While a lawyer working for the provincial government never met Danny Williams, that doesn’t solve the basic problem with justice minister Felix Collin’s contradictory statements about who hired Danny Williams’ former law firm to work a potentially very lucrative lawsuit against Big Tobacco.
Kenn McClain of Humphrey, Farrington and McClain told CBC news that he hired Roebothan, McKay, Marshall as a local firm to work on the suit because of their experience and other factors.
However, a February justice department news release claimed that the provincial government retained the local firm. implicit in the date of the release is that the firm started work on the file after Danny Williams left office in December.
In the House of Assembly on Monday, Collins said much the same thing:
when the time came to expedite this process and to file the statement of claim, the American company still did not have the certificate to practice so we had to engage in the firm they had retained to file their statement of claim.
Collins added, apparently inadvertently, that RMM had been working on the suit for five or six years, not the few weeks implicit in Collin’s earlier statements and the February news release.
So which is it?
Collins’ version and the Missouri lawyer’s account just don’t match up at all.
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