At its weekly campaign update press conference held on Sunday, the Progressive Liberal Party responded to the claims about the nomination of Fort Charlotte candidate, Sebastian Bastian.
PLP Legal team member, Keenan Johnson told reporters there is not legal provision in law or constitution that prevents anyone who has or has interest in a government contract from seeking to be nominated and elected to the House Of Assembly. These comments came after Bastian’s nomination was protested on Nomination Day by Coalition Of Independents Leader, Lincoln Bain.
Johnson said, “what the constitution does provide is that you have to disclose any interest that you have in contracts and that disclosure must be done via notice in a gazette.”
He went further stating, “there’s some confusion because everyone talking about this is missing out the within part. The law or the constitution says that you have to disclose via notice in a gazette within one month preceding the election. Which means you look at when the election is and you count back one month and its in that timeframe that you have to disclose via notice in a gazette. Just to break it down further election day is on May 12th that means the actual time for the disclosure would be between April 12th and May 11th. So we can emphatically state that all of our candidates have disclosed any interest in government contracts to the Parliamentary Registration Department already and we anticipate that is short order all of those disclosures will be published via gazette and in the various dailies.”
Nomination day was held on April 16th. The advance poll is scheduled for April 30th.
