Gail Alexan­der

Op­po­si­tion leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar on Mon­day said she couldn't be­lieve the sto­ry of the Prime Min­is­ter be­ing "scammed."

Speak­ing at the UNC Fo­rum, she cit­ed a T&T Guardian on­line re­port head­lined "PM: Call re­gard­ing fund­ing from Bill Gates Foun­da­tion came from scam­mer."

She added, "I am told of a re­cent pub­li­ca­tion of a sto­ry from the Guardian. I can’t be­lieve this. So from Email­gate to Bill­Gate.

"Prime Min­is­ter Scammed. Re­al­ly? He said the fund­ing from Bill Gates foun­da­tion was a scam."

She was re­fer­ring to a sto­ry which high­light­ed Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley's state­ment on the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter's web­site on Mon­day about the is­sue.

On his re­turn from Guyana on Sun­day, Row­ley said last Sat­ur­day while in that coun­try, the chair­man of Cari­com had com­mu­ni­cat­ed with him that the Of­fice of the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the UN want­ed to reach him and a cou­ple oth­er Cari­com Heads to ad­vise them "that he had re­ceived a sub­stan­tial grant from the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion to be dis­trib­uted among" Cari­com lead­ers in its on­go­ing pover­ty al­le­vi­a­tion pro­gramme.

Row­ley said he re­turned a call to the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al on Sun­day (whose num­ber and pro­file pic­ture he has on his phone) and thought noth­ing un­usu­al of this, since the Gates Foun­da­tion had made grants to T&T at least twice be­fore.

He said he men­tioned at last Sun­day's press con­fer­ence that he was ad­vised that T&T was to be al­lo­cat­ed an­oth­er grant as de­scribed. How­ev­er, Row­ley said when he at­tempt­ed to speak to the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al on the num­ber he was car­ry­ing on his phone, he was on­ly able to com­mu­ni­cate by What­sApp and a per­son pur­port­ing to be the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al at­tempt­ed to en­cour­age him to use a for­eign bank to re­ceive the grant - but "there would be a sig­nif­i­cant pro­cess­ing fee."

The PM de­tailed oth­er de­vel­op­ments which aroused his sus­pi­cion, adding he was sat­is­fied that there was no grant but a brazen at­tempt to scam coun­tries "through the use of im­per­son­ation and iden­ti­ty theft."

Row­ley said he was re­fer­ring this mat­ter to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice and all oth­er rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties.

Yes­ter­day, an of­fi­cial at the UN of­fice in T&T was asked by the T&T Guardian if there would be any check in­to how the han­dle of the Of­fice of the UN's Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al might have been used in such a scam.

They replied, "Not that I'm aware of."

TTPS of­fi­cials didn't an­swer calls on whether they were fol­low­ing up the mat­ter as the PM re­quest­ed.

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