ON June 10, a High Court judge will say if she will grant an injunction to Youth Development and National Service Minister Foster Cummings to stop Opposition Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial from publicly speaking of his private and confidential information.
Late Friday, Justice Nadia Kangaloo heard an emergency application filed by Cummings’s attorneys which also seeks to get Lutchmedial to take down all information about him and his banking details which are posted on her Facebook page. He also sought to have her take down recordings of her statements on a UNC Monday Night Forum platform on May 5 and 16.
At the former, Lutchmedial released the contents of a Special Branch report on the minister while at the second meeting, he took issue with her use of financial records.
At the Monday Night forum, Lutchmedial raised questions over a public entity's payment into the credit union account of a high-ranking public official.
She said the payment was disclosed in a source-of-funds declaration form. Lutchmedial said the form was leaked, along with two letters of award from the public body, plus the personal identification of a woman involved in the transaction.
The senator said a cheque from the public body was also uncovered and it was made out directly to the credit union. The letters of the award were made out to a relative of the public official and were provided to support the declaration, Lutchmedial said.
Cummings has since publicly clarified the business transactions. In his injunction application, he also provided an explanation for the transactions.
He said the company, Rivulet Investment Group Ltd, which is owned by his wife, Juliet Modeste, received loans over the years from the credit union. Cummings was the former CEO at Rivulet and was a director at Pical Services Ltd – the two companies identified by the senator – before he became a minister.
Cummings’s attorneys had written to the senator asking her to remove the recordings from her social media accounts, but they received no response prompting him to file for injunctive relief.
In strong opposition to any injunction being granted, Lutchmedial’s lead attorney, former AG Anand Ramlogan, SC, said this will only serve to “send a chilling cold down the constitutional spine that holds the freedom of political expression.”
Ramlogan said the injunction application was so wide, that it sought to muzzle the entire Opposition party. This, he said, was “offensive,” and “an unjustified attempt to muzzle a senator.”
In dealing with the Special Branch report and the financial records, Ramlogan questioned the explanation given by the minister. “It keeps getting murkier and murkier.”
He also said there was no information on what has become of the police’s investigation and made mention of the investigators' application to the court for production orders to advance the investigation.
In October 2021, the police applied to the court for production orders for information from several financial entities as they probe payments to companies formerly li
