The Tribune

By TANEKA THOMPSON

Tribune News Editor

tmthompson@tribunemedia.net

FORMER Free National Movement Leader Hubert Ingraham yesterday dismissed the show of support by those former FNM members who joined Prime Minister Perry Christie on the stage at the final night of the Progressive Liberal Party’s convention as “nothing”.

Mr Ingraham, the country’s former prime minister, said three of the former FNMs had not supported his party for more than a decade. He also said one of them, Lester Turnquest, received a “favour” from Mr Christie during his first term in office and another, Anthony Miller, works as an aide for Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Works Philip Davis.

“Algernon Allen, Tony Miller and Lester Turnquest have not been supporting the FNM for the last 15 or more years,” Mr Ingraham said.

“From 2002, 2001 they’ve been gone. They didn’t support the party in 2007, they supported the PLP. They supported the PLP in 2012. It’s nothing. Whatever currency they had they already spent it on the PLP before.”

He added: “Tony Miller is a number one aide to Philip ‘Brave’ Davis. He’s a consultant in the Ministry of Public Works. And Mr Algernon Allen is chairman of Urban Renewal and he’s not doing that for nothing. He’s getting paid for it. It’s either $50,000 or $60,000 a year.

“In the case of Lester Turnquest, Perry Christie did a favour for him when he was in office the last time that certainly I would not have done. He knows what that favour was and so does Perry Christie,” Mr Ingraham said, however he declined to reveal what the favour was.

Last Thursday, as the PLP’s convention was drawing to a close, former FNM Cabinet ministers Algernon Allen and Byron Woodside, former MPs Lester Turnquest, Anthony Miller and former FNM supporters Ivoine Ingraham, Peter Carey and Wellington Smith expressed their support for Mr Christie and the PLP.