Griffith alleges Government hypocrisy over procurement rules

NTA head Gary Griffith on Friday accused the Government of hypocrisy in querying his spending as commissioner of police, but then retroactively approving monies spent for last week's Caricom heads meeting in TT with purchases not following the provisions of the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act.

In an audio clip sent to media houses, Griffith said, at a recent political meeting, Rowley had waved an alleged document to try to make it look as if Griffith had breached procurement rules as police commissioner, when Griffith had simply been trying to secure the country and make citizens safe.

"Every single item acquired can still be accounted for," Griffith said.

He listed them as "the Operational Command Centre, tasers, pepper spray, body cameras, dashboard cameras on the vehicles, the Special Operations Response Team which has now been removed and the criminals have taken over, the Gender-based Violence Unit, the Social Media Monitoring Unit, the White Collar Crime Unit, hundreds of vehicles for emergency response patrol which caused the highest police visibility ever seen in our history and also caused the highest reduction in criminal elements." He lamented many of these initiatives have since been disbanded.

"All of this played an instrumental part to ensure the highest reduction in crime in 17 years.

"The public trust in the police service moved to 55 per cent, when it was 14 per cent when I arrived."

Griffith said he did all that expenditure within his authority and his budget, the latter which he alleged the Government had cut by $240 million each year.

"The hypocrisy now is mind boggling," he said, hitting Rowley's appearance this week on a political platform to justify the Government's actions over the same law that the PM had claimed Griffith had violated but which the Government now "hypocritically and conveniently" view as a flawed law.

"So it was not okay for me to do what was required within the regulations to save lives and secure the country as I did, but you saw it being important to breach the regulations to buy cake and ice cream for a Caricom summit."

Griffith added, "Let us not discuss the position of the so-called communications adviser in that same Finance Ministry, who had to apologise to me for lying a few weeks ago. "Did you ever use any aspect of those procurement regulations to have her hired?"

He asked about any breach of procurement rules when $45 million was given to the police to pay a foreign attorney to investigate political opponents.

"To have the audacity to say you 'already have the majority in Parliament, so what is the big issue?'

"This equates to saying the law could be broken because you already have the majority in Parliament. There is a word for that, Keith Rowley. It is known as dictatorship.'"