Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has assured that the nation that he never defended the cost of the Paria Commission of Enquiry.
He made the statement in light of an article in Sunday’s Newsday.
The Sunday July 30th issue had a story stating “The Prime Minister rejected complaints in the public domain about the cost of the Paria Commission of Enquiry (CoE) being too high” is wholly inaccurate and misleading and needs to be corrected.
However, in a social media post, Rowley said, “I simply said that commissions of enquiry are expensive undertakings. I used the Clico experience as an example. I further went on to say that it is because of this experience why the Government’s initial idea was to use a technical team to investigate and report on the accident. This was the first option.
“This would have been much cheaper and would have reported long ago.”
According to Rowley: “I said that from the onset the tragedy was politicized and as such persons and interested parties started to invoke “cover-up” and blame throwing long before any examination of the facts and situations were known. These very same people are now taking issue with the Commission of Enquiry which they themselves demanded.”
“I said nothing about “rejecting complaints about costs being too high.”