With one meeting, the Integrity Commission falls

The meeting lasted one hour and 15 minutes. At its end, the commissioners decided to refer a report into allegations made against Dr Keith Rowley to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Two years later, that meeting would be the commission’s undoing.

This month, High Court Judge Justice Maureen Rajnauth-Lee ruled that the commission had acted “in bad faith” in so referring the report and ruled that the commissioners were guilty of the tort of misfeasance. The judge’s findings, which prompted the entire commission to resign on February 5, were audacious given the fact that two former judges had sat on the commission and were present at the August 7, 2006 meeting.

Present were: John Martin, the then deputy chairman who later became the chairman; commissioners Justice Monica Barnes SC (retired), Justice Ralph Narine (retired) and Terrance Martins; as well as then-registrar of the commission Albert Alkins and then-administrative officer Martin Farrell. Notably, the then-chairman of the commission, Gordon Deane, absented himself from the meeting.

The day’s proceedings began with a prayer, said by Barnes. Minutes of the last meeting were then confirmed by Martins and seconded by Narine. Then, the “Report of the Utilisation of Materials and Labour from the Scarborough Hospital Project and Construction Site for use in a private housing development owned by Minister Keith Rowley” was discussed.

According to the minutes of the meeting, which was obtained by Sunday Newsday, the commission agreed to deal with legal advice given to them from Douglas Mendes SC in a peculiar way.

“The Commission agreed, based on the advice received from Mr Douglas Mendes, to separate the issue of the Code of Conduct (for persons in public life) from the matters raised in the declarations,” the minutes read, before sedately noting a startling decision:

“The issue with respect to the Code of Conduct will be referred to the DPP on Monday August 7, 2006.”

Justice Rajnauth-Lee found that this decision was not in keeping with Mendes’ advice at all. In her 45-page judgment, she found that the commission ignored the lawyer’s advice which had recommended the report not be forwarded to the DPP without giving Rowley a chance to respond.

This week Barnes, who has until now had an unblemished legal career and who opened the day’s proceedings on August 7, 2006, told Sunday Newsday that her resignation in light of the findings of the High Court now marks the end of her career.

“This has come at the end,” she said in a brief telephone interview last week, declining to be interviewed in person. Speaking in the well-rounded cadences that characterised her speech from her days on the bench, she added, “it would be the best thing to think of this as the end. Thank God I have been able to do what I have done and let us call it quits. Right now I think that I have got to this stage of my life where I have got to be mellow.”

And what a career it has been for Barnes, who declined to answer further questions. Barnes recently penned an important and influential report into the failings of the social services. The one-time chairman of the Tax Appeal Board also served on the Law Reform Commis-sion, the Law Revision Commission, and the Constitution Commission.

But she was not the only person with an illustrious past caught up in the abrupt Integrity Commission fallout. Commis-sioners Peter Clarke and Vindar Dean-Maharaj also resigned this month alongside Barnes and Martin. The profiles of all the members who resigned still remained, as of last week, posted on the commission’s website.

Last Monday, staff at the Integrity Commission’s offices at Independence Square held a luncheon in honour of Martin, their former chairman.

At the fourth floor of the UTC Building on Independence Square, staff toasted Martin as they partook of a lunch of steamed fish, chicken, rice and salad served with orange juice and mauby. It was a low-key event; a banal end for Martin’s tenure at the top. Barnes and the other commissioners were not in attendance.

“It is a loyal staff,” Martin, 77, noted this week in an interview with Sunday Newsday. A chartered accountant for over 36 years and a one-time president of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce, he expressed sadness at how his career has come to an end.

“You are sad like anything else, but that is it. The judge has ruled and that is it regardless of whatever else.”

Martin said on August 7, 2006, he could never have foreseen that the routine meeting would have been the commission’s undoing.

“Well I could have never foreseen that but this is how it is. It is unfortunate and that is it. What is done is done. I can’t go back and change. I don’t have a time machine to go back. Sometimes an accident happens and you’ve got to live with it.”

But time machine or not, there are clouds that still linger over the commission in the wake of the incidents surrounding the 2006 meeting. Rajnauth-Lee herself described some of her own findings as “troubling” and described the commission as “recklessly indifferent.”

“In all the circumstances, the court finds as a fact that the Integrity Commission had intended at its meeting of the 7th August, 2006 to forward the Intelsis Report to the Director of Public Prosecutions,” the judge said. She noted that the commission disregarded steps contained in the report and legal advice which argued that Rowley should be presented with the findings of the investigation and allowed an opportunity to respond in conformance with the law and the principles of fairness.

“I find at the very least that the Integrity Commission did not care whether section 38 of the (Integrity in Public Life) Act was being breached,” the judge ruled. “When the Integrity Commission referred its report to the Director of Public Prosecutions on the 7th August, 2006, it was recklessly indifferent as to whether the conduct was illegal. The Integrity Commission was subjectively reckless in the sense of not caring whether their conduct was illegal or not,” she said.

The judgment marked the low point of the commission which was established under Section 138 of the 1976 Constitution. Section 138 established the commission, which is similar to other like bodies across the globe, and a further section, Section 139, empowered Parliament to prescribe laws to determine the procedure by which the commission was to function. Yet, in the wake of years of corruption scandals such as the O’Halloran affair in the 1980s, it was more than a decade later, in 1987, that such a law was passed, setting out detailed requirements for persons in public life to declare their assets.

The 1987 act was later repealed and replaced by a similar act in 2000 and was the basis of a criminal conviction of former prime minister Basdeo Panday in 2006. That conviction brought the commission’s affairs into the public spotlight in a way it had never been before and underlined how politics often intrude into its constitutional mandate, which requires it to remain an independent body.

For instance, in Parliament on September 30, 2008, Prime Minister Patrick Manning alleged that Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar had an inside link to the commission.

“There is someone in the Integrity Commission who is in loco parentis, as the laws would say, with the member for Siparia as a consequence of which the member of Siparia was in a position to know far more than she, under normal circumstances, is authorised to know,” Manning said.

Former chairman Martin later denied the allegation outright, but the impression that the commission has often been nettled in the politics of Trinidad and Tobago persisted.

Two weeks ago, Rajnauth-Lee found that there was no satisfactory explanation as to why the commission, during its investigation of Rowley back in 2004, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Patrick Manning.

“The Court does not accept the Integrity Commission’s explanation as to why it wrote to the Honourable Prime Minister on October 19, 2004, to ascertain whether an inquiry was to be undertaken and if so, the names of the persons to man the inquiry and their terms of reference. The Court notes that the Integrity Commission is an independent constitutional body which ought to act independently pursuant to its constitutional and statutory powers and duties,” the judge found.

Asked to explain why the commissioners wrote Manning, Martin said deliberations of the commission are secret and referred all questions of this nature to the Integrity Commission’s legal team. Deane, similarly, refused to address this issue or any other issue, saying, “I have no comment.”

Asked if the commission had ever been influenced to act against Rowley, Martin denied ever falling under any political pressure. “We had no political attachments at all,” he said.

But Rowley disagrees.

“There are people in the Government who sought to use the Integrity Commission against me in an attempt to put an end to my political career,” the sacked trade minister said this month. “The Integrity Commission was a willing participant in that development. They thought they were acting in good faith, they thought they would have gotten away with that foolishness, but the commission should not have done that.”