Geisha Kow­lessar

A le­gal war is brew­ing be­tween Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing and Home Con­struc­tion Lim­it­ed (HCL) over the rights of a par­cel of land at One Wood­brook Place, Port-of-Spain. In a press con­fer­ence at City Hall, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Lee Sing ac­cused HCL of want­i­ng to lease the space to the fran­chise-hold­ers of the cin­e­ma group, IMAX, know­ing the space was al­ready al­lo­cat­ed to the city. Ac­cord­ing to Lee Sing, in Jan­u­ary 2011 the coun­cil of the cor­po­ra­tion com­mis­sioned a di­ag­nos­tic re­view of the op­er­a­tions of the cor­po­ra­tion.

That, he said, was to en­sure the ac­tiv­i­ties of the coun­cil and by "nec­es­sary im­pli­ca­tion" the ac­tiv­i­ties of the cor­po­ra­tion were be­ing con­duct­ed in ac­cor­dance with the best prac­tice and the law. "The re­view pe­ri­od was both cur­rent, that is to say, fo­cused on the present day-to-day ac­tiv­i­ties of the cor­po­ra­tion as well as his­tor­i­cal, that is to say, fo­cused on past prac­tices of the cor­po­ra­tion," Lee Sing said. Say­ing he was ad­vised the re­view was al­most com­plet­ed, the may­or added that dur­ing the course of the cor­po­ra­tion's analy­sis, "cer­tain find­ings" be­came ap­par­ent.

He said it was his un­der­stand­ing those mat­ters were about to be­come mat­ters in the pub­lic do­main.

He added: "The events in is­sue con­cern the on­go­ing de­vel­op­ment known as One Wood­brook Place."The coun­cil has searched its records and re­ceived a com­pre­hen­sive re­port from its cor­po­rate sec­re­tary on mat­ters that touch the en­ti­tle­ment of the cor­po­ra­tion to cer­tain space de­fined in the con­cep­tu­al plans for One Wood­brook Place as an area to be used as an au­di­to­ri­um.

"The area was at all ma­te­r­i­al times in­tend­ed for use by the city," Lee Sing said. He said about a fort­night ago, he held a meet­ing with of­fi­cials in­volved in the de­vel­op­ment af­ter it be­came known that the de­vel­op­er was about to lease the space to IMAX. "This was, in the opin­ion of the cor­po­ra­tion, a clear breach of its agree­ments with the de­vel­op­er," Lee Sing said. He said he in­tend­ed to keep the de­tails of the meet­ing con­fi­den­tial "for now." He added: "For the time be­ing I wish it to be made known to our burgess­es, to the cit­i­zens of Port-of-Spain and to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that the cor­po­ra­tion in­tends to pur­sue its rights in this mat­ter to a fi­nal­i­ty.

"We pre­fer that there should be a peace­ful res­o­lu­tion of this mat­ter but we are not pre­pared, un­der any cir­cum­stances, to cede the rights of the peo­ple of Port-of-Spain to a valu­able as­set in ex­change for emp­ty promis­es and rhetoric." He said the cor­po­ra­tion was be­ing rep­re­sent­ed by for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al John Je­re­mie. Ef­forts to con­tact of­fi­cials of HCL for a re­sponse yes­ter­day proved fu­tile and mes­sages left were not re­turned. The T&T Guardian was told that there were no man­agers avail­able to re­spond.­