An­oth­er fam­i­ly liv­ing in the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion’s (HDC) Green­vale Park De­vel­op­ment in La Hor­quet­ta has been served an evic­tion no­tice af­ter be­ing found to be il­le­gal­ly oc­cu­py­ing a house there.

The evic­tion comes just two weeks af­ter the Sorzano fam­i­ly was evict­ed from the de­vel­op­ment af­ter be­ing found to be liv­ing there il­le­gal­ly by an HDC team which had gone to set up a flood re­lief cen­tre for res­i­dents af­fect­ed by Oc­to­ber’s dev­as­tat­ing flood­ing.

Yes­ter­day, HDC chair­man New­man George said the lat­est find was now forc­ing them to do a de­vel­op­ment to de­vel­op­ment au­dit tak­ing stock of their as­sets. George said the lat­est fam­i­ly was served with a no­tice to quit the premis­es af­ter they failed to pro­duce any doc­u­men­ta­tion prov­ing own­er­ship.

“We found two peo­ple who were liv­ing in a unit in which, when we were go­ing through our records, they were not sup­posed to be as­signed and we asked them to pro­duce doc­u­ments and they could not pro­duce doc­u­ments so they were is­sued a no­tice to quit by Fri­day,” George said.

Asked if this case could be sim­i­lar to that of the Sorzanos, who have said they were giv­en the fraud­u­lent doc­u­ments by a Min­istry of Hous­ing em­ploy­ee they thought was help­ing them, George said, “They didn’t pro­duce any doc­u­ments so there was noth­ing to say that they were giv­en doc­u­ments by the same in­di­vid­ual that had giv­en doc­u­ments to the oth­er cou­ple.”

In the days fol­low­ing the Sorzanos’evic­tion, two record­ings of con­ver­sa­tions be­tween the cou­ple and the Hous­ing Min­istry em­ploy­ee be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing.

In one of the record­ings, the man says to At­i­ba Sorzano, “I wish you had called me be­fore and I would have told you do not give them any pa­pers be­cause I would tell you tell them the man did every­thing, he had every­thing, all the pa­pers…In that case, you know they wouldn’t have any­thing if you know what I mean.”

Yes­ter­day, when George was asked whether this could be the rea­son this fam­i­ly had not pro­duced any doc­u­ments, he replied, “I don’t know, we haven’t done any link at all—if they pro­duce doc­u­ments, we can trace it but they didn’t pro­duce any doc­u­ments so as a re­sult of that we gave them no­tice to quit.”

George said util­i­ties in the unit oc­cu­pied by the sec­ond fam­i­ly were al­so run­ning.

Com­par­ing it to the Sorzano case, George said, “Just like the Sorzanos, the Sorzanos were giv­en a let­ter to take to T&TEC and WASA, it was a fraud­u­lent let­ter but T&TEC and WASA did not know that and they con­nect­ed and they were pay­ing elec­tric­i­ty.”

On Wednes­day, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that the Hous­ing Min­istry em­ploy­ee named in the Sorzano case had been laid off al­though an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to that case is still on­go­ing.

Speak­ing on the HDC’s now new dri­ve to weed out il­le­gal ten­ants, George said when he en­tered of­fice in late 2015 he did not re-ex­am­ine ex­ist­ing al­lo­ca­tions but fo­cused in­stead on deal­ing with cur­rent is­sues such as the 160,000 pend­ing hous­ing ap­pli­ca­tions.

“Green­vale was giv­en out in 2015, pri­or to when I came in­to of­fice at the end of 2015 and you will think that when peo­ple are oc­cu­py­ing a place, they will be do­ing so le­git­i­mate­ly, so you don’t go back and check be­cause we have 160,000 peo­ple on record look­ing for hous­es,” he said.

“We are go­ing for­ward, we are look­ing to build, to see those that were dam­aged, peo­ple who died and left their homes and how to re­as­sign those but now that this has jumped out at us, we are re­al­ly tak­ing stock and go­ing from de­vel­op­ment to de­vel­op­ment.”

He said the HDC has al­so re­ceived a num­ber of “tips” from le­git­i­mate home­own­ers that there are oth­er cas­es of fam­i­lies il­le­gal­ly oc­cu­py­ing hous­es and will be tak­ing ac­tion to re­move the il­le­gal ten­ants. He said go­ing for­ward, the HDC will al­so be in­stalling alarm sys­tems in its va­cant units to en­sure peo­ple do not break in and oc­cu­py them with­out the cor­po­ra­tion’s per­mis­sion.