By KEN ALI
Dr Keith Rowley is the common chord in the two current multi-million-dollar financial scandals with the public’s purse.
That is despite Rowley’s repeated claims while in office – and the outlay of tens of millions of dollars in so-called investigations – about fighting white-collar crime.
Posterity will remember him for casually sitting for almost a decade on the eye-popping Colman report on the CL Financial saga, Trinidad and Tobago’s worst-ever daylight robbery.
The Ponzi scheme cost citizens some $28 billion, a sizable chunk of the country’s gross domestic product.
Attorneys’ fees alone were a staggering $4 billion.
At the core of the financial atrocity were unregulated high-risk investments, and lack of regulatory oversight.
The architects of the heist escaped public reckoning and serious criminal charges and possible lengthy jail terms.
No one ended up in handcuffs.
To be sure, Rowley responded to a curious request from Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Roger Gaspard to hold his hand on the release of the report with scandalous revelations about CL’s kingpins.
The DPP does not have to account for his actions, including his peculiar request that Sir Anthony Colman conduct the enquiry behind closed doors.
But Gaspard’s “long silence,” as the Express calls it, must be the source of deep concern and rampant public speculation.
The issue, as the newspaper also accurately sums up, “threatens to destabilise the financial foundation of T&T.”
That is why Rowley, as the nation’s then-leader, should have called Gaspard’s bluff.
He should have exposed the Colman report for all to ingest what Attorney General John Jeremie brands “the largest case of fraud and financial tragedy” in T&T.
Rowley’s blatant cover-up and Gaspard’s strange inaction mean that, once again, the powerful and wealthy escape prosecution for boldfaced crimes that rob common people.
The Ponzi schemers and their well-placed enablers lived the good life while the authorities consciously looked away.
The same is true about Rowley and public contracts worth up to $500 million to relatives and friends of PNM high-flyer Foster Cummings.
Surely, the then-PM would have known about the obvious conflicts of interests and absence of adherence of public procurement regulations.
As if nothing happened, Cummings is today a member of Pennelope Beckles-Robinson’s handpicked team of senators preaching public morality.
As for Rowley, the electorate’s rebuff of the PNM on his home turf is part of the retribution for disregarding appalling financial scandals.
