Senior Reporter
Former attorney general Camille Robinson-Regis has rejected allegations that she rushed the approval of lease agreements involving businessman Dominic Hadeed’s Blue Waters Products Ltd company shortly before the 2025 general election, saying the matter had undergone years of review by legal officers.
The response follows a newspaper report that the former People’s National Movement administration cabinet moved to reverse previous decisions to grant leases to Blue Waters Products Ltd, with Attorney General John Jeremie referring the matter to police.
The dispute centres on approximately 450 acres of land at the Orange Grove Estate in Trincity.
The leases have been the subject of negotiations between Blue Waters and successive administrations since the company acquired Pernod Ricard’s local operations in 2007. The lands were previously leased to Pernod Ricard in 1995.
The company’s owners, Dominic and Genevieve Hadeed, are currently detained under Preventive Detention Orders amid the ongoing State of Emergency. They were arrested on June 24 at their Westmoorings home, as police investigated allegations of a conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Attorney General and other Government officials, as well as alleged offences under the Emergency Powers Regulations. Police also executed a search at the Blue Waters compound.
According to the article, Minister of Lands and Legal Affairs Saddam Hosein informed Hadeed on May 5, 2026, that Cabinet had decided to rescind lease approvals made by the former PNM administration.
Hosein had previously raised the matter in Parliament during the October 2025 budget debate, alleging that the former PNM administration moved urgently to approve the leases at its final cabinet meeting before the election. He claimed a former Attorney General’s Office employee sent a voice note on the eve of the election instructing public servants to proceed with preparing the leases, noting that Robinson-Regis was attorney general at the time.
In a statement to Guardian Media yesterday, however, Robinson-Regis said when she assumed office as attorney general, she inherited the matter from former attorney general Reginald Armour as one of several pending issues before the Office of the Attorney General.
She explained that she was advised that the matter had been active since 2017 and that senior attorneys within the Civil Law Department, formerly the Chief State Solicitor’s Department, had raised concerns about the preparation of the leases.
Robinson-Regis said Armour had sought meetings with the Commissioner of State Lands on several occasions to obtain answers to questions raised by legal officers.
“The Hon AG Reginald Armour SC would have, after meeting with said CSS attorneys, requested at least five times, for a meeting with the Commissioner of State Lands (COSL) to provide answers in full to the CSS for clarity of their specific issues,” Robinson-Regis said.
“At no time did the COSL respond to these written and or oral invites (through her office). This would have caused the Hon AG Reginald Armour SC to once more have meetings with the lawyers at the CSS to see if there was anyone else who could have assisted. During this time, attorneys from the Ministry of Agricultural Land and Fisheries were also questioned as to if, and how, they were able to assist the CSS with the anomalies they pointed to,” she continued.
Robinson-Regis said the matter was eventually reviewed by attorneys from the Civil Law Department, the Lands and Surveys Department and associated ministries before advice was provided to Cabinet.
She said Cabinet relied on that advice when approving the preparation of the leases.
“At no time would the Cabinet have acted ultra vires, as we would only seek the advice in such a matter from the legal experts within the Civil Law Department, as the preparation of leases such as these commercial contracts fall within their field.”
Robinson-Regis also defended the voice note referenced by Hosein, saying it was an administrative communication conveying a Cabinet decision.
“It is always noted that the CSS is a chief legal officer and cannot be instructed by anyone else but the Attorney General. Therefore, the voice note which the Government speaks of is that member of staff simply doing their job, as one of the duties of the Secretariat staff was to pass on minutes of Cabinet-approved requests.”
She said attorneys within the Civil Law Department had the authority to refuse to proceed with a matter if they had legal concerns, arguing that no attorney general could compel them to act against their professional judgement.
“The questions in my view should be directed to the attorneys at the CSS to find out the advice they provided to the cabinet, as that is what would have been relied upon,” she said.
Robinson-Regis further rejected suggestions that the leases were rushed to benefit a PNM financier.
“It is by far mischievously crafted by this Government to put it in the public that this matter was hustled to satisfy a ‘PNM financer’ who, as far as I know, is not a so-called ‘financier’ when it took its due process in accordance with the advice of the attorneys at the CSS.”
She added: “It should be considered that if this matter was to be rushed, it would have been taken care of long before 2025.
“There was no reason to hasten the pace with a matter such as this, as the CSS needed to be satisfied that they had all their questions properly answered.”
Hadeed has challenged the Government’s decision to rescind the leases, claiming in an affidavit filed on July 3 that the move was connected to his detention under the SoE.
He said Blue Waters had been in discussions with successive administrations for years and had invested significantly in developing the lands based on assurances that formal leases would eventually be granted.
