Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

The Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) ap­peared to breach at least five le­gal pro­vi­sions un­der the tenure of Calder Hart as its ex­ec­u­tive chair­man.

This was the claim made by Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) po­lit­i­cal ac­tivist and lawyer Ver­non de Li­ma dur­ing a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day. "It lends sup­port to the con­tention that some­thing un­law­ful has hap­pened at Ude­cott and so we have passed the in­for­ma­tion over to the au­thor­i­ties so the ball is in their court now, that is the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions and the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go," De Li­ma said. He said state­ments from Hart about bear­ing no re­la­tions to the di­rec­tors of a firm which was award­ed hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in Ude­cott con­tracts was an of­fence un­der the Per­jury Act.

Hart's at­tor­neys, Frank Solomon SC and De­vesh Ma­haraj, filed clos­ing sub­mis­sions to the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­ves­ti­gat­ing Ude­cott and the lo­cal con­struc­tion sec­tor say­ing that doc­u­men­tary proof to sub­stan­ti­ate the claims need­ed to be pro­vid­ed. "Proof of mar­riage in law re­quires the pro­duc­tion of at least a cer­ti­fied mar­riage cer­tifi­cate... fam­i­ly re­la­tions are to be proved. De Li­ma and oth­er COP ac­tivists were able to ob­tain doc­u­ments which es­tab­lished fam­i­ly ties be­tween Hart and Sun­way Con­struc­tion Caribbean Lim­it­ed, the Malaysian firm at work on the Gov­ern­ment's $820 mil­lion Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs Tow­er.

Among the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments the COP pre­sent­ed to the me­dia yes­ter­day in­clud­ed birth and mar­riage cer­tifi­cates which claimed that Sher­rine Hart's younger sis­ter, Lee Soeh Ching, was mar­ried to Ng Chin Poh. Lee Hup Seng was list­ed as a wit­ness to their mar­riage and it claimed he was the broth­er of Lee Soeh Ching and there­fore, Sher­rine Hart. Lee Hup Ming and Ng Chin Poh were list­ed as the di­rec­tors of the firm CH De­vel­op­ment and Con­struc­tion Ltd, ac­cord­ing to its ar­ti­cles of in­cor­po­ra­tion, which was dat­ed Oc­to­ber 19, 2004. "We can now get on with it and do what is the right thing," De Li­ma said.

?Mean­while, the par­ty's lawyer Tim­o­thy Hamel-Smith said it would be un­ac­cept­able for Ude­cott's deputy chair­man Dr Kr­ish­na Ba­hadoors­ingh or an­oth­er board mem­ber, such as In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Michael An­nisette, to as­sume the func­tions of the board's ex­ec­u­tive chair­man fol­low­ing Calder Hart's abrupt res­ig­na­tion. Hamel-Smith said the re­main­ing mem­bers of the Ude­cott board need­ed to re­sign. Oth­er Ude­cott board mem­bers in­clude Wen­dell Dot­tin and An­tho­ny Cher­ry.