Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

State-owned en­er­gy com­pa­ny Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Ltd has been or­dered to re­con­sid­er its de­ci­sion to refuse to dis­close a list of its em­ploy­ees and their salaries. 

On March 27, Ap­pel­late Judges Nolan Bereaux, Mark Mo­hammed and James Aboud up­held an ap­peal brought by for­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter and so­cial ac­tivist De­vant Ma­haraj over the dis­missal of his case over the han­dling of his dis­clo­sure re­quest un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act (FOIA). 

In late 2018, Ma­haraj sub­mit­ted a com­pre­hen­sive re­quest for in­for­ma­tion re­lat­ed to the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness af­fairs, in­clud­ing a list of its em­ploy­ees and their cor­re­spond­ing salary ben­e­fits. 

Ma­haraj filed a law­suit af­ter the com­pa­ny failed to re­spond to his re­quest in a time­ly man­ner. 

The case was even­tu­al­ly with­drawn af­ter the com­pa­ny pro­vid­ed most of the re­quest­ed in­for­ma­tion.

How­ev­er, it re­fused to hand over the em­ploy­ee list­ing and their re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­ages as it claimed that such was ex­empt from dis­clo­sure for be­ing per­son­al in­for­ma­tion. 

Al­though Ma­haraj, through his lawyers led by Anand Ram­lo­gan, sent sev­er­al let­ters to the com­pa­ny seek­ing to per­suade it to re­con­sid­er its po­si­tion, it (the com­pa­ny) held firm, lead­ing to an­oth­er law­suit. 

The High Court Judge as­signed to the case agreed that the com­pa­ny failed in its du­ty un­der Sec­tion 35 of the leg­is­la­tion to con­sid­er whether there were pub­lic in­ter­est con­cerns which war­rant­ed the dis­clo­sure of a nor­mal­ly ex­empt­ed doc­u­ment. 

She al­so found that the com­pa­ny had sat­is­fied its statu­to­ry re­quire­ment to redact a doc­u­ment to make it non-ex­empt, as it pro­vid­ed a list­ing of the po­si­tions in the com­pa­ny and the salary range for each. 

In de­cid­ing the ap­peal, Jus­tice Bereaux found that the in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the com­pa­ny was not sought by Ma­haraj. 

“There was no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of dif­fer­ent job ti­tles, num­ber of po­si­tions, per­sons fill­ing the po­si­tions or the salaries for each dis­crete po­si­tion. That was a sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent doc­u­ment from what the ap­pel­lant re­quest­ed,” he said. 

Jus­tice Bereaux and his col­leagues or­dered the com­pa­ny to re­con­sid­er its de­ci­sion based on the pub­lic in­ter­est pro­vi­sion of the leg­is­la­tion. 

“While some time has elapsed, we con­sid­er that it is ap­pro­pri­ate for the pri­ma­ry de­ci­sion mak­er to car­ry out the sec­tion 35 ex­er­cise,” he said. 

“It is in the best po­si­tion to weigh the pros and cons giv­en its knowl­edge of the per­son­nel in­for­ma­tion of em­ploy­ees it em­ploys,” he added. 

Ma­haraj was al­so rep­re­sent­ed by Kent Sam­lal and Asha Ram­lal. The com­pa­ny was rep­re­sent­ed by Stephen Singh and Aman­da Adi­moolah.