(Trinidad Express) FORMER justice minister Herbert Volney has jumped to the defence of embattled former executive chairman of CL Financial, Lawrence Duprey, slamming his former Cabinet colleague Attorney General Anand Ramlogan.
During Thursday’s post-Cabinet news conference, Ramlogan said Duprey’s failure to appear in the Commission of Enquiry into the failure of the conglomerate and four of its subsidiaries where he was the “central protagonist” effectively “makes him a wanted man”.
Volney, a former High Court judge, said he was “impelled” to come to Duprey’s defence in light of Ramlogan’s statement.
“It scares me to hear this reckless and dangerous statement coming from the State’s chief legal adviser and someone so entrenched in the political boudoir of the Prime Minister,” Volney said.
“It speaks volumes of the mindset of the Attorney General for it must now only be taken to be seen as the ominous signs of a creeping dictatorship in which no citizen can feel protected by the right to a fair trial in accordance with fundamental justice, the protection of the law and the right against self-incrimination declared in the Constitution,” he said.
He said, “This unfortunate misstatement is not in accordance with the criminal law where it is enshrined that there is a presumption of innocence even in the face of pregnant silence.”
Volney said Ramlogan’s statement “has been aggravated ten times over” because it has “attracted neither condemnation nor derision” from Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Chief Justice Ivor Archie or Director of Public Prosecutions, Roger Gaspard.
