Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley is calling on Housing Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal to say whether or not he owns a mall in Holland. Rowley posed the question while delivering the feature address at a cottage meeting held at the Mt D’Or Community Centre on Tuesday night. “I want to ask Dr Moonilal one question and it has nothing to do with my mouth. I want to ask him if he knows anything about a mall in Holland? I want to ask him to tell this country all that he knows truthfully about a mall in Holland.
“Today they spending money left, right, and centre, giving Ranger Rovers to friends as gifts. These are people hired to work for you but they are working for themselves,” Rowley said. He said that as a former housing minister he had maintained the “same lifestyle, had the same friends and also had no mall...I defy anybody in this country, contractor or otherwise, to truthfully come forward and say when I was minister of housing under the PNM that you had to give me a dinner mint to get a contract in the HDC.”
But during his contribution to the no-confidence motion against Rowley, held in Parliament yesterday, Moonilal denied he owned such property. Instead, he accused Rowley of “taking basket” to cause confusion while on the political platform. “Somebody put a little mauvais langue, a little mischief, a little bacchanal somewhere...as Leader of the Opposition somebody give him an e-mail and read out the e-mail and accuse high office holders of committing murder.
“Somebody write somewhere that I have six houses, a rum shop in Penal and a mall in Holland. I don’t own a tulip or a windmill. I have never been there since I became a minister,” Moonilal added. He challenged Rowley to produce documentary evidence to support his claim.
Alfonso must go
During his address, Rowley called for National Security Minister Carl Alfonso to be fired. The Opposition Leader said he found it disturbing that neither Alfonso nor the National Operations Centre (NOC) had knowledge that the police were planning to hold nation-wide roadblocks which crippled the country on Monday.
“The strike by police grounded the country to a halt like it never did before. Just like everything else the Prime Minister and the national security minister did not know. Nobody in authority knew the police was going to shut down the country. You think this could have happened in a serious country and the minister of national security was not fired, especially when you have the National Operations Centre.
“If they didn’t know about this nation-wide calamity what else do they not know? Whatever confidence we had in them it is all gone,” Rowley added. Stressing that Alfonso should have been fired, Rowley said that he was still in line to become the shortest-serving minister of national security.