KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

The re­port of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry (CoE) in­to the Paria/LM­CS div­ing tragedy has been de­layed by three months.

At a vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, CoE chair­man Jerome Lynch, KC, apol­o­gised for the de­lay and said he had not ex­pect­ed the vol­ume of ev­i­dence he need­ed to ex­am­ine. He said it would be a dis­ser­vice to those who took time to sub­mit state­ments to the CoE to dis­re­gard them.

“The rea­son is en­tire­ly my fault. The bur­den of writ­ing this par­tic­u­lar re­port falls large­ly on me in the first in­stance. It has been rather more bur­den­some than I had an­tic­i­pat­ed. The sheer vol­ume of ma­te­r­i­al that I had to work with in or­der to do jus­tice to the very many con­tri­bu­tions that we have had has tak­en me far longer than I had an­tic­i­pat­ed,” Lynch said.

He said he asked Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo for an ex­ten­sion last week but did not get a re­sponse.

“All I can do is as­sure the Pres­i­dent that hav­ing cleared my desk in all oth­er mat­ters, I am work­ing dili­gent­ly to have it as soon as is hu­man­ly pos­si­ble that does jus­tice to the many rep­re­sen­ta­tions we had,” Lynch said.

The re­port will de­tail the CoE’s find­ings on the deaths of LM­CS divers Fyzal Kur­ban, Yusuf Hen­ry, Kaz­im Ali Jr and Rishi Na­gas­sar, and the in­juries suf­fered by Christo­pher Boodram, af­ter they got sucked in­to a 30-inch pipeline on Feb­ru­ary 25, 2022.

The men were car­ry­ing out sub­sea main­te­nance at Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny’s Sealine No.36 at Berth No.6 in Pointe-a-Pierre when tragedy struck.

Fol­low­ing pub­lic hear­ings in Jan­u­ary, Lynch promised to com­plete the re­port by East­er. How­ev­er, the CoE is­sued a me­dia re­lease in March say­ing the law man­dates that it de­liv­er Salmon let­ters, cri­tiquing cer­tain com­pa­nies, agen­cies and in­di­vid­u­als in­volved in the div­ing in­ci­dent. The CoE or­dered those spec­i­fied for the let­ters to re­ceive them on or be­fore April 28. Those wish­ing to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions had to sub­mit them in writ­ing by May 12, push­ing back the re­port com­ple­tion to May.

On May 1, the CoE is­sued an­oth­er or­der with an Au­gust 31 dead­line to de­liv­er the fi­nal re­port to Kan­ga­loo. Lynch said the dead­line was ten­ta­tive in case a tragedy be­fell him. He said the let­ters will go out next week, as he works on the fi­nal draft.

The CoE will al­low re­cip­i­ents to con­sid­er the con­tent and re­spond to the let­ters through writ­ten and oral sub­mis­sions.

Lynch said he was not al­lowed to share the list of re­cip­i­ents for Salmon let­ters, ex­plain­ing that what he had was a draft re­port con­tain­ing crit­i­cisms.

Com­mis­sion­er Gre­go­ry Wil­son and the CoE le­gal team will ex­am­ine the let­ters be­fore send­ing them out. Lynch said when re­cip­i­ents re­spond, they may per­suade the CoE to re­move crit­i­cisms, which will de­ter­mine how much more work the re­port needs.

Lynch said as an ap­pointee of the Pres­i­dent, he has to de­liv­er the re­port to her. He said if the CoE rec­om­mends pros­e­cu­tion, there would be need for the pros­e­cut­ing agen­cies to re­ceive the re­port as well.