The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) says it “cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nies re­cent al­le­ga­tions sug­gest­ing that doc­u­ments and files re­lat­ed to the cor­po­ra­tion’s op­er­a­tions were shred­ded or de­stroyed.” 

It made the com­ment in a me­dia re­lease is­sued yes­ter­day af­ter a video sur­faced on so­cial me­dia show­ing staff, al­leged­ly from the HDC, shred­ding doc­u­ments in an of­fice. 

“We wish to state un­equiv­o­cal­ly that no doc­u­ments, ap­pli­ca­tions, or files—phys­i­cal or elec­tron­ic—have been de­stroyed, tam­pered with, or un­law­ful­ly re­moved from HDC of­fices. Fur­ther­more, no of­fi­cer, em­ploy­ee, or agent has been in­struct­ed to car­ry out such ac­tions, nor has any such ac­tiv­i­ty oc­curred. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the room in ques­tion is not an of­fice with­in the HDC,” the re­lease said. 

The me­dia re­lease added that the State com­pa­ny op­er­ates un­der strict in­ter­nal pro­to­cols and na­tion­al reg­u­la­tions re­gard­ing the man­age­ment and preser­va­tion of pub­lic records. 

It said pro­to­cols are rig­or­ous­ly fol­lowed and files are now digi­tised. 

“Any re­ports or in­sin­u­a­tions to the con­trary are com­plete­ly false and ap­pear in­tend­ed to mis­lead the pub­lic and un­der­mine the in­tegri­ty of the cor­po­ra­tion. The HDC re­mains com­mit­ted to its man­date of pro­vid­ing af­ford­able hous­ing so­lu­tions to the cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go and will con­tin­ue to op­er­ate with the high­est stan­dards of pro­fes­sion­al­ism and in­tegri­ty. We urge the pub­lic to re­ly on of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels for ac­cu­rate and ver­i­fied in­for­ma­tion.”