Fran­cis Joseph

It's con­firmed. Pro­fes­sor John Uff, QC, will speak to the me­dia this morn­ing af­ter pre­sent­ing his con­tro­ver­sial re­port on the con­struc­tion sec­tor to Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards at Pres­i­dent's House. His re­port comes two days af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning put the coun­try in gen­er­al elec­tion mode, and in the midst of a po­lice probe in­to Ude­cott, and its for­mer ex­ec­u­tive chair­man, Calder Hart, who is out of the coun­try. Uff, chair­man of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Con­struc­tion Sec­tor, the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (Ude­cott), and the Cleaver Heights hous­ing project, will ad­dress the me­dia at Win­sure Build­ing, Port-of-Spain, at 11.30 am. Uff flew in­to Trinidad last evening from Lon­don af­ter com­plet­ing the re­port, which has had two ex­ten­sions. Uff presents the re­port to Richards with�on­ly me­dia pho­tog­ra­phers al­lowed at Pres­i­dent's House–no re­porters.

He will speak to re­porters af­ter­wards, al­though he made it quite clear that he can­not speak on his rec­om­men­da­tions and the con­tents of the re­port. But the British QC said he want­ed to say "a few things" at the news con­fer­ence. He breaks with tra­di­tion as no oth­er chair­man of a com­mis­sion of en­quiry has ever sat down af­ter the pre­sen­ta­tion of the re­port to speak with the me­dia. The com­mis­sion had to seek an­oth­er ex­ten­sion for de­liv­ery of the re­port. The re­port was due on Feb­ru­ary 28, but was held up be­cause of a ju­di­cial re­view case filed by Ude­cott against the com­mis­sion for ap­par­ent bias. This was dis­missed on March 5 by Jus­tice Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er, and there has been no ap­peal by Ude­cott.

This was the third ex­ten­sion be­ing sought by the com­mis­sion from the Pres­i­dent. On Sep­tem­ber 9, 2008, Richards ap­point­ed four peo­ple as com­mis­sion­ers to in­quire in­to cer­tain mat­ters in re­la­tion to the con­struc­tion sec­tor. The com­mis­sion be­gan sit­ting and heard open­ing state­ments on Jan­u­ary 12, 2009, and had, up to Sep­tem­ber, held three sets of hear­ings dur­ing the course of which a sub­stan­tial amount of in­for­ma­tion was re­ceived by the com­mis­sion­ers by way of writ­ten state­ments, oral tes­ti­mo­ny un­der oath, and round-ta­ble dis­cus­sions, on some eight items of the terms of ref­er­ence. Days be­fore the start of the fi­nal set of hear­ings on Sep­tem­ber 7, it was dis­cov­ered that the com­mis­sion had not been gazetted as is re­quired by Sec­tion 15 of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry Act on Sep­tem­ber 9, 2008, when the com­mis­sion was es­tab­lished.�

As a re­sult, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie went to Par­lia­ment and got both Hous­es to pass the Val­i­da­tion Act, and which was as­sent­ed to on No­vem­ber 3. This gave the com­mis­sion a retroac­tive ef­fect, mean­ing that all the ev­i­dence tak­en be­fore the er­ror was dis­cov­ered was still valid. The Gov­ern­ment ap­point­ed for­mer Ap­peal Court judge, An­tho­ny Lucky, to in­ves­ti­gate why the re­port was not gazetted. He sub­mit­ted his fi­nal re­port to the AG, but noth­ing has been heard about it again. The fourth and fi­nal phase end­ed on De­cem­ber 8, 2009, with Uff�promis­ing to pro­duce his re­port by the end of Feb­ru­ary 2010. There was al­so an un­der­tak­ing from the com­mis­sion that the re­port would not be hand­ed over to the Pres­i­dent un­til judg­ment was giv­en in the ju­di­cial re­view case. Along the way, two com­mis­sion­ers–Is­rael Khan, SC, and Ken­neth Sir­ju–re­signed, leav­ing just Uff and Desmond Thorn­hill to com­plete the re­port.