Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says the re­port on the Sports Min­istry’s $150,000 set­tle­ment to a for­mer em­ploy­ee is the sub­ject of le­gal “chal­lenges.” On the ad­vice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the pub­lic ser­vice, he said the mat­ter’s be­ing re­viewed and when it’s ap­pro­pri­ate to present the re­port it will be done. He added that he couldn’t give a time­frame for fi­nal­i­sa­tion.

Row­ley said he didn’t give Green­vale, La Hor­quet­ta res­i­dents an as­sur­ance when flood mit­i­ga­tion work would be­gin. He said he re­cent­ly toured the ad­vanced state of prepa­ra­tions to deal with im­proved hy­draulic man­age­ment around Green­vale and sim­i­lar work was be­ing done all over T&T.

On the lease of the St Clair prop­er­ty owned by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi’s fam­i­ly for the CPO’s of­fice, Row­ley said steps were tak­en to de­ter­mine its val­ue and the of­fer­ing of the build­ing was de­ter­mined as suit­able by the rel­e­vant Gov­ern­ment de­part­ment and ap­pro­pri­ate ap­proval was done un­der the “nor­mal cir­cum­stances of Gov­ern­ment rental.”

“Ex­am­i­na­tion of this par­tic­u­lar arrange­ment will show there are ben­e­fits to the Gov­ern­ment,” Row­ley said, adding it was cheap­er to have done it that way.

Row­ley said he wasn’t aware that the pop­u­la­tion’s con­cerned about who owns the build­ing, but not­ed they’re con­cerned about what the Gov­ern­ment’s buy­ing and what the Gov­ern­ment gets val­ue for mon­ey for. He said the cri­te­ria for the arrange­ment was val­ue for mon­ey and suit­abil­i­ty of the struc­ture.