PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – Former principal of the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) 63-year-old Dr. Bhoendradatt Tewarie was sworn in as the new Minister of Planning, Economic and Social Restructuring and Gender Affairs yesterday even as the former holder of the office continued to plead her innocence against the charges that led to her dismissal less than 24 hours ago.
Tewarie took the oath of office before President George Maxwell Richards in what he described as a bitter sweet moment.
In life you have to make choices in situations in which you find yourself,” he told reporters, adding that while he had been given short notice “I am happy to be on board.
“I want to do the best I can for Trinidad and Tobago, I want to make the best contribution I can to the People’s Partnership…and I want to support the Prime Minister to be a high achieving prime minister,” said Tewarie, a former minister under the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) between1986-1991.
He will be sworn in as a government senator when the Senate meets next meet.
But even as he pledged to help the Kamla Persad Bissessar coalition administration fulfill its mandate to the population following its 29-12 victory at the general elections on May 24 last year, Mary King was insisting that her dismissal was wrong and that the Prime Minister should have held talks with her prior to her dismissal.
Joseph Toney, chairman of the Congress of the People (COP) party, one of five members of the coalition administration, said that King, an economist and a former head of the Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute (TTTI) had met with the party’s executive on Tuesday night to discuss her situations surrounding her dismissal.
“She felt very strongly that she was hard done by, that she had committed no wrong and that on the basis of her interpretation of the Integrity in Public Life Act, she was quite innocent,” Toney said.
He told reporters that the COP executive “did not want to offer a view as we felt that in all the circumstances the Integrity Commission should be the best institution to look at all the facts of this matter and determine whether any wrong doing had been done.
King was axed from her job less than 48 hours after the Sunday Express newspaper ran a front page story indicating that questions have been raised as to whether King breached the law when she failed to disclose her pecuniary and family interest in a software engineering company, Ixanos Ltd, which won a Government website development contract from her ministry last November.
It said that the minister is the corporate secretary on record and a joint shareholder with her husband Dr St Clair King of Ixanos.
Prime Minister Persad Bissessar had described the dismissal of King “as a very sad day”. (CMC)
