Yvonne Ba­boolal

Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) chair­man Ra­bindra Moo­nan is claim­ing the cor­po­ra­tion was a free for all hor­ror un­der the for­mer Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion, with no fi­nan­cial state­ments for the pe­ri­od from 2004 to 2007.Peo­ple oc­cu­py­ing HDC hous­es, some from as far back as 1995, owe the cor­po­ra­tion some $225 mil­lion as a re­sult of the mis­man­age­ment that oc­curred, he added.

Moo­nan said many hous­ing projects con­struct­ed un­der the for­mer PNM regime had to be sus­pend­ed by the present one be­cause mul­ti­ple con­trac­tors made a mess of them. Hous­es were built with­out waste­water plants and there was no in­fra­struc­ture.He said the cur­rent man­age­ment of the HDC has been forced to spend more mon­ey and ex­pend ex­tra ef­fort to fix these in­her­it­ed prob­lems.

These and oth­er dis­clo­sures were made at a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) meet­ing in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, where Moo­nan, HDC man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Jear­lean John and oth­er of­fi­cials ap­peared be­fore the com­mit­tee to give an ac­count of how they were run­ning the cor­po­ra­tion.Asked about the HDC's au­dit­ed state­ments for the last few years, Moo­nan said a huge back­log of non-ex­is­tent fi­nan­cial state­ments dat­ing back to 2004 were on­ly re­cent­ly com­plet­ed.

"It was a hor­ror. There were no fi­nan­cial state­ments. We had to for­mu­late doc­u­ments for the au­di­tor and hire a pri­vate au­di­tor to help up­date the ac­counts," he said."That's why we are where we are. There was no dif­fer­ence in the state of the hous­es. It seems to have been a free for all."Di­vi­sion­al Man­ag­er, Fi­nance, Celia Lewis, ear­li­er re­vealed that the cor­po­ra­tion had on­ly re­cent­ly com­plet­ed au­dits for the pe­ri­od be­tween 2004 to 2006.

Lewis said over $81 mil­lion in mort­gages were owed to the HDC, with $141m owed from peo­ple un­der the li­cenced to oc­cu­py cat­e­go­ry.Asked if an in­quiry will be launched in­to the flout­ing of the fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions and if the mat­ters will be tak­en to court, Moo­nan said the au­di­tor gen­er­al will have to make some state­ment on the mat­ter­La Hor­quet­ta/Tal­paro MP Jairam Seemu­n­gal asked Moo­nan if his board was around when the fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions were flout­ed dur­ing that pe­ri­od and he replied, "Ab­solute­ly not."

Lau­ren Legall, Man­ag­er, Al­lo­ca­tions, in de­scrib­ing the state of hous­es the Gov­ern­ment met when it came in­to pow­er three years ago, was al­so asked by Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Min­is­ter Ger­ald Hadeed what ad­min­is­tra­tion was in pow­er when those hous­es were built. She said as far as she could re­call, it was the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion.Moo­nan's dis­clo­sures came af­ter PNM Sen­a­tor Faris al Rawi asked him if he had to stick pins on a map where HDC projects were, how many pins he would get.

Moo­nan coun­tered that as chair­man of the board of di­rec­tors he dealt large­ly with pol­i­cy mat­ters. He re­ferred ques­tions on the op­er­a­tions of the HDC to the rel­e­vant of­fi­cials present.Al Rawi had al­so ques­tioned the val­u­a­tion of pri­vate prop­er­ty the HDC ac­quired for hous­ing at $170 mil­lion when a pri­vate val­u­a­tor had priced it at $51 mil­lion.

Moo­nan, dis­clos­ing that 4,700 hous­es were al­lo­cat­ed be­tween 2010 to the present time, said when the Gov­ern­ment came in­to pow­er, there were 7,263 units on the ground left by the last ad­min­is­tra­tion. There were no waste­water plants for a num­ber of them, he said.Re­fer­ring to the un­oc­cu­pied "tow­ers" in Ch­agua­nas, he said it con­tains tiny rooms and cor­ri­dors through which one had to walk side­ways.

He said he dis­cov­ered, to his cha­grin, that no thought was giv­en to whether peo­ple could af­ford the hous­es built in Moru­ga by the last ad­min­is­tra­tion."There were many, many faults in the work done by the last ad­min­is­tra­tion which the present board is now try­ing to cor­rect."His com­ments prompt­ed Port-of-Spain North/St Ann's West MP to re­mark that his com­ments were po­lit­i­cal­ly charged.