Akash Sama­roo

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is de­fend­ing Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert amidst calls for his res­ig­na­tion from the Op­po­si­tion, for al­leged­ly at­tempt­ing to mis­lead the pub­lic by un­der­stat­ing the cost over­runs for the ANR Robin­son Air­port ex­pan­sion project.

On De­cem­ber 2, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar had ini­tial­ly al­leged the cost over­runs to be around $431 mil­lion. This prompt­ed Min­is­ter Im­bert to host a post-Cab­i­net news brief­ing on De­cem­ber 5, where he down­played that fig­ure.

“As of to­day, the orig­i­nal con­struc­tion con­tract sum has been ex­ceed­ed by US$2.5 mil­lion or two per cent,” Im­bert said on De­cem­ber 5.

How­ev­er, a leaked Cab­i­net note forced Im­bert to call a sec­ond me­dia con­fer­ence a day lat­er, where he ad­mit­ted the cost is clos­er to TT$118 mil­lion (US$17.5 mil­lion).

The Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) la­belled this a de­lib­er­ate act and called for his fir­ing, while po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath said the min­is­ter had no ex­cuse for mis­lead­ing the pop­u­la­tion.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, the Prime Min­is­ter said he saw no rea­son to be up­set with his Fi­nance Min­is­ter.

Speak­ing at White­hall, Port-of-Spain, Row­ley said, “I un­der­stand ex­act­ly what the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance was say­ing. I un­der­stand ex­act­ly what was hap­pen­ing, so I was not up­set about it.”

The Prime Min­is­ter went on to say, “You think you prob­a­bly scored a point by say­ing the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance was caught ei­ther ly­ing or with mis­in­for­ma­tion.”

Elab­o­rat­ing on his de­fence of Im­bert, Row­ley said, “The con­ver­sa­tion on one day and the con­ver­sa­tion on an­oth­er day, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance came back a sec­ond day to make it abun­dant­ly clear as to what he was re­fer­ring to and now that you are tak­ing about the broad­er pic­ture, what the broad­er pic­ture is. If you don’t want to ac­cept it then don’t ac­cept it, that does not change the fact.”

When asked on De­cem­ber 6 why he was not forth­right with the full val­ue of the ad­di­tion­al costs, Im­bert ex­plained that he on­ly want­ed to ad­dress what he knew with cer­tain­ty at the time. He said he want­ed to be care­ful not to speak about things he was not ful­ly in­formed about, since re­porters had asked him to com­ment on re­ports he didn’t have in front of him.

On De­cem­ber 12, Im­bert said the me­dia was run­ning a smear cam­paign against the air­port ex­pan­sion project.

“The Cab­i­net Note clear­ly in­di­cates the project’s time­line, the chal­lenges faced, the amend­ments to and phas­es of the project, the costs per fis­cal year to date, the new re­quest­ed fund­ing to com­plete the project and the JUS­TI­FI­CA­TIONS for those re­quests,” he point­ed out.