Ramlogan: Disgraceful act by Rowley
Attorney General Anand Ramlogan said that Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley made a “bold-faced, disgraceful, shameful attempt to assassinate the character of PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar” when he presented a motion of no confidence against the PM and the Government yesterday. Ramlogan was the first Minister to respond to Rowley’s motion in the House of Representatives. “It is pure and utter fabrication,” Ramlogan said the allegation of email exchanges between certain high-ranking government officials.
Ramlogan said he never had any gmail account with the address Rowley referred to in his contribution. He also dismissed Rowley’s claim that he wanted to tap the phone of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). He also said the Office of the AG had no interest in tapping the phones of journalists either, as was claimed by Rowley, adding that was the way the PNM operated while in government.
The AG said Rowley’s motion was “entirely misconceived, totally devoid of merit, completely unjustified, and an abuse of Parliament.” He insisted the Government had not done anything to undermine the Judiciary or the media in the country, as was claimed by Rowley. Noting Rowley’s motion was “ridiculous in the extreme”, Ramlogan said he did not have an email with the addressanan@gmail.com. He said his email address was anand@tstt.net.tt. Ramlogan said Rowley was making “baseless allegations” and “grasping at straws”, adding there was a good working relationship between the Government and the Judiciary. He said the motion should be treated with the greatest of contempt for it was vacuous and without merit. In a release last evening, the Office of the PM refuted any authorship in the series of printouts of alleged electronic mails between members of the government during a period of September 2012 produced by Rowley.
“The content of the print-outs as read into the Parliamentary debate this afternoon would be inadmissible under any general rule of evidence and we challenge the Leader of the Opposition to authenticate these messages. “We also challenge the Opposition Leader to repeat these allegations outside the Parliament chamber and without the protection of the privilege he so skillfully abuses,” the release said.It added that “in this era of technology, it is easy to forge e-mail accounts, or to create accounts that are either very similar or appears to be an authentic existing email”. “If a series of print outs, without any well-established electronic verification process, is the foundation of the Leader of the Opposition’s No Confidence Motion in the Government; then the motion is being built on nothing more than a fictitious and fabricated paper foundation and adds nothing to the development of the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” the release said.