To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine has been giv­en 30 days to file his In­tegri­ty in Pub­lic Life Act de­c­la­ra­tion for 2023.

High Court Judge Frank Seep­er­sad grant­ed the or­der yes­ter­day as he up­held an ex-parte ap­pli­ca­tion from the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion against Au­gus­tine.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­mis­sion's court fil­ings, ob­tained by Guardian Me­dia, Au­gus­tine was re­quired to file his de­c­la­ra­tions of in­come, as­sets, and li­a­bil­i­ties that ex­ceed $10,000 and his state­ment of reg­is­tra­ble in­ter­ests for 2023 by May 31, last year, but failed to do so.

In No­vem­ber last year and Jan­u­ary this year, the com­mis­sion pub­lished ad­ver­tise­ments in a news­pa­per and no­tices in the T&T Gazette, which list­ed Au­gus­tine among a group of pub­lic of­fi­cials with­out out­stand­ing de­c­la­ra­tions.

It filed the ap­pli­ca­tion un­der sec­tion 11(7) of the leg­is­la­tion, which did not ne­ces­si­tate Au­gus­tine's re­sponse, af­ter he failed to heed the pub­lic no­tices.

Fail­ure to ad­here to the court or­der would re­sult in the com­mis­sion of an of­fence un­der the leg­is­la­tion, which car­ries a max­i­mum penal­ty of a $150,000 fine.

As part of his de­ci­sion, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad or­dered Au­gus­tine to pay the $1,500 in le­gal costs in­curred by the com­mis­sion in pur­su­ing the court or­der.

Guardian Me­dia sought to get a re­sponse from Au­gus­tine on whether he planned to chal­lenge the or­der or would sim­ply com­ply by the dead­line.

How­ev­er, he did not re­spond to mes­sages sent to his cell phone via What­sApp.

The com­mis­sion was rep­re­sent­ed by Nikhil Sanchez.