UNC MPs Jack Warner and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj will not be attending tomorrow’s meeting of the National Congress, which takes place from 1 p.m. at Rienzi Congress. Neither will Congress of the People Leader Winston Dookeran, who was invited.

UNC Leader Basdeo Panday said yesterday that the invitation to Dookeran was ’a reciprocal response’ to the invitation which the COP issued to UNC Deputy Political Leader, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, to attend its Congress in July of this year.

’We are just reciprocating,’ Panday said.

Dookeran said yesterday that the UNC was informed that prominent COP members, Timothy Hamel-Smith and Robert Mayers, would represent him and that they were prepared to present the party’s ’People’s Charter’ at the UNC Congress. He said, however, that the UNC wrote him yesterday, to say that they (Hamel-Smith and Mayers) would be attending as ’guests’. It was not certain that the two men would be attending the meeting.

Meanwhile, Warner, who is overseas, said no one from his constituency would be attending the Congress ’since my executive and I decided that we should not participate in a congress that has been summoned on the basis of a flawed membership list’. In fact, he promised to challenge any decision that emerges from the congress ’that is detrimental to Chaguanas West, members of the party, the people of Trinidad and Tobago and me’.

Warner said the ’automatic renewal of the members’ results in a false, misleading and inflated list, because it includes persons who no longer wish to be members of the UNC, persons who have taken membership in other parties, persons who no longer reside in Trinidad and persons who are deceased.

In fact, Warner said the Movement for Change would still be going ahead with its own congress of UNC members at Saith Park, Chaguanas, next month.

Maharaj, meanwhile, will be attending to matters in his constituency. In a release issued yesterday, Maharaj said he would address some of the major national issues, ’including UDeCOTT, crime and the draft constitution during his constituency activities in Caratal’.

Winston ’Gypsy’ Peters will be the only one of the three dissidents attending the congress.

Responding to this, Panday said yesterday, ’I cannot tell who will attend and who will not, those are personal decisions.’

On reports that the trio had been cleared by the Disciplinary Committee of all 20-plus charges, Panday said: ’They (the Disciplinary Executive) have not made a recommendation. The Executive has received none. We are a party that operates by rules and the rules are that when a Disciplinary Committee is appointed, it reports to the Executive and the Executive considers its report. We have had no such report.’

On Tuesday, the trio appeared before the committee with their lawyers and they later reported to the media that the committee membership had informed them that they (the Committee) would be recommending to the Executive that it not proceed with the charges because there was no basis for them. Each of the three MPs had faced over 20 disciplinary charges for allegedly making statements inimical to the interests of the party, and for not voting with the party in the Parliament.

Yesterday, Panday, who missed the debate in Parliament on the Validation and Immunity Bill in Parliament on Wednesday because he was overseas, said he had no comment to make whatsoever on Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s description of Maharaj as a destroyer of governments.

However, on the Commission of Enquiry into UDeCOTT, Panday, said: ’I am sure of one thing, that nothing would come out of the UDeCOTT Enquiry. This Government, having been involved in such enormous corruption ... will not allow this enquiry to operate properly and nothing will come out of it eventually. I said this when it (the Enquiry) was appointed and I stand by that statement.’