The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has with­drawn its ap­peal over a judge’s de­ci­sion to up­hold a law­suit from an em­ploy­ee, who was tasked with in­ves­ti­gat­ing a col­league based on a com­plaint, for which for­mer Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les was a wit­ness. 

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that at­tor­neys for the au­thor­i­ty filed a no­tice of dis­con­tin­u­ance in the ap­peal a day be­fore it came up for hear­ing be­fore the Court of Ap­peal on Tues­day. 

Lancelot Leza­ma brought the law­suit un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act (FOIA) as he claimed that he was pres­sured by then-se­nior of­fi­cials of the au­thor­i­ty to make find­ings against his col­league Ce­cil Matthews in his probe. 

Leza­ma was as­signed to probe Matthews af­ter it was al­leged that he (Matthews) al­lowed a non-WASA em­ploy­ee to dri­ve an of­fi­cial ve­hi­cle. Gon­za­les was an al­leged eye­wit­ness to the pur­port­ed act. 

Leza­ma found no ev­i­dence of wrong­do­ing but claimed that the of­fi­cials sought to ma­nip­u­late the in­ves­ti­ga­tion to reach a pre­de­ter­mined con­clu­sion. 

In No­vem­ber, last year, High Court Judge Na­dia Kan­ga­loo up­held his case and or­dered that the au­thor­i­ty dis­close the re­quest­ed em­ploy­ment doc­u­ments in re­la­tion to the of­fi­cials Leza­ma ac­cused of im­prop­er con­duct. 

Jus­tice Kan­ga­loo ruled that Leza­ma, through his lawyer Anand Ram­lo­gan, SC, of Free­dom Law Cham­bers, had raised le­git­i­mate con­cerns about ac­count­abil­i­ty and po­ten­tial mis­man­age­ment, which war­rant­ed ad­di­tion­al scruti­ny. 

“The court finds fur­ther that there was a fail­ure by the de­fen­dant in this mat­ter to prop­er­ly con­sid­er the pub­lic in­ter­est over­ride un­der Sec­tion 35 of the FOIA, which specif­i­cal­ly man­dates dis­clo­sure if there is ev­i­dence of mis­con­duct or unau­tho­rised use of pub­lic funds ex­ists,” she said. 

Re­ject­ing com­plaints from WASA that the dis­clo­sure re­quest was spec­u­la­tive, Jus­tice Kan­ga­loo said that con­fi­den­tial­i­ty and pri­va­cy rights could not shield pub­lic of­fi­cials from al­leged mis­con­duct scruti­ny. 

The ini­tial out­come of the case was praised by the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion which praised Leza­ma for tak­ing the stance he did and for pur­su­ing the case. 

“The judg­ment re­veals the alarm­ing lev­el of cor­rup­tion and po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence at WASA. It is rep­re­hen­si­ble that se­nior of­fi­cials would at­tempt to ma­nip­u­late an in­ves­ti­ga­tion to shield a min­is­ter and un­der­mine an in­no­cent work­er,” it said.