STATE attorney Renuka Rambhajan said yesterday a prima facie case had been made out against Chief Magistrate Sherman McNicolls, on a charge of permitting a police officer to drive his vehicle without a valid insurance policy.

Rambhajan said documents from his insurance company showed that since December of last year McNicolls’s vehicle had not been insured, and had only been re-insured three hours after his bodyguard, PC Sean Simon got into an accident with the van.

McNicolls yesterday re-appeared before Senior Magistrate Lucina Cardenas-Ragoonanan in the Port of Spain Fourth (A) Court, charged with permitting Simon, to drive his vehicle without a valid insurance policy, while Simon is charged with driving McNicolls’s Mitsubishi L200 vehicle without valid insurance. The charges stem from an accident along the Lady Young Road, Belmont earlier this year. When the matter was called on the prior occasion, Senior Counsel Israel Khan had argued that there was no case for his client to answer, saying that the Chief Magistrate had a valid insurance policy with Capital Insurance, which would automatically be renewed once the old policy had expired.

But in response, Rambhajan said there was ample evidence in order to have a prima facie case made out against the Chief Magistrate.

’Even if there is an automatic renewal of the policy, then why wasn’t it renewed since December of last year when the last policy had expired? If there is an automatic renewal, this would have been done. It would not have been renewed on the day of the accident. The accident took place at 11.25 a.m., and the documents show that renewal took place at 2.25 p.m., which means that at the time of the accident there was no valid insurance policy for the vehicle,’ she said.

On February 20, Simon was driving McNicolls’s van along the Lady Young Road when it collided with another vehicle. The driver of the other vehicle, a woman from Mt Hope, made a report to the Belmont Police Station, while Simon reported the accident at Princes Town Police Station hours later. McNicolls lives in New Grant near Princes Town. Cardenas-Ragoonanan said she needed time to review the submissions made by both the defence and the prosecution before coming to a decision on the next occasion.