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by pltm
(PLTM) - The Commission of Inquiry (CoI) probing allegations of Government corruption has expressed concern after Acting Financial Secretary, Jerimiah Frett admitted to contacting Claude Skelton Cline to source information before testifying.
Counsel to the CoI, Bilal Rawat pointed out that not only does Frett appear to have done this in relation to Letters of Requests, but he appears to have acted in anticipation of a Letter of Request that he has yet to receive.
“He gave evidence about reaching out to Mr Skelton Cline to get documents from him. And that just only compounds the problem,” Rawat has expressed in released transcripts.
The Right Honourable Sir Gary Hickinbottom who is heading the Commission indicated that it compounds the problems in two ways.
One is the "fundamental problem" because they don't actually know what his department actually held at the time of the request.
“Secondly, we've been told, and I fully accept that public officers are under a huge burden of work, and Mr Frett has increased the burden on him by doing things which we did not ask him to do and he did not have to do,” the Commissioner stated.
Plugging Gaps
Rawat stated that he would flag up the issue of Frett seeking to plug gaps in the information held at the Ministry of Finance.
He then pointed out that Letters of Request have gone out to different Ministries on the same issue, and the reason for that is what the Commission wanted to know is 'what documents do you hold on this matter'.
Rawat pointed to Frett's approach when he took him to sets of e-mails that were dated, all of them from Greg Romney, who is Deputy Commissioner of Customs.
According to Rawat, he did so because it was very difficult to understand what those e-mails were about. “And Mr Frett then volunteered that what he'd done was to contact Mr Romney, once he'd been alerted about this is a Letter of Request and seek information from him,” Rawat stated.
He indicated that it is a fundamental problem because the Ministry of Finance is a Ministry to whom a significant number of requests have been sent.
“And if the Financial Secretary has adopted the approach of deciding that he will fill in gaps in the material that he cannot locate in his department by essentially sourcing them from elsewhere, that leaves you in the position that you cannot assess the basis on which a decision may have been made because it could have been made without the necessary documents, but if they have been found and disclosed to you without any explanation, that might not become clear,” Rawat shared.
The CoI has concluded that the material being submitted by the Government is sometimes in complete disarray and that the disclosure has been materially deficient.
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