The State may be forced to foot the bill for hir­ing over 2,300 in­terns at the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) in the lead-up to the April 28 Gen­er­al Elec­tion. Hous­ing Min­is­ter Phillip Alexan­der says files will soon be hand­ed over to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie, de­tail­ing how the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion al­leged­ly used the HDC as a po­lit­i­cal tool.

Dur­ing Mon­day night’s Sen­ate de­bate on the Fi­nance (Sup­ple­men­tary Ap­pro­pri­a­tion) (Fi­nan­cial Year 2025) Bill, Alexan­der said the files al­leged that for­mer min­is­ters or­ches­trat­ed the hir­ing. Along­side Hous­ing Min­is­ter David Lee and Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Anil Roberts, Alexan­der claimed he dis­cov­ered an $81 mil­lion short­fall in the min­istry’s ac­counts: funds crit­i­cal for op­er­a­tions and re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture that should have been in the orig­i­nal bud­get.

Their probe re­vealed that ad hoc de­ci­sions and un­bud­get­ed spend­ing had tak­en place, in­clud­ing the sud­den on­board­ing of tem­po­rary work­ers in March and April.

Alexan­der said they asked for ev­i­dence that it was an an­nu­al ex­er­cise, but there were no such hir­ings at that time in pre­vi­ous years.

He held up a doc­u­ment, he said, that con­tained names he could not re­veal in the Up­per House, but which mem­bers would re­ceive.

“I do not plan to cause any em­bar­rass­ment of any­one, and I would leave that up to the au­thor­i­ties to deal with.”

He said while HDC staff ac­knowl­edged the hir­ings, they could not clear­ly state their pur­pose.

He said the Com­mu­ni­ty In­tern­ship Pro­gramme, orig­i­nal­ly de­signed to re­ha­bil­i­tate HDC rental de­vel­op­ments us­ing lo­cal labour and con­trac­tors, was meant to em­ploy 600 peo­ple across all sites. But a doc­u­ment from HDC’s Hu­man Re­sources Di­vi­sion re­vealed that di­vi­sion­al man­ag­er Ron­nie Spencer, un­der in­struc­tion from man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Jay­selle Mac Far­lane, re­ceived names from var­i­ous con­stituen­cy of­fices for hir­ing. These in­di­vid­u­als were giv­en let­ters for two fort­night­ly stints.

The lo­calised labour start­ed work­ing in ear­ly April, with hires stag­gered through­out the month. De­spite the ini­tial 600-work­er lim­it, he claimed Mac Far­lane pushed for more hires, ex­pand­ing the tem­po­rary work­force to 2,300.

“I com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor about the lack of ma­te­ri­als and ac­tu­al task for them to un­der­take; how­ev­er, she in­formed me that these in­struc­tions had been is­sued by two then gov­ern­ment min­is­ters and oth­er PNM min­is­ters over­see­ing mar­gin­al con­stituen­cies and that it was her di­rec­tive to en­sure their ex­e­cu­tion,” the let­ter stat­ed.

“Mr Pres­i­dent, these work­ers were not gain­ful­ly em­ployed in HDC work and were used for po­lit­i­cal pur­pos­es, paid through the HDC, and that bill is now due and ow­ing.”

Com­par­ing the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s hous­ing fig­ures with its pre­de­ces­sor’s, Alexan­der said that in 2015, when the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship left of­fice, 169,557 ap­pli­cants were on the pub­lic hous­ing list. That num­ber has since grown to over 200,000.

Be­tween 2010 and 2015, the PP built 7,596 homes. In the 10 years that fol­lowed, the PNM man­aged on­ly 4,700. Most of those, he said, had al­ready been al­lo­cat­ed, large­ly through min­is­te­r­i­al di­rec­tives.

“We found an HDC that was be­ing used as a po­lit­i­cal tool.”