Gail Alexan­der

For­merT&T pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards is alive and well, con­trary to an Al Jazeera me­dia re­port which cir­cu­lat­ed is cur­rent­ly be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed via so­cial me­dia.

In fact, Richards and his fam­i­ly are sched­uled to at­tend­din­ner at a Mar­aval win­ery to night, his wife, Jean Richards, said.

Mrs Richards laughed off ru­mours of the for­mer head of state's death af­ter the AJ re­port spawned ru­mours lo­cal­ly.

," she told the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

The Al Jazeera sto­ry is the lat­est in a spate of false in­for­ma­tion about T&T per­son­al­i­ties - in­clud­ing Machel Mon­tano - which have hit in­ter­na­tion­al news me­dia in re­cent months.

The AJ re­port seen by T&T Guardian stat­ed its source was Amer­i­can.

Th sto­rys­tat­ed as fact that: "The for­mer Pres­i­dent of T&T, George Maxwell Richards, has died in New York, NY dailies re­port.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­ports, George Maxwell Richards was se­cret­ly flown to New York for med­ical at­ten­tion. The re­port did not state the cause of his death but it added that his body has been since sent to the morgue for au­top­sy. A source at the hos­pi­tal told Al Jazeera that George Maxwell Richards had al­ready vis­it­ed the health fa­cil­i­ty on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions. An­oth­er source close to the for­mer Pres­i­dent says he had been se­cret­ly bat­tling high blood pres­sure."

The re­port, which al­so gave back­ground de­tails on Richards, stat­ed: "He died at 84."

, was cer­tain­ly not dead.

"He's right here next to me.In his re­tire­ment now, he's got time toin­dulge his hob­bies, he keeps up with all the news lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and was teas­ing me about the score," Mrs Richards said.

din­ner - so I can­not imag­ine where or how a re­port­like that could have arisen."

Richards, T&T's fourth pres­i­dent (2003-2013), was re­placed af­ter re­tire­ment by Pres­i­dent An­tho­ny Car­mona. He lives at his long-time St Joseph home.