AG denies hiring wife's law firm

ATTORNEY GENERAL Faris Al-Rawi has denied hiring his wife’s law firm to file a formal response on behalf of the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) to the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha which recently sent a pre-action protocol letter to the Cabinet.

Maha Sabha attorneys wrote to the Cabinet complaining of the cut in the number of national scholarships and the implementation of a new bursary system.

In a response letter dated April 1, the law firm Al-Rawi, Haynes-Soo Hon and Company wrote Maha Sabha attorneys advising them not to file any legal proceedings against the Cabinet as they were in the process of addressing the Maha Sabha's pre-action protocol letter.

The law firm, Newsday was told, is owned by Al-Rawi’s wife and was representing the Office of the Prime Minister, in response to the Maha Sabha's letter to the Cabinet. A Cabinet is fully constituted when there is a prime minister and an attorney general.

Newsday contacted AG Al-Rawi for a comment on the issue of the hiring of his wife’s law firm to represent the Cabinet – of which he is a member – and how this could be perceived in several different ways.

Al-Rawi said his wife’s firm is forbidden to receive work from the Office of the Attorney General but not from other arms of the State, including the Office of the Prime Minister.

“I had nothing to do with the hiring of my wife’s firm...that is Office of the Prime Minister,” Al-Rawi told Newsday.

Newsday also questioned the appearance of bias, since his wife’s firm was being hired by the Government of which he is a part. To this, Al-Rawi said there are other Cabinet ministers whose spouses are attorneys who sometimes do work on behalf of the State or certain ministries, and dismissed the suggestion as nothing more than political mischief.

“My wife’s company has sued the State (in the past) and I have stayed clear from that. If the OPM decides to hire her law firm, that is their prerogative.”

Al-Rawi has had to fend off controversy since entering public life, most notably after a building said to be owned by his family was rented by the Opposition and Government. His family connections were also brought up in 2019 when he denied any conflict of interest between his wife’s niece forming a company to deal in marijuana as the Government was moving towards the commercialisation of the cannabis plant.

In the letter to Cabinet secretary Cheryl Hem-Lee, dated March 23, attorneys Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, Dinesh Rambally, Stefan Ramkissoon, Kiel Taklalsingh and Rhea Khan said they were acting on behalf of the Maha Sabha and questioned the change in criteria for scholarships.

They said that in the past, there was no subjectivity in the process and it did not previously involve the "discretion of government appointees or functionaries" and was not tainted by "individual predilections, preferences or biases.”

The lawyers argued that the students would have “acquired a legitimate expectation” of benefiting from the previous system, adding that the new policy, which reduced the number of scholarships from 400 to 100, and introduced 500 bursaries, left a potential applicant in the dark as to what criteria to focus on.

The letter claimed macro-economic considerations were not the driving force behind the change and advised of legal proceedings to have the courts quash Cabinet’s decision to replace the previous scholarship system with the bursary system.

The Cabinet was given until March 29 to respond to the letter, which was copied to the Prime Minister and the Attorney General.

In response, attorneys from Al-Rawi, Haynes-Soo Hon and Company said they were allowed 30 days to respond to a claim but were only given six. The letter added that there were no outlined circumstances that required immediate response and said they would espond in full by April 12.

Up to 6 pm on Easter Sunday, calls and messages to  the Prime Minister's cellphone went unanswered. Rowley is said to be spending the Easter weekend in Tobago.