(Trinidad Express) Collin Partab may have been the latest minister to get axed by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, but he was not the first.
In fact, just after two years in office, Persad-Bissessar has found grounds to strip six other ministers of their portfolios. On May 10, 2011, the appointment of Government Senator and Minister of Planning, Restructuring and Gender Affairs, Mary King, was revoked by President George Maxwell Richards.
King’s dismissal came after Persad-Bissessar found evidence that implicated King in the inappropriate awarding of a TT$100,000 contract to a company, Ixanos, in which King’s family has an interest.
Persad-Bissessar was quoted as saying, “new evidence came to light following an investigation conducted into the matter by the Attorney General Anand Ramlogan”. She explained that her decision to remove King as both a senator and government minister was based on that new evidence.
In June 2011, Persad-Bissessar reshuffled her Cabinet removing three ministers—Therese Baptiste-Cornelis as Minister of Health, Rudrawatee Nan Gosine-Ramgoolam as Minister at the Ministry of Public Administration and Subhas Panday as Minister in the Ministry of National Security. Both Baptiste-Cornelis and Gosine-Ramgoolam were former lecturers at the Lok Jack Graduate School of Business before entering the Cabinet in May 2010. Following their removal as ministers, Baptiste-Cornelis and Gosine-Ramgoolam accepted Persad-Bissessar’s offer to become this country’s consuls-general in Geneva, Switzerland and New York in the United States respectively.