Carisa Lee

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley last night launched an at­tack on Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Al­liance (NTA) leader Gary Grif­fith at the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) pub­lic meet­ing in St James.

Dr Row­ley waved a Min­istry of Fi­nance Cen­tral Au­dit Com­mit­tee Re­port where it is al­leged that Grif­fith ex­ceed­ed the mil­lion-dol­lar lim­it of con­tracts while he was com­mis­sion­er of po­lice.

Read­ing from Page five of a 46-page doc­u­ment, the PM said the re­port start­ed out with “abuse of del­e­ga­tion of au­thor­i­ty.”

He said, “The Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice is an ac­count­ing of­fi­cer so he too had a lim­it of one mil­lion dol­lars, this ex­ec­u­tive sum­ma­ry of this au­dit starts out with say­ing ‘abuse of del­e­ga­tion of au­thor­i­ty’.

“Let me read a cou­ple of lines of it for you. There were nu­mer­ous in­stances where sin­gle-con­tract agree­ments ap­proved were in ex­cess of the com­mis­sion­er’s del­e­gat­ed au­thor­i­ty of one mil­lion dol­lars and con­tracts were bro­ken up to by­pass the del­e­gat­ed au­thor­i­ty of both the min­is­te­r­i­al ten­ders com­mit­tee and the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board. There were nine in­stances where con­tracts were ap­proved in­ter­nal­ly by the TTPS of which the com­mis­sion­er’s au­thor­i­ty did not ex­ist,” the re­port al­leged.

“In par­tic­u­lar, on De­cem­ber 30, 2020, the TTPS and a pri­vate com­pa­ny en­tered in­to a ve­hi­cle lease agree­ment for the lease of 114 ve­hi­cles for a pe­ri­od of three years from Jan­u­ary 1, 2021, at a cost of 51.1 mil­lion dol­lars.  So peo­ple, what I am say­ing to you here, read­ing from this au­dit, this gen­tle­man who now wants ex­ec­u­tive au­thor­i­ty, form a po­lit­i­cal par­ty, join up with the UNC hail friends well met be­cause birds of a feath­er flock to­geth­er even af­ter they moult and come back they still flock to­geth­er. His au­thor­i­ty lim­it­ed as com­mis­sion­er is one mil­lion dol­lars but he man­aged to get the po­lice to en­ter in­to a con­tract un­der his au­thor­i­ty of 51 mil­lion dol­lars.

“That is what he wants the au­thor­i­ty to do in Port-of-Spain cor­po­ra­tion and Diego Mar­tin ... I did not make this up, this is a re­port from the Min­istry of Fi­nance,” the PM al­leged.

Row­ley al­so said he was con­strained to speak about an­oth­er con­fi­den­tial re­port on Grif­fith.

Grif­fith has formed an ac­com­mo­da­tion with the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress to fight the Au­gust 14 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions. The UNC will fight 110 seats in cor­po­ra­tion elec­toral dis­tricts while Grif­fith’s NTA will con­test 31 seats.

In Port-of-Spain, Griff­fith will be fight­ing six seats while the UNC will al­so be fight­ing six seats.

"It is not about the PNM. The PNM has done a lot to help de­vel­op the coun­try, just as the UNC has done but this R-PNM, the Row­ley PNM is what needs to go," Grif­fith told Guardian Me­dia this week.

"Join­ing with the 300-thou­sand-odd UNC sup­port­ers means one thing, the an­ni­hi­la­tion of the PNM de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly to have Kei­th Row­ley re­moved from of­fice be­cause what we are see­ing now in this coun­try is a de­mo­c­ra­t­ic dic­ta­tor­ship."

PM Row­ley warned the pub­lic against sup­port­ing Grif­fith and told them to en­sure that the NTA can­di­dates lose their de­posit.