Independent Senator Stephen Creese has caution against levelling accusations in the fake oil scandal at State- owned Petrotrin involving lease operator A and V oil and Gas.
Speaking on an Opposition motion in the Senate calling for the suspension of the lease operator’s contract pending an investigation Creese said, “We have to be careful we do not try people on the streets and here in the Parliament.”
Creese added, “Due course and due process must be followed.” But he said, “It is the business of the courts to try people for criminal offences.”
Creese said he had decided to participate in the debate “because it is not our role and we should not lend support to that wicked national pastime of trying people in the media, the press, the rum shop the street corner before the courts do.”
Creese said, “We have to be very careful always to give each other the benefit of the doubt and to allow due process to take its course, wherever that goes and however long it takes. It is peoples reputation and family and so on whose good name and comfort zone you are interfering with when you support an atmosphere in which rumours and allegations abound and people are not allowed a fair opportunity as is their right.”
The Independent Senator said he had noted what the chairman of Petrotrin was saying “in terms of how the company is proceeding and it is better to be a day slow than to destroy people the process.”
He was of the view that the DPP to whom the matter has been referred “has the authority to pursue matters, in which case from whatever he may glean publicly he may proceed and thereby subvert any other process that a company or whoever may engage in.”
He urged senators to “refrain from whipping up public hysteria, today is me tomorrow it could be you,” he said.
Creese also spoke to the Opposition criticism of the Prime Minister’s admission that he called the owner of A and V Oil and Gas when the scandal first broke.
He said, “Are we going to challenge our PM because a contractor somewhere is a friend or relative. We have to give people in all fairness the benefit of the doubt that when they operating publicly they operating within the four walls of their office until something else is established.”
The motion was defeated after 18 Government and Independent Senators voted against it, six Opposition Senators voted in favour while four other Independent Senators abstained.
