Long before the May 24 general election and before she became Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar's controversial million-dollar house was substantially completed. This disclosure was made by the Prime Minister herself in an interview with the Guardian yesterday from her Siparia home where she was spending the weekend with her family in her house, an aging, homely-looking structure with bougainvillea spilling over the walls. Persad-Bissessar made reference to a photograph in yesterday's Newsday of former prime minister, Patrick Manning, holding up another photograph of the PM's Phillipine house during last Friday's sitting of Parliament. Manning, making several allegations and inferences, said the cost of construction of the house stood at $150 million. However, according to Persad-Bissessar, the date of the photograph was "very instructive." "The photograph of the house was taken one day after the general election and it showed that the house was substantially completed," she said.
"Where I getting money in April to build a house for $150 million? "Does that mean that during the five weeks of campaigning, I collected money and built the house?"
She said she intends to lay all the facts about her house on the table.
"I believe in the best interest of transparency and accountability I will lay out all the facts in Parliament." The PM, in an earlier interview, said she spent $3 million on the house and it may cost another $500,000 to complete. Charging that Manning's claims were "calculated to deceive", she dismissed notions of her as someone who placed a great emphasis on lavish houses. Persad-Bissessar said: "I have no palace. I have a castle and my home is my castle. My home is where I spend precious time away from my job with my family. "My castle is where my heart is." She said the design for the Phillipine house was the idea of her husband, Dr Gregory Bissessar, a doctor/businessman for 30 years. Persad-Bissessar said she moved into the PM's residence with her husband after the People's Partnership won the general election, but she spends every weekend at her Siparia home. "I never rushed to live in the PM's residence," she noted. "When President George Maxwell Richard's house collapsed, I offered him the PM's residence but he declined." Persad-Bissessar said when she goes to her Siparia home on weekends, she spends the time with her husband, her son and his wife and two grandchildren.
"My nephew lives downstairs... The family needs a little more space," she said. Persad-Bissessar said she moved into this two-storey concrete house when she returned from abroad in 1983. "I lived with my father and he passed it on to me when he died...The house is decades old," she said. A pink wall surrounds the house, its walls painted in apple green and the roof is fading moss green. The PM said: "We live here at no cost and were able to save little by little. We have been building the house in Phillipine 25 years now. If I was corrupt, I would have finished 20 houses." Asked by the Guardian to recall the humble wooden home at the edge of a rice lagoon in Boodhoo Trace where she spent a part of her childhood, she said: "It was a wooden house with no electricity. We used flambeaux. I lived there with my parents and siblings, an uncle, two aunties, my grandfather and grandmother." She philosophically dismissed the whole brouhaha over her house. "That's the way of public life. My hands are clean and my heart is pure," she said.
