For­mer min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Faris Al-Rawi, is push­ing back against claims by the Gov­ern­ment that the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) was be­ing used to fi­nance crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Al-Rawi dis­missed sug­ges­tions that CEPEP and the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) func­tioned as crim­i­nal em­pires un­der the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), as im­plied by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar. He not­ed that dur­ing the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion from 2010 to 2015, CEPEP op­er­at­ed with even larg­er bud­gets, cit­ing a $726 mil­lion al­lo­ca­tion be­tween 2014 and 2015, com­pared to $358 mil­lion un­der the PNM. How­ev­er, he did not clar­i­fy the time­frame for the PNM fig­ure.

On the is­sue of crim­i­nal links, Al-Rawi said that dur­ing his time as line min­is­ter, he re­ceived just one re­port from the TTPS about CEPEP, tied to the ben­e­fi­cial own­er­ship laws in­tro­duced by the PNM to iden­ti­fy the true own­ers of com­pa­nies.