Vendor threatens case against mayor over ”dump potatoes” allegation

Derek Achong

A road­side ven­dor has threat­ened to sue Ch­agua­nas May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed for pub­licly ac­cus­ing him of sell­ing pota­toes scav­enged from the For­res Park Land­fill in Clax­ton Bay.

Ra­jin­dra Ali made the threat in a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter sent by his lawyers Bhi­mal Ma­hara­jh and Kavi­ta Moonasar to Mo­hammed, this morn­ing.

In the cor­re­spon­dence, ob­tained by Guardian Me­dia, Ma­hara­jh claimed that Mo­hammed de­famed Ali in a post on his of­fi­cial Face­book page, last Thurs­day.

In the post, which was wide­ly shared and com­ment­ed on by so­cial me­dia users, Mo­hammed claimed that a ven­dor sell­ing pota­toes along Narsa­loo Ra­maya Road was ar­rest­ed by mu­nic­i­pal po­lice of­fi­cers and he (the ven­dor) told them that he sourced the pro­duce from the land­fill.

Mo­hammed called on mem­bers of the pub­lic, who may have pur­chased from the ven­dor, to im­me­di­ate­ly dis­pose of the pota­toes. He al­so ad­vised them to ex­er­cise cau­tion and on­ly pur­chase food from ap­proved vend­ing ar­eas.

While Ma­hara­jh ad­mit­ted that Mo­hammed did not iden­ti­fy Ali by name, he point­ed out that the post in­clud­ed a pho­to­graph of Ali's road­side stall, which he has been op­er­at­ing since April.

He al­so point­ed out that Mo­hammed's post was dis­sem­i­nat­ed by lo­cal me­dia com­pa­nies to a wider au­di­ence.

Stat­ing that Ali's rep­u­ta­tion has been se­ri­ous­ly dam­aged, Ma­hara­jh said: "Mem­bers of the pub­lic, cus­tomers, busi­ness as­so­ciates and mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty have been led to be­lieve that our client was en­gaged in the sale of food prod­ucts re­cov­ered from a dump site and un­fit for hu­man con­sump­tion."

"The al­le­ga­tions have ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed our client's per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion and have caused sub­stan­tial em­bar­rass­ment, dis­tress, and fi­nan­cial loss," he added.

Ma­hara­jh not­ed that Ali was charged with lit­ter­ing and pitch­ing a stall con­trary to the High­way Act and not a pub­lic health of­fence in re­la­tion to the pota­toes.

He was grant­ed bail by a Jus­tice of the Peace (JP) and or­dered to make his first court ap­pear­ance be­fore a mag­is­trate on Ju­ly 20.

Stat­ing that the charges un­der­scored the fal­si­ty of the al­le­ga­tions, Ma­hara­jh said: "The pub­li­ca­tion con­veyed to the pub­lic that our client had en­gaged in con­duct pos­ing a se­ri­ous risk to pub­lic health and ad­mit­ted to sell­ing pota­toes sourced from a dump."

"No such charge has been laid against our client and there ex­ists no law­ful ba­sis for the pub­li­ca­tion of such al­le­ga­tion.

At­tached to the let­ter was a re­ceipt from a food dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny from Freeport for a $600 pal­let of pota­toes, dat­ed May 25.

Ma­hara­jh re­quest­ed that Mo­hammed re­move the post from his so­cial me­dia pages and pub­lish a full and un­equiv­o­cal re­trac­tion and apol­o­gy with sim­i­lar promi­nence as his orig­i­nal post.

He al­so re­quest­ed that Mo­hammed re­frain from mak­ing the al­le­ga­tions against Ali in the fu­ture.

Ma­hara­jh gave Mo­hammed two days in which to pro­vide a favourable re­sponse be­fore he files the law­suit seek­ing sig­nif­i­cant com­pen­sa­tion.