Kevon Felmine

Of­fi­cials at the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry (CoE) in­to the Paria/LM­CS Div­ing Tragedy had to sep­a­rate three Land and Ma­rine Con­tract­ing Ser­vices Ltd (LM­CS) wit­ness­es and seize their phones yes­ter­day, af­ter catch­ing the men watch­ing the live pro­ceed­ings de­spite be­ing for­bid­den from do­ing so.

“What am I deal­ing with? Chil­dren? They will wait there un­til I am ready to hear them give their ev­i­dence,” CoE chair­man Jerome Lynch said as he ad­dressed the mat­ter dur­ing the sit­ting.

Lynch re­gard­ed the ac­tion as con­tempt of the pro­ceed­ings.

Lynch de­cid­ed against tak­ing ac­tion in pur­suit of con­tempt but warned he would if it hap­pened again.

“I make it ab­solute­ly clear I will. I have con­sid­er­able pow­ers to do so, and I will use them,” Lynch warned.

LM­CS con­struc­tion su­per­vi­sor Dex­ter Guer­ra, dive su­per­vi­sor An­drew Far­rah and divers Michael Kur­ban and Ronald Ra­moutar ap­peared be­fore the CoE yes­ter­day.

An hour in­to Guer­ra’s ex­am­i­na­tion, coun­sel for Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny, Gilbert Pe­ter­son, SC, alert­ed Lynch to the in­fringe­ment.

“They sent some­body to check it, and it is, in fact, so,” Pe­ter­son said.

Lynch paused the morn­ing ses­sion while the CoE staff dealt with the sit­u­a­tion and re­port­ed back to him.

He said: “Wit­ness­es yet to give ev­i­dence are in the wit­ness room as we made arrange­ments in the past, and they were all look­ing at their tele­phones, ap­par­ent­ly watch­ing pro­ceed­ings. I thought I made it per­fect­ly clear right at the on­set to all coun­sel that whilst I did not and could not pre­vent any­body from watch­ing these pro­ceed­ings on the live link, I ex­pect­ed coun­sel to ad­vise the peo­ple that they rep­re­sent.”

Lynch said he ex­pect­ed at­tor­neys at the CoE to ad­vise their clients and wit­ness­es called not to view the pro­ceed­ings. He said what the LM­CS wit­ness­es did was a de­lib­er­ate vi­o­la­tion of his in­struc­tions.

“I will not have this en­quiry thwart­ed by peo­ple de­lib­er­ate­ly flout­ing the ob­vi­ous and plain rules that ex­ist in or­der to pre­serve the in­tegri­ty of this en­quiry.”

Lynch ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment that any­one should feel the need to do that.

“They have now had their tele­phones tak­en away from them, they’re put in sep­a­rate rooms,” he said.

On dis­charg­ing Guer­ra, he asked him not to dis­cuss the in­for­ma­tion he shared with the oth­er wit­ness­es and sug­gest­ed that he leave the build­ing. He al­so asked Far­rah not to talk to the oth­er wit­ness­es.