Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Allyson West has fired back at for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj over his com­ments on the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP) of­fice scan­dal.

In a re­lease on Sun­day, West re­spond­ed to com­ments made by Ma­haraj in the Sun­day Guardian. She said there was no ev­i­dence to back his claims.

In the ar­ti­cle, Ma­haraj claimed af­ter the DPP viewed the Park Court build­ing, lo­cat­ed at Park Street, in Port- of- Spain, he in­formed the Gov­ern­ment that while it was suit­ed for the DPP’s of­fice, it would not be oc­cu­pied un­less it got se­cu­ri­ty clear­ance from Spe­cial Branch.

He added that dur­ing his tenure as AG and Min­is­ter of Le­gal Af­fairs, it was pro­to­col for the Spe­cial Branch to pro­vide clear­ance be­fore the State rent­ed any build­ing for Gov­ern­ment use.

Ac­cord­ing to West, how­ev­er, no Spe­cial Branch re­port was re­quest­ed, not un­til six years lat­er, in Ju­ly 2020.

The re­lease said, “Mr Ma­haraj claims that when the DPP first viewed the build­ing he in­formed the Gov­ern­ment that it was specif­i­cal­ly suit­ed for the DPP’s of­fice, but would not be oc­cu­pied un­less it gets se­cu­ri­ty clear­ance from the Spe­cial Branch. While it is un­clear in which ca­pac­i­ty Mr Ma­haraj is speak­ing, or the source of his in­for­ma­tion, I would re­mind your read­ers that on Fri­day I shared a copy of a doc­u­ment signed by Mr Gas­pard in 2014 in which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed his un­re­served and un­qual­i­fied en­dorse­ment of the rental of Park Court to house the Of­fice of the DPP. Specif­i­cal­ly, his words were “Af­ter due con­sid­er­a­tion, I am of the view that the of­fice of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions could and should be ac­com­mo­dat­ed at those premis­es.” No caveat was at­tached to this state­ment.”

“The is­sue of a spe­cial branch re­port on the build­ing was not re­quest­ed un­til Ju­ly 2020 dur­ing a site vis­it by the DPP of the al­ready rent­ed build­ing, by which time the out­fit­ting of the build­ing was close to com­ple­tion and the tar­get oc­cu­pa­tion date was ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, 2020. I al­so note the state­ment made by Mr Ma­haraj that dur­ing his tenure as At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Min­is­ter of Le­gal Af­fairs it was pro­to­col for the Spe­cial Branch to pro­vide clear­ance be­fore the State rent­ed any build­ing for Gov­ern­ment,” it added.

West said up­on ex­ten­sive re­search, she found no ev­i­dence or any cab­i­net note to the rental of said build­ings.

She re­it­er­at­ed that the Gov­ern­ment took all rea­son­able steps to ad­dress the se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns raised.

West said work was re­quest­ed to the build­ing in­clud­ing re­plac­ing glass pan­els, but that was a de­sign fea­ture with con­crete block work.

How­ev­er, that was halt­ed be­cause the land­lord pro­duced an en­gi­neer­ing as­sess­ment stat­ing the build­ing’s foun­da­tion was not de­signed to ac­com­mo­date the ad­di­tion­al work.