And now, what next?
THE RESIGNATION of Karl Blythe has been accepted by the Prime Minister. Mr. Thorant Hardware, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Housing, is going on pre-retirement leave at the end of the month. The Board of the National Housing Development Corporation, including the Chairman, Mr. Michael Vacciana, has resigned and the technical adviser to the former Minister has demitted office. All this in the wake of the damning Angus Report on Operation PRIDE and the NHDC. The process of dismantling what the commission described as the "brotherhood" which ran Operation PRIDE has begun. But there is still unfinished business.
We have not heard of the status of the contractors and others who have received over-payments in excess of $1 billion on the five projects that have been abandoned and the 21 Operation PRIDE projects, which were the focus of the probe by the Angus Commission.
Have the contracts been terminated, presuming that some of them had any residual value? How soon will we hear from the Director of Public Prosecutions if there will be criminal charges? Will efforts be made to recover the money that was overpaid?
Should Mareva injunctions be imposed on those involved to prevent them from liquidating or otherwise disposing of their assets?
Also, there is the matter of the other PRIDE projects, which were not the focus of this investigation. If excesses and corruption existed at such a degree in the projects which were investigated, it is not unreasonable to assume that a similar tale will emerge from investigation of others.
Given what has emerged from this investigation, should the subsequent enquiries be left to the Auditor-General or should a special investigator undertake them?
The role of the Provident Societies also requires further scrutiny. Dr. Blythe, the former Minister, had always insisted that the Provident Societies were independent, autonomous bodies, which selected the contractors that they wished to do the construction on their Operation PRIDE projects. We now learn from the Angus Commission that this much-vaunted independence was a sham, as the contractors paid the Provident Societies to ensure their selection.
So much went wrong in Operation PRIDE and there was such wholesale corruption of processes, that not only must every thing be done to get to the bottom of what happened, but those who are culpable must be brought to book and safeguards put in place to ensure that will never happen again.
