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We spoke to Mike Peyrefitte after today's senate meeting where, first off, we asked him if he knew Lev Dermen:

Jules Vasquez- Reporter
"You have known many famous and infamous people. Did you know Lev Dermen or Levon as he was known in Belize? What were your dealings with him?"

Michael Peyrefitte
"I met him casually once through my very good friend the Hon. Ralph Fonseca. He introduced me to Mr. Dermen as a person who was interested in doing business in Belize. I met him, I shook his hand but I've never done business with him. Never had any interaction with him other than just hi this is Mr. Dermen and he is in Belize and he is interested in doing business with Belize. That was it. I certainly did not recieve any $25,000 a month from him, I can assure you."

Jules Vasquez
"But at the time you weren't even a Minister."

Michael Peyrefitte
"I wasn't even a Minister then but then people sometimes don't make the distinction. They figure they just threw things out, you know."

Reporter
"The Prime Minister is being highly criticized for saying that we can't do anything more than just wait, rather than going back an looking at the bank accounts of these people."

Michael Peyrefitte
"I know the Prime Minister, maybe, according to you has been taking some criticism but what else could he do? There is a report that some unnamed minister, some unnamed public official was receiving monies from this person or through this person. We don't know. And no names are being called. The best the Prime Minister can do is, in a Cabinet meeting, ask all his Ministers, especially those who were Ministers then, have you all received this money from this person. And everybody said no, they did not receive this money as alleged in that precursor to that case that is going on in the States. But beyond that, what can you do? The Prime Minister has taken a very stringiest type of saying, listen it is one thing for you to have received that money because there are no campaign finance to the laws but it is another thing for you to have then received it for some favour. There is no evidence of that not even in what they are saying in the papers. But most importantly, I am asking you if you received it any at all. And if you lie to Cabinet and lie to the Prime Minister and it turns out that you did receive that then you should be fired from Cabinet. I know there is mention that there was one wire transfer to a government official. They may define government official narrowly or wide enough to include a Minister, we don't know. But then that wire transfer would have a name. You would know exactly who that money would have reached. But if you are just saying you gave the person $25 thousand per month, the didn't say whether they gave it in cash or in checks or in whatever, we don't know. We are assuming, we can only assume that maybe it was in cash. We don't know, they didn't get into any details. Until we find that out, we would be investigating for investigations sake. We don't know what to look for. So, I don't think you can do more than what we are doing. It is an unfortunate wait and see. We would like to know today, I would have liked to known last week so we can be done with it. If you can show me in that indictment or in that precursors where it says that a wire transfer was sent to the person on October 2nd 2013, then yes, you can ask each Cabinet member to submit their financial records to see what occurred during that time if the bank has that particular record. But the person gives no specificity. We don't know. And I know you like to ask these questions to irritate the person you are interviewing but we don't know. You'd be searching for a needle in a hay stack."

Reporter
"There is a responsibility to the people."

Michael Peyrefitte
"Right, and there is a responsibility to a person who says that they have done something. You don't even know if the person who is saying that is telling the truth. Listen to me. You have a person who is a co-accused in a criminal fraud. This person has capped a plea. This person is singing for his supper. I would say anything to lessen my sentence. So, we don't know. He has not even revealed who it is and even if and when he does that has to be tested on a cross examination. it is amazing to me that we are just accepting what this person could be saying as a stone cold fact when we don't know. Even when we learn the name when he says, without proof that he paid the person, how do you know he is telling the truth?"