"I hired competent people I could trust" AG Ramlogan

Attorney General Anand Ramlogan responded Thursday to charges made earlier the week by Opposition leader Dr Keith Rowley.

Speaking in the budget debate Monday Rowley accused Ramlogan of handing a $13 million job to his friends and "brothers in law" to conduct forensic audits of several government institutions, including UDeCOTT, Petrotrin and the UTT.

Rowley suggested that Ramlogan was rewarding his friends.

“I am grateful to him for confirming I have an ‘A-Team’,” Ramlogan told reporters, noting that he hired legal experts whom he knew and who could be trusted.

“What am I to do hire people who are not my friends? I have a lot of friends in the legal profession and I tend to rely on them for independent, impartial, reliable and competent legal advice and I make no apologies for that," he said.

“I don’t know if Dr Rowley expects me to hire my enemies,” Ramlogan added.

He suggested that when the PNM hired some of the same people in the past no one complained about it, among them Russell Martineau, SC, a former PNM AG, and Michael Beloff, QC.