To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?The re­turn of Calder Hart to Trinidad af­ter a pe­ri­od of respite in Flori­da that last­ed more than a month pro­vides the rel­e­vant agen­cies with an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ques­tion him on his stew­ard­ship of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (Ude­cott).

Mr Hart served as chair­man of Ude­cott be­tween 2002 and 2006 and as the com­pa­ny's ex­ec­u­tive chair­man be­tween 2006 and March 6 this year, when he ten­dered his res­ig­na­tion fol­low­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning the pre­vi­ous day. In the eight years that he ran Ude­cott, the com­pa­ny was re­spon­si­ble for the man­age­ment of the con­struc­tion of build­ings worth bil­lions of dol­lars. It is now clear from a read­ing of the re­port of the Uff Com­mis­sion of En­quiry that probed many of the Ude­cott projects dur­ing the pe­ri­od of Mr Hart's lead­er­ship that he has many ques­tions to an­swer.

In the re­port that spans over 500 pages, three is­sues stand out:

�2 The Com­mis­sion of En­quiry rec­om­mends that there should be an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Ude­cott's fail­ure to con­trol and re­duce de­lays at the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus project.

�2 The com­mis­sion rec­om­mends that there should be a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the award by Ude­cott of the Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs con­tract to CH De­vel­op­ment, "in­clud­ing the role of Mr Calder Hart and the con­duct of the board in not en­sur­ing that an en­force­able guar­an­tee was giv­en by the par­ent com­pa­ny of CH De­vel­op­ment."

�2 The com­mis­sion al­so rec­om­mends a "full in­ves­ti­ga­tion" in­to the award of five con­struc­tion pack­ages at the Bri­an Lara project in Tarou­ba with spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence to is­sues touch­ing on the ad­vance pay­ments made to the con­trac­tor.

The re­al ques­tion is whether Mr Hart will ever be called up­on to ac­count for the many fail­ures of cor­po­rate gov­er­nance, over­sight and man­age­ment con­trol at Ude­cott. The way in which the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion has treat­ed Mr Hart would seem to in­di­cate that there is lit­tle chance that the Cana­di­an-born ex­ec­u­tive will be called up­on to ac­count be­fore the gen­er­al elec­tion, which is due to be held in a lit­tle less than three months. As the last Sun­day Guardian re­port­ed, Mr Hart re­turned to Trinidad just as he left–sur­round­ed by a co­coon of ex­clu­sive priv­i­lege on­ly grant­ed to one of this coun­try's most favoured sons, even one who was not born here. The re­ports in­di­cate that Mr Hart was giv­en the fa­cil­i­ty of us­ing the VIP lounge.

While it may be un­der­stand­able for the chair­man of five state-owned com­pa­nies to be grant­ed VIP sta­tus, sure­ly the ra­tio­nale for him be­ing grant­ed that priv­i­lege should have been stripped from him when he was forced to re­sign as the chair­man of the com­pa­nies. The Gov­ern­ment al­so seems to have been un­usu­al­ly ac­com­mo­dat­ing in the way in which it fa­cil­i­tat­ed Mr Hart's de­par­ture: the Prime Min­is­ter him­self had a dis­cus­sion with him and the tim­ing of the an­nounce­ment of his res­ig­na­tion was on­ly made af­ter de­par­ture. The Gov­ern­ment did the right thing by hold­ing the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry, en­sur­ing that it was held in pub­lic, res­cu­ing it when it faced the pos­si­bil­i­ty of be­ing de­railed, and then fa­cil­i­tat­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the en­su­ing re­port. Will the Gov­ern­ment en­sure that Mr Hart and the Ude­cott di­rec­tors are made to re­spond to ques­tions about their fail­ures in a way that en­sures that T&T learns from their many mis­takes and nev­er re­peats them?