The Trinidad Guardian reported on Saturday that Attorney General John Jeremie told the House of Representatives that a media report of the bank account held by Rowley and his wife, Sharon, was "a total fabrication and a hoax".
But it turns out that Jeremie did not make that statement in Parliament.
The Guardian has explained the discrepancy saying that it had received an email draft copy of the AG's speech which stated:
"The ACIB (Anti-Corruption Investigations Bureau) has fully investigated these reports and has determined that they were a total fabrication and a hoax, calculated to create confusion in the national community.”
When Jeremie spoke in the House he did not make any such statement. In fact the office of the Attorney General has issued a statement distancing itself from the Guardian report.
"The fact is despite strenuous attempts through official channels to investigate the veracity of reports of Cayman Islands accounts, the Ministry of the Attorney General is still not yet in receipt of any definitive, official information required to make a statement on the issue,” the release stated.
It added that the Guardian report, which "purports to be a record of his statement to the House of Representatives" was erroneous, noting that "The Hansard records would show that at no time did the Attorney General utter the words attributed to him in relation to an alleged account in the Cayman Islands."
The Guardian is now urging the Attorney General to clear up the matter of the "hoax". In an editorial the paper stated that Jeremie should get to the bottom on the issue.
Read the editorial: Unearth hoaxers, Mr Jeremie
Now, the Sunday Express is saying Rowley wants Jeremie to tell the public about the correspondence he received from the Alexandria Bancorp Limited, the Cayman Islands bank in which an account was allegedly held in the name of Rowley’s wife, Sharon Rowley, with himself as a signatory.
Rowley had previously denied that he or his wife has any foreign bank accounts. And according to the Express he is now demanding that the Attorney General account for the difference between the draft sent to the Guardian and the statement he actually made in Parliament.
Rowley told the Express Jeremie knows that "the allegations of a US$6.5 million (TT$40 million) bank account in the Cayman Islands, held by him and his wife, is a hoax, but is not saying so."
He added, "He was in a position to treat with that matter on Friday and he chose not to, when he addressed the Parliament. How could somebody put into a draft of a statement that this is a hoax if they don’t know that?.. The fact that it (the draft) got to the Guardian and was published, too bad for him...
"But clearly, when he spoke in the Parliament for public consumption, he was either not prepared to, or wasn’t in a position to say it was a hoax, even though somewhere before that he determined it to be a hoax - otherwise it couldn’t get into the draft."
Rowley told the Express his wife, Sharon, wrote to the Attorney General on Friday asking Jeremie "to make available to her a copy of what the Bank said to him or to make that statement public."
Rowley also told the paper he wrote to the bank's manager asking for a statement of all accounts held at the bank in his name, to say whether any such account is held jointly and to explain who are the signatories to the account.
He has also asked for the date on which his name was added to any such accounts, if they exist, the balance on the account at the time of opening and at the present time.
Rowley also told the Express that Jeremie "without doing an investigation went to the court in the Cayman Islands ’to freeze assets...which he darn well knew did not exist because the Bank told him that’.
He accused the Attorney General of being part of the alleged hoax, stating that Jeremie "wanted to use the ’innuendo’ of saying that Government went to the courts to freeze assets ’to continue the hoax'."
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