OW Mayor Kevin Bernard Slams Fake News About Councilor Vaswani

Orange Walk Town Mayor Kevin Bernard says that fake news created by the U.D.P. and reported by certain media houses was aimed at tarnishing the reputation of one of his councilors and the town council.  Bernard says he was informed of cell phone videos showing councilor Haresh Vaswani with an accompanying report stating that the video was taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, alleging that Vaswani was in breach of COVID regulations. But Bernard was able to verify that that all three videos were taken before February 2020 and date way back to March 2018.  Bernard says that Vaswani, who had volunteered to relinquish his duties assigned to him as councilor, has been advised that he will continue to retain his portfolio assigned to him by the mayor. The mayor says that the release of the video and the article in sections of the media was an act of cyber bullying, filled with malicious and political attacks.

Kevin Bernard

Kevin Bernard, Mayor, Orange Walk

“It is obvious that it is a malicious act, it is apolitical act from those we know in the U.D.P. who wanted to attack our councillor. This is the problem we have when people get out there and put fake news and put false information to try and bring down somebody else. This for me I am going to say it obviously political, it is a political move trying to attack not really Haresh but trying to attack the People’s United Party, trying to attack the Orange Walk Town Council. I take it personal in that aspect. I know I sat with Haresh. Initially he said to me, Mayor I know that this will bring a lot of pressure on you and I want to tell you I will relinquish my duties as a councillor but I really want you to give me the time to be able to get some clarification. So I said no problem Haresh we will do so. We made statement on that but immediately we cannot just leave this as it and so he was able to get the time stamp of those video images. He knows very well the time when these things were taken. In fact he is in the video. One of them being a celebration event in his vehicle after the municipal elections with his friends  another being a birthday event with his wife last December and one being sometime February of this year. All of this Hipolito were outside the entire COVID situation and they want to spin this thing using COVID and trying to say that the councillor was being irresponsible.”