Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

Po­lice have seized Adri­an Scoon’s cell­phone as the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to his Sea­side Brunch event late last year takes an­oth­er turn.

Act­ing Deputy Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, Wen­dell Williams con­firmed this at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, he said Scoon re­fus­es to give po­lice of­fi­cers the de­vice’s pass­word pre­vent­ing them from ac­cess­ing in­for­ma­tion on it.

Williams said an ap­pli­ca­tion to com­pel Scoon to dis­close the pass­word has been signed off by Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob.

Of­fi­cers have been in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether Scoon, the son of gov­ern­ment min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon, breached the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions by host­ing his event on­board the MV Ocean Pel­i­can on De­cem­ber 26, 2021.

On Jan­u­ary 5, 2022, po­lice ex­e­cut­ed a search war­rant at Scoon’s Mar­aval home look­ing for ev­i­dence in­clud­ing com­pa­ny doc­u­ments and records.

Scoon’s at­tor­ney, Kiel Tack­lals­ingh, wrote a let­ter to Ja­cob, a copy of which was ob­tained by Guardian Me­dia.

“We are un­will­ing to give blan­ket ac­cess to my client’s de­vices for po­lice to con­duct rov­ing in­quiry in­to pri­vate in­for­ma­tion and de­vices. You have not spec­i­fied any spe­cif­ic doc­u­ment or in­for­ma­tion which you re­quire and there­fore we are un­will­ing to sim­ply give you pass­words to do as you wish,” ac­cord­ing to the let­ter.

The let­ter went on, “I wish to re­mind you that the war­rant au­tho­riz­ing you to seize my client’s de­vices is cur­rent­ly be­ing chal­lenged via ju­di­cial re­view pro­ceed­ing and that those pro­ceed­ings in­volve in­ter alia a chal­lenge to: 1. the grant of the war­rant; and 2. whether that war­rant could have au­tho­rized the ex­trac­tion of in­for­ma­tion from the seized elec­tron­ic de­vices.”

Mean­while, Williams re­vealed that there is now a sec­ond part to the in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

He, how­ev­er, could not go in­to any fur­ther de­tails.

“We’re tak­ing up every as­pect that presents it­self as an al­le­ga­tion or sug­ges­tion of it in terms of an in­frac­tion of the law. For that rea­son, we have iden­ti­fied two streams of in­ves­ti­ga­tions in terms of per­sons ac­tu­al­ly on it and so head of the CID, Mr Chan­dool is han­dling one stream and the oth­er stream is be­ing han­dled by the west­ern di­vi­sion ba­si­cal­ly the main or sub­stan­tial in terms of what was found on the Ocean Pel­i­can,” Williams said.

“The thing is we live in Trinidad and every­thing is heav­i­ly le­gal­is­tic in terms of our sys­tem and so we have to cov­er sev­er­al things less we ex­pose our­selves when we get to the point of court,” he added.