- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 29/Jun 20:28

PNM threatens legal war over CEPEP firings

OPPOSITION Leader Pennelope Beckles says the termination last week of approximately 10,700 CEPEP workers last week is the tip of the iceberg and evidence of similar actions the two-month-old UNC government plans to take against other workers at other state entities. For this reason, she said the PNM will take legal action against the government on behalf of the CEPEP workers. Beckles said the opposition will consider similar action for other workers who are now being targeted for dismissal by the UNC since it won the April 28 general election. Opposition Senator Faris Al-Rawi told the UNC to put on their court clothes for legal battles on several fronts in the coming months. Beckles and members of a high-powered team of PNM parliamentarians made this position clear after a legal clinic they held with hundreds of CEPEP contractors and workers at the Lisas Gardens Community Centre, Couva on June 29. The team included Opposition Senator Faris Al-Rawi and PNM MPs Marvin Gonzales (Arouca/Lopinot), Keith Scotland (Port of Spain South), Symon de Nobriga (Diego Martin Central) and Kareem Marcelle (Laventille West). Beckles, Al-Rawi, Gonzales, Scotland, and Marcelle are attorneys. Al-Rawi and Scotland are also senior counsels (SCs) Former UNC member, attorney Larry Lalla, SC, and attorney St Clair O'Neil also attended the meeting. Lalla resigned from the UNC and joined the PNM during the election campaign. Some of the people at the meeting were senior citizens with disabilities. One man required the help of three younger people to help him up a staircase to attend the nearly two-hour meeting on the upper floor of the centre. Beckles and members of her team addressed the meeting. The assembled contractors and workers were allowed to make statements and ask questions of the PNM team. At different stages in during the meeting, there were loud shouts and applause. After the meeting, Beckles said, 'This is consistent with a certain pattern of behaviour of the UNC government." That pattern, she continued, included the recent firings of Central Bank governor Dr Alvin Hilaire, Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) CEO Keithroy Halliday, WASA senior managers and several workers at the Land Settlement Agency (LSA). Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo and Public Utilities Minister Barry Padarath declined to answer urgent questions from the opposition in the House of Representatives on June 27 about Hilaire and Halliday's firings respectively. Beckles said, "It is our information that they are also going for the URP workers as well as the reafforestation workers. She added this is why the PNM convened an urgent meeting with fired CEPEP contractors and workers. As the former government, she continued, the PNM would have done what was necessary in terms of getting proper legal advice before CEPEP entered into several contracts which have since been terminated by the UNC. Gonzales said, "We are assembling a team of attorneys to offer legal services, so that they can be properly represented to prevent the government from proceeding with this very, very wicked act on their part." Asked if the PNM would offer the same protection to other workers targeted by the government, Beckles said, "Therefore if there are other workers who will be affected, yes, we will consider very seriously assisting them with the benefit of course and expertise of the lawyers that are available to us." On the type of legal action the opposition will pursue on behalf of the CEPEP contractors and workers, Gonzales said, "It will be a class action type of lawsuit but of course we cannot go into any details with respect to strategy." The PNM's attorneys. he continued, are looking at all of the legal avenues that are available. Gonzales added some of the contractors and workers may be pursuing their own legal action against CEPEP and the government. 'We are putting together a strategy and we are offering it to them, and we see where we go from here within the shortest time possible." Al-Rawi told the UNC, "Bring our all your clothes. Your track suit, your long pants, your shoes, your court clothes...everything." He elaborated on Gonzales' point on the PNM's legal strategy. Al-Rawi, a former attorney general, said, "The pieces of (legal) action will include every range possible. Class action is not the only intended action." He added, "There will be individual actions. There is High Court. There is Industrial Court There is public law. There is constitutional law." Al-Rawi said Beckles, who has 30 years experience as an attorney, is directly involved with the PNM's legal team. "No stone will be left unturned. Therefore we intend to take every step that is possible in the law and the representation of the people's rights." Gonzales, a former public utilities minister, rejected the ongoing UNC narrative that CEPEP contracts received no proper approvals before the election and were being given to PNM financiers and supporters. "That is simply not true." Gonzales told the media there is evidence which clearly showed that on the cusp of the September 7, 2015 general election, the then UNC-led People's Partnership coalition government approved CEPEP contracts which had durations of two to three years. He said there is also evidence that when the PNM won that election, it "honoured all of these contracts." Former finance minister Colm Imbert made a similar statement in a recent post on X. The UNC, Gonzales continued, has not offered one iota of evidence to prove there was any wrongdoing by any public official in awarding CEPEP contracts before the election. He said the UNC has also provided no evidence to show the public procurement law was breached in any of these matters. Gonzales challenged the UNC to produce any evidence it has to support its claims. "You just can't go forward and make statements to mislead your supporters and throw red meat to them." Most of them were contracts two and three years and we honoured them." Al-Rawi disclosed during the meeting one contractor asked why the government fired them. "Those are things that we have to get on the record to treat with in law." He reminded the media, CEPEP contractors and workers were not the only casualties in the two months the UNC has been in government. Al-Rawi added that the "other casualties" included 400 change agents at the Rural Development and Local Government Ministry, were ten WASA executives, 400 WASA managers and 900 and 800 workers, respectively, at two separate regional health authorities which he did not name. Referring to earlier comments from Beckles, Al-Rawi said 5,000 URP workers and 4,700 forestry workers could also now be in the UNC's line of fire. "There are a lot of questions that the UNC will answer and they will have to answer those questions in courts and in the public domain." The post PNM threatens legal war over CEPEP firings appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.