A former Life Sport director, Ruth Marchan has now taken to making a stream of serious allegations against the Government online and in a letter to Jack Warner. Marchan disappeared last June, going to a ‘safe house’ provided by the former national security minister and Independent Liberal Party leader.
Weeks later, she allegedly fled the country amid threats on her life. She remained under the radar for the better part of seven months, but resurfaced on social media sites in the first week of the new year making incriminating comments about the Government, the unsolved assassination of Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal and the $34 million paid to a single contractor under the now defunct Life Sport programme.
Marchan also e-mailed Warner last week from her hiding place to warn of an underworld plot to assassinate him. According to the e-mail, Marchan is in dire financial straits and in need of Warner’s assistance to hire a lawyer and help pay her rent. Warner, in a brief interview with the Sunday Guardian, confirmed that he had received the e-mail from Marchan and that he was convinced it was her and not some electronic ploy.
“She has pleaded with me for assistance both in terms of additional security and finance. I did this for her before and I am prepared to do so again because of what she is going through is wrong,” Warner said. Marchan’s letter to Warner, which was sent from her new e-mail address on January 10, asks for the assistance, lists details of Seetahal’s murder plot, and alleges one very tech-savvy former Life Sport contractor was retained to conduct electronic spying and set up foreign accounts for some clients.
“Behind close doors he is doing all their dirty work spying on top officials and undermining the State in a lot of areas,” she said. She claimed a local who was linked to the JFK bombing had his records cleaned up by this Government before he came back to T&T and was able to get lucrative business deals. Marchan made allegations against four senior government ministers in her letter to Warner. She also implicated a former government official in Seetahal’s assassination in her letter.
“(Name called) was given the official job to implement the plot on Dana,” she said. Marchan goes into detail about who else assisted the official by “housing” the hired guns at a private home in the West. She defended the people hired to carry out the murder, saying that they were “innocent.”
“For them is a job, the ground is innocent,” she said. She named five people behind the plot and every name linked back to the Life Sport programme in one way or another. “All that went on with lifesport and its connection with Dana Seetahal and a lot more wrong doing with the bring in of durgs (sic) and guns into the country,” she said. “I was told I have to stay away until after the elections...” she said.
She said with all the information she had “it is not safe” for her to be back in the country as she believed there would be an attempt on her life. But she wanted to hire a lawyer to help build a case against the State with respect to her involvement in Life Sport. “The lawyer I need we will win the state for all i have been through. I am innocent... I need a lawyer to represent me as well. I have a lot of grounds to sue the state on more that three situations that occur,” she told Warner.
This is not the first time Marchan has turned to Warner for help. At the height of the Life Sport debacle, Warner came to Marchan’s rescue after her own body guard, Curtis “Tallman” Gibson, was killed in his bed. Marchan said she was ready to talk and to provide the necessary evidence. While Warner did not reveal if he had handed Marchan’s letter over to the police, the Sunday Guardian revealed the contents of the letter to National Security Minister Gary Griffith yesterday.
Griffith said he was apprised of Marchan’s comments on the social media site and the alleged death threats made against Warner. “But I have to be very careful not to overstep my boundaries on any matter that is part of a police investigation,” Griffith said yesterday.
Griffith said he was also aware that the police investigations into the criminal aspects of the matter were ongoing. “Where there is a criminal offence, the police will continue investigations,” Griffith said, adding that he would continue to keep abreast of the situation.