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Prime Minister Dean Barrow
"In terms of Penner being a dead weight or the consideration of his perhaps being induced by the opposition to resign - well, I did hear that, but I had a couple of meeting with Penner and quite frankly I was satisfied that Penner isnt going to go. Penner obviously was harboring thoughts of perhaps be able at some point to make his way into the Cabinet - I put paid to that on Thursday and I think that upset him. Penner was harboring thoughts in any event being able to run again at the next general elections - this has now paid to that, but all I am saying is that in all those circumstances I was convinced that he wasn't going to go anywhere."

"Really, it is the honest truth - what has changed now is the evidence that Hulse found over the weekend."

Jules Vasquez
"Was his absence at the meeting - was he required to be at those public meetings? Nine or ten of them he didn't appear."

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
"No, initially the plan was that he would be a part of the tour, but on Friday afternoon he indicated the he had to go urgently to Guatemala where he says he get treatment, not just for hypertension, but for blinding headaches that he says have been troubling him for a while now. One can understand that. In the teeth of all this pressure he said he had some sort of relapse and he said he needed to got to Guatemala and we accepted that."

"Again in a sense it played right into my hands because I wanted to get a kind of independent feel for how the constituency was reacting and in his presence I might not have been able to do that. In his absence there was a great deal of plain speaking and I believe that I was able to asses fairly accurately what the party's chances would be in a bi-election."