For­mer Com­mu­ni­ty-based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) chair­man Joel Ed­wards has of­fi­cial­ly de­nied al­le­ga­tions that he ad­vised the com­pa­ny’s of­fi­cials that the then-cab­i­net had ap­proved the three-year ex­ten­sion of con­tracts days be­fore the Gen­er­al Elec­tion on April 28.

Ed­wards made the claim on Tues­day in an af­fi­davit filed in re­sponse to an ap­pli­ca­tion from CEPEP Com­pa­ny to strike out a law­suit brought by the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) on be­half of Laven­tille-based gen­er­al con­tract­ing com­pa­ny East­man En­ter­prise Lim­it­ed, who was among the 300 con­trac­tors who were re­cent­ly ter­mi­nat­ed by the cur­rent Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC)-led coali­tion Gov­ern­ment.

On Mon­day, CEPEP’s le­gal team, led by Se­nior Coun­sel Anand Ram­lo­gan of Free­dom Law Cham­bers, filed the ap­pli­ca­tion with at­tached af­fi­davits from CEPEP’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer (CEO), Kei­th Ed­dy, its head of le­gal/cor­po­rate sec­re­tary, Nicole Gopauls­ingh, and Neela Ram-At­wa­roo, the act­ing per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties.