Richard Lord

Com­mis­sion­er Ken­neth Sir­ju will have no in­volve­ment in de­lib­er­a­tions of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Con­struc­tion Sec­tor in all mat­ters re­lat­ing to the Cleaver Heights Hous­ing project in Ari­ma. This is ac­cord­ing to a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day by com­mis­sion sec­re­tary Ju­dith Gon­za­lez. The Guardian re­port­ed last week that Sir­ju's com­pa­ny, KS&P was in­volved in the Cleaver Heights project. And the Com­mis­sion in con­firm­ing this yes­ter­day said, "It has al­so emerged that in Ju­ly 2009, an em­ploy­ee of NHIC con­tact­ed an em­ploy­ee of KS&P Ltd to re­quest in­spec­tion of cer­tain re­tain­ing walls on the Cleaver Heights De­vel­op­ment Project." The Com­mis­sion added that the in­spec­tion was car­ried out on Ju­ly 28, 2009, and a let­ter set­ting out the find­ings re­lat­ing to the re­tain­ing walls was sent on Au­gust 6, 2009."

Ac­cord­ing to the Gon­za­lez, Sir­ju was "un­aware of these mat­ters and had no per­son­al in­volve­ment in the work car­ried out by KS&P for NHIC." Gon­za­lez said that "nei­ther Sir­ju nor KS&P had at any time had any in­volve­ment in the con­trac­tu­al is­sues con­cern­ing Cleaver Heights De­vel­op­ment Project or any of the is­sues con­cern­ing Cleaver Heights set out in the ex­tend­ed terms and ref­er­ence dat­ed De­cem­ber 10, 2008." Notwith­stand­ing this, Gon­za­lez said com­mis­sion chair­man John Uff was of the opin­ion that it would now be in­ap­pro­pri­ate for Sir­ju to have any in­volve­ment in the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry so far as it con­cerned the Cleaver Heights De­vel­op­ment Project." "Sir­ju has ac­cord­ing­ly de­cid­ed that he should re­cuse him­self from the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry with re­gard to the Cleaver Heights De­vel­op­ment Project."

Gon­za­lez said this de­ci­sion "re­moves any fur­ther ob­sta­cle to the con­tin­u­a­tion and com­ple­tion of the work of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry." Re­sump­tion of hear­ings of the en­quiry is set for Mon­day. The com­mis­sion sec­re­tary said the re­port con­cern­ing the orig­i­nal terms of ref­er­ence will be pre­pared by com­mis­sion­ers Sir­ju and Desmond Thorn­hill, and Chair­man Uff, while the re­port re­gard­ing he ex­tend­ed terms of ref­er­ence will be com­piled by Uff and Thorn­hill. The Com­mis­sion said af­ter re­ceiv­ing claims of an al­leged pro­fes­sion­al re­la­tion­ship be­tween Sir­ju and NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean) Ltd, it wrote to par­ties on Au­gust 26, re­quest­ing com­ments on the al­le­ga­tion.