Po­lice have searched the homes of sev­er­al high-rank­ing of­fi­cials in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), as the probe in­to a con­tro­ver­sial voice record­ing widens.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that at least one re­tired THA chief ad­min­is­tra­tor, whose name we have cho­sen to with­hold giv­en the sen­si­tive na­ture of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, was among those whose homes were searched by po­lice over the week­end in con­nec­tion with the probe in­to the leaked voice record­ing in­volv­ing Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine and an uniden­ti­fied fe­male.

In that one-minute-and-15-sec­ond voice record­ing that has made its rounds on so­cial me­dia since May 23, the two THA ex­ec­u­tives were heard plot­ting to utilise the THA mon­ey to fund a pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign on be­half of the new To­ba­go Peo­ple Par­ty, led by Au­gus­tine.

How­ev­er, the em­bat­tled Chief Sec­re­tary has since al­leged that the au­dio file was an at­tempt at ex­tor­tion by a con­trac­tor who is owed mil­lions of dol­lars in out­stand­ing pay­ments by the THA.

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, head of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice White Col­lar Crime Di­vi­sion As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (ACP) Wen­dell Lu­cas con­firmed that sev­er­al search­es took place over the week­end in con­nec­tion with the probe in­to the au­dio record­ing, which was still on­go­ing.

“As you would re­call Deputy Com­mis­sion­er [of In­tel­li­gence and In­ves­ti­ga­tions] Curt Si­mon had in­di­cat­ed that an in­ves­ti­ga­tion had been launched in­to that record­ing and this is in fur­ther­ance of that,” ACP Lu­cas said.

How­ev­er, asked to con­firm if the homes of Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine and a for­mer Chief Ad­min­is­tra­tor were among those searched, Lu­cas said he could not con­firm at this stage.

He, how­ev­er, de­nied that the homes of any promi­nent con­trac­tors had been searched.

With­out re­veal­ing any names of those of­fi­cials whose homes were searched or giv­ing de­tails on any items seized, he said his of­fi­cers were still in the field con­duct­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

“We are at a fact-find­ing stage at this point in time.

“We are just try­ing to gath­er as much in­for­ma­tion as we can so that we can push the com­pe­tent au­thor­i­ty in that di­rec­tion,” ACP Lu­cas said, adding that the next stage would be “to have a con­ver­sa­tion with the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions af­ter we have analysed the ev­i­dence col­lect­ed”.

In light of the scan­dal which has rocked To­ba­go since the record­ing was leaked in May, the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion has al­so launched a probe in­to the mat­ter.

An anony­mous com­plaint was re­port­ed­ly lodged with the Com­mis­sion on June 3, un­der Sec­tion 32 of the In­tegri­ty in Pub­lic Life Act.

Un­der this sec­tion, the com­mis­sion must in­ves­ti­gate any com­plaint made by the pub­lic in­to any al­leged breach­es of the act or al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion.

Fol­low­ing the ini­tial as­sess­ment, the com­mis­sion will de­ter­mine if a full-scale probe is war­rant­ed.