Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Princes Town, Bar­ry Padarath MP, is al­leg­ing that the TSTT Es­tate Po­lice Di­vi­sion will be re­placed by a pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty firm, and says he has pa­per­work that can back up his claims.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment, MP Padarath, who is the Op­po­si­tion’s Shad­ow Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, ar­gues that Gov­ern­ment “was in­tent on pri­va­tiz­ing the pub­lic util­i­ties sec­tor while send­ing thou­sands of em­ploy­ees’ home”.  He called on the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties to come clean on the mat­ter.

In the re­lease, the Princes Town MP claims he re­ceived “a doc­u­ment in his mail­box that shows over 150 em­ploy­ees from the Es­tate Po­lice Di­vi­sion go­ing home and be­ing re­placed by a pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty firm”. 

“The pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty firm was al­ready en­gaged in oth­er as­pects of TSTT's op­er­a­tions un­der the name of an­oth­er com­pa­ny but who had the very same own­ers and di­rec­tors,” MP Padarath says in his state­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to MP Padarath: “Friends, fam­i­ly and fi­nanciers of the PNM are feed­ing at the trough at TSTT and that was the main rea­son for the an­nounce­ment of a Sub-Com­mit­tee of Cab­i­net to ad­dress the chal­lenges at TSTT.”

The Princes Town MP al­so asked whether the gov­ern­ment “had al­ready ear­marked sev­er­al va­cant prop­er­ties owned by TSTT to be sold in a fire sale in the not-too-dis­tant fu­ture.”

“The pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty firm al­ready has sev­er­al lu­cra­tive con­tracts with TSTT and ap­peared to be the sup­pli­er and pro­pri­etor of pref­er­ence by this ad­min­is­tra­tion,” MP Padarath stat­ed.

He added: “While prop­er­ties owned by TSTT were left va­cant for years, the gov­ern­ment was busy rent­ing prop­er­ties for TSTT’s op­er­a­tions from the own­ers of the pre­ferred se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny un­der dif­fer­ent names.”

The Op­po­si­tion MP wants the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter to ex­plain to the pub­lic what ex­act­ly are gov­ern­ment's in­ten­tions in this mat­ter.