Renu­ka Singh

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day dis­missed the Op­po­si­tion's con­cern that a new mem­ber of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion had links to the Gov­ern­ment and was too close to it.

Dur­ing the de­bate to ap­prove Pres­i­dent Paula-Mae Weekes’ nom­i­nees to the PSC on Wednes­day, Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress MP for Oropouche East Dr Roodal Mooni­lal said that wealth man­ag­er Max­ine King, through her com­pa­ny First­line Se­cu­ri­ty, was as­so­ci­at­ed with a de­vel­op­ment in Buc­coo which is be­ing man­aged by In­ez In­vest­ments, which was linked to a Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial.

Mooni­lal ques­tioned King’s re­la­tion­ship with the Gov­ern­ment as a re­sult of this.

“The head­line point is the per­son, Max­ine King is much too close to the po­lit­i­cal ex­ec­u­tive of this coun­try to be on the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion by virtue of her job as the wealth man­ag­er at First­line Se­cu­ri­ties,” Mooni­lal said.

Mooni­lal al­so queried whether Ian Ramd­hanie had some “in­ter­fac­ing” with mem­bers of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion.

“An em­ploy­ee of that or­gan­i­sa­tion has in­di­cat­ed to me that the per­son is pre­pared to write the new chair­man and in­deed the per­son­al ad­min­is­tra­tion about a pre­vi­ous in­ter­fac­ing with a nom­i­nee who is be­fore us,” he said.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Row­ley la­belled Mooni­lal as "farse and bold­face" for mak­ing those vague con­nec­tions be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the nom­i­nees.

"For a per­son who has done to this coun­try what he did and who is men­tioned so fre­quent­ly and ques­tion­ing­ly in court doc­u­ments, who is of great in­ter­est to the po­lice, he just farse and bold­face to be seek­ing to cast as­per­sions on any per­son in this coun­try," Row­ley said.

Row­ley urged Mooni­lal to deal with his own mat­ters first.

"He would do well to fol­low the judge’s rul­ing and con­clude and present his de­fence in the court mat­ters where he and oth­ers have to ac­count for how they wan­ton­ly and self-serv­ing­ly ex­pend­ed huge sums of tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey," he said.

"The same tax­pay­ers whom they now pre­tend to be pro­tect­ing and de­fend­ing, even as the po­lice is look­ing for them for what they did when they had the reins of au­thor­i­ty in 2010-2015.”

Row­ley added, "I have no in­ter­est in any­thing that Mooni­lal has to say.”

Re­tired Jus­tice Ju­dith Jones, King, Ramd­hanie, Max­ine At­tong and Ra­jiv Per­sad were even­tu­al­ly ap­proved with the 21 Gov­ern­ment MPs vot­ing for and the 19 Op­po­si­tion MPS vot­ing against. The new mem­bers are ex­pect­ed to be sworn in next week.