DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar is be­ing re­buked by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds for threat­en­ing le­gal ac­tion if the Gov­ern­ment does not iden­ti­fy the lawyers re­ceiv­ing mil­lions in State briefs.

Hinds ques­tioned why Per­sad-Bisses­sar is in­sist­ing on the pub­li­ca­tion of the list of at­tor­neys, ac­cus­ing her of hav­ing “no dig­ni­ty”.

Dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to the de­bate on the mid-year bud­get re­view in Par­lia­ment last Fri­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar slammed At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour for re­fus­ing to di­vulge the in­for­ma­tion.

Re­call­ing that the AG told the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee on June 3 that he would seek the lawyers’ per­mis­sion to waive their right to pri­va­cy, Per­sad-Bisses­sar ques­tioned if he asked tax­pay­ers for ap­proval be­fore pay­ing the lawyers.

The Gov­ern­ment lat­er pro­vid­ed a doc­u­ment with the names of ten at­tor­neys and the mon­ey paid to them af­ter they con­sent­ed for their in­for­ma­tion to be pub­lished.

Hinds yes­ter­day said he had no clue what the UNC hoped to gain by forc­ing Gov­ern­ment to name the at­tor­neys, not­ing this will on­ly serve to make them soft tar­gets for crim­i­nals.

“There is a lev­el of ab­sur­di­ty about this. I mean, they just want to re­veal who earns how much mon­ey in their pro­fes­sion­al prac­tice. So, every sur­vey­or who works with the Gov­ern­ment, every ar­chi­tect, every doc­tor, we should re­veal their fees to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty putting them at un­due risk.

“This is just pre­pos­ter­ous, and it is just re­flect­ing of the ig­no­bil­i­ty and the nas­ti­ness of some of the peo­ple in this so­ci­ety who hold high of­fices and are quite pre­pared to use those of­fices to achieve their ug­ly in­ten­tions,” he said.

“I find that hor­ri­ble be­cause when you bal­ance the fact of stat­ing this in­for­ma­tion against some of the in­her­ent risks that now ex­ists in so­ci­ety, it is just UNC pol­i­tick­ing. That has to be bal­anced against the fact of safe­ty of the in­di­vid­ual, se­cu­ri­ty of the in­di­vid­ual, ex­tor­tion and all kinds of oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions,” he added.

De­spite those con­cerns, un­der the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion, then-AG Faris Al-Rawi re­leased the names of the at­tor­neys paid un­der both the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment and Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment from 2010 to 2015.

Nev­er­the­less, Hinds slammed the UNC’s cri­tique of Gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­ture on le­gal fees, con­sid­er­ing their at­tor­neys al­leged­ly spon­sor po­lit­i­cal ac­tivist Ravi Bal­go­b­in Ma­haraj to sue State agen­cies.

At­tempts to reach the Op­po­si­tion Leader for a re­sponse were un­suc­cess­ful.