Richard Lord

Chair­man of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute Vic­tor Hart says the fail­ure by the Gov­ern­ment "to gazette" the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Con­struc­tion Sec­tor "shows up our coun­try as be­ing very Third World." In a state­ment yes­ter­day, Hart said he was sur­prised be­cause the le­gal re­quire­ment to gazette a com­mis­sion of en­quiry was well known.

"This is very el­e­men­tary...I am sur­prised that it was over­looked," he said.

He said the pub­lic should be told who was re­spon­si­ble for this "cost­ly er­ror and the guilty per­son should be held ac­count­able."

Hart said mil­lions of tax­pay­ers' mon­ey had so far been spent on the in­quiry and more would be spent be­cause of the de­lay. "If the in­quiry is abort­ed as a re­sult, mil­lions of dol­lars will have gone down the drain," he added.

He said pub­lish­ing the in­quiry in the Gazette im­me­di­ate­ly and ap­proval of retroac­tive leg­is­la­tion must be done to cor­rect the er­ror. Hart said if the in­quiry were to be abort­ed the coun­try would lose the ben­e­fit of the com­mis­sion­ers' rec­om­men­da­tions on pub­lic sec­tor pro­cure­ment re­form and the re­or­gan­i­sa­tion of the con­struc­tion sec­tor.

And chair­man of con­struc­tion firm NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean) Ltd, Emile Elias, said he hoped that "the fail­ure to pub­lish in the Gazette, as re­quired by law, the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry, is not a fa­tal er­ror." He said the prob­lem could be re­solved "by the im­me­di­ate pub­li­ca­tion of the en­quiry as soon as pos­si­ble in the Gazette, retroac­tive­ly." Pres­i­dent of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil for the Con­struc­tion In­dus­try Win­ston Ri­ley said: "It is clear that we are liv­ing in a place akin to an asy­lum. In an asy­lum there is al­ways some­one who is laugh­ing. I am the one who is laugh­ing now."