Energy Minister Stuart Young will, today, present in Parliament the report of the Lynch Commission of Enquiry into the February 2022 incident at Paria Fuel Trading Company Ltd where four LMCS divers died.
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley announced this at yesterday’s media briefing at Whitehall, Port-of-Spain.
Young will do so when the House of Representatives resumes sittings today after the Christmas break.
Rowley had promised last December that the report would be made public once reviewed by the Cabinet.
The CoE, headed by Jerome Lynch, KC, was appointed in 2022 to probe the incident where the four divers—Fyzal Kurban, Kazim Ali Jr, Yusuf Henry and Rishi Nagassar—died inside the Paria Sealine 36 pipeline at Berth No 6 in the Pointe-a-Pierre harbour on February 25.
A fifth diver, Christopher Boodram, survived and was rescued. He had said the other four men were alive but he was unable to get them out. The divers had all been sucked into the 30-inch pipeline during maintenance work.
After six months of public hearings and voluminous information, the CoE’s 380-page report was presented to President Christine Kangaloo last November 30, some 21 months after the incident, with a request to make it public.
Commission head Lynch had said at the final sitting that the incident was no “act of God” and asked that the Government consider the report’s recommendations to prevent the incident from happening again. In January last year, the commission’s legal counsel Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, had called for the report to be published and laid in Parliament.
Last December, the Prime Minister had said the report would be sent to Cabinet, which would examine it and then it would be sent to the Parliament.
Attempting to quell concerns that the report might be “sanitised”, Rowley had assured it would not have been and dismissed such talk as “absolute nonsense”.
On the eve of today’s resumption of Parliament, UNC MP Rudranath Indarsingh called for the report to be made public, adding the issue of compensation was important. Relatives of the divers’ families have also firmly pressed for the report to be revealed.