Businessman grant­ed $475,000 bail af­ter ap­pear­ing in court on firearm and drug pos­ses­sion charges

Aboud, of Cy­press Boule­vard, San Fer­nan­do, op­er­ates a cloth­ing store in down­town Port-of-Spain.

Michael Patrick Aboud was charged with pos­ses­sion of three mar­i­jua­na cig­a­rettes, pos­ses­sion of two pieces of ap­pa­ra­tus mod­i­fied for co­caine con­sump­tion; and pos­ses­sion of a 9 mm firearm and 15 rounds of am­munition.

The il­le­gal items were al­leged­ly found as of­fi­cers of the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team, led by Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith, ex­e­cut­ed a search war­rant at a res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty at Alexan­dria Street in St Clair, owned by Aboud’s fam­i­ly, last Fri­day.

Aboud plead­ed not guilty to the drug charges but was not called up­on to plead to the firearm and am­mu­ni­tion charges as he elect­ed to have those heard in the High Court be­fore a judge as op­posed to hav­ing them con­tin­ue be­fore Stroude.

Dur­ing the hear­ing, po­lice pros­e­cu­tor Sgt Azard Ali said that Aboud did not fall un­der the pro­vi­sions of the Bail Amend­ment Act, which pre­cludes bail to re­peat of­fend­ers charged firearm of­fences.

Ali ex­plained that Aboud’s crim­i­nal record trac­ing showed that he had two pend­ing cas­es from 1998 for re­sist­ing ar­rest and us­ing ob­scene lan­guage and an­oth­er from 2017 for drunk dri­ving.

Af­ter mak­ing fur­ther checks in the court’s records, Ali in­formed Stroude that Aboud had ad­di­tion­al charges from last year for as­sault causing ac­tu­al bod­i­ly harm and for chok­ing with in­tent.

However Aboud’s lawyer Fa­reed Ali asked that the court not place much em­pha­sis on the charges from 1998 as they oc­curred when he was a teenag­er.

Ali al­so not­ed that Aboud had to be tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal for treat­ment, sev­er­al times dur­ing his stint in po­lice cus­tody.