisette were linked to the rul­ing Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).

"When peo­ple tar­get you po­lit­i­cal­ly, no holds are barred in pol­i­tics. Fel­lows like (Ude­cott board mem­ber Wen­dell) Dot­tin and me and so on, no­body in­ter­feres with us, be­cause we have no po­lit­i­cal facets," Cher­ry said. "An­nisette and Hart, those fel­lows are po­lit­i­cal fig­ures. So you all are more in­ter­est­ed in them than us. No one in­ter­feres with me." Cher­ry said Hart demon­strat­ed "in no un­cer­tain way that he has a hell of a broad back," from the crit­i­cisms that he faced as Ude­cott's ex­ec­u­tive chair­man. He al­so said that Hart's res­ig­na­tion sur­prised him, be­cause there was no need for Hart to re­sign. "I heard about it from the news. I heard it from friends who saw it on the news. Peo­ple start­ed call­ing me," Cher­ry said. "Well, yes. I have to say yes, (I was sur­prised). Be­cause I nev­er saw any rea­son for him to re­sign. And he has re­signed and I still can­not find any rea­son for him to re­sign. So to that ex­tent, it is a sur­prise.

"But if he can­not take the pres­sure any­more, and he says: look; you see me, I am an old man, I can­not take this thing any­more. I am go­ing to 'lime.' "Then, per­haps, he is say­ing: 'why do I have to do this?'" Cher­ry stressed that "to the best of my knowl­edge, in­for­ma­tion and be­lief, there is not any­thing wrong with Ude­cott."