Editorial | Go to court, not inquisition

It is not clear who Delroy Chuck, Jamaica’s justice minister, has in mind to instruct the Integrity Commission (IC) to certify Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ statutory declaration of his wealth.

Hopefully, Mr Chuck wasn’t expecting the Parliament, or the Integrity Commission Oversight Committee (ICOC) thereof, to do so. It has no such power.

Mr Chuck’s ambition should become clearer by Thursday when the IC’s commissioners, including its chairman, retired Court of Appeal president Seymour Panton, appear before the committee.

In the meantime, if Mr Holness believes that the IC erred in fact or law in reviewing his income, assets and liability statements, he, like any other public official who is subject to the commission’s oversight, has recourse to the law by way of judicial review.

Indeed, Section 6 (3) (a) of the Integrity Commission Act says: “In the exercise of its powers and performance of its functions under this Act, the Commission shall not be subject to the direction or control of any other person or authority other than the Court by way of judicial review.”

Others – including Mr Holness’ former energy and science minister Andrew Wheatley, when he was subject to adverse findings by the IC’s director of investigations in his report on the Petrojam corruption and cronyism scandal – have used this provision in attempts to overturn conclusions and recommendations with which they disagreed.

In recent times, Ian Hayles, a former junior minister and a current vice president of the opposition People’s National Party (PNP), is another of the people to have made a similar effort. In his case, though, it was with respect to an investigation inherited by the IC from one of its legacy agencies, the Contractor General, into allegations that he had developed a property in the parish of Hanover without appropriate permits and with suspect documents. That report was referred to the police for further investigations, including into claims of fraud.

It matters naught that both Dr Wheatley and Mr Hayles failed to clear the first hurdle of convincing judges to grant them leave to take their cases to full judicial review, on the basis that they had real chances of success. Prime Minister Holness may well have substantive and unique points to argue.

GOOD SENSE

So perhaps by Thursday good sense will have prevailed, and the apoplexy which seemingly attended government members of the ICOC at last week’s session sufficiently subsided to allow for a rational, mature and constructive engagement between the committee and the commissioners, rather than the lynch-the-IC posture that has characterised the attitude of too many members of the government towards the Integrity Commission over the past two years.

Much, however, will depend on how the ICOC’s chairman, Edmund Bartlett, controls the meeting, including, maybe, fixing the glued-in pacifier to the government’s, and committee’s, tantrum-throwing resident enfant terrible, who has apparently assumed the role of stalking horse for those who would gut and quarter the IC. The inquisition, or the preparation therefore, has begun with crude assaults and lacerations by way of questioning of the IC’s impartiality.

The existing environment notwithstanding, The Gleaner prefers to assume that, like us, Mr Bartlett, wishes for a constructive meeting and sought to signal as much in the tone of his statement on Thursday’s session, which was triggered by the recent tabling of the IC’s investigation report to Prime Minister Holness’ finances.

“We have asked the Commissioners to attend on us at the meeting on October 3 and they have responded favourably,” Mr Bartlett said. “This is in keeping with the principle of maintaining a healthy relationship between the Integrity Commission and the parliamentary oversight committee.”

Politicians have had an uneasy relationship with the six-year-old IC and its predecessor agency, Office of the Contractor General. The latter, they felt, was often too loud and aggressive in announcing its investigations, and the IC too tediously nitpicking in its demands for information on their statutory findings.

PLUNGED SHARPLY

Those relations, especially with respect to government legislators, have plunged sharply in the last two years, primarily over two matters.

One was the IC’s clunky handling early last year of a report into whether Mr Holness wrongfully issued the award of contracts in the first half of the 2000s when he was education minister.

A report was tabled in Parliament indicating the IC’s director of investigation’s recommendation that Mr Holness be prosecuted for breaching procurement rules for work in his constituency. But within 24 hours another report was tabled with the ruling by the commission’s director of corruption prosecution that it would be difficult to get a conviction on the issue, given Mr Holness’ explanation of what had happened, and because rules governing the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), from which the projects were financed, weren’t in place at the time.

More significant, however, was the IC’s disclosure that six MPs (now eight), who weren’t named, but all apparently from the government benches, were under investigation for illicit enrichment – the same offence that has caused the IC not to certify Mr Holness’ filings for two consecutive reporting cycles.

Although it found only a small discrepancy in the prime minister’s assets and liabilities filings for 2022, the commission determined that it couldn’t provide Mr Holness with a clean bill of health and forwarded its report to the Financial Investigations Division for additional probe. The IC was concerned about volume and velocity of the movement of money between Mr Holness’ private companies.

Additionally, the commission also called on the tax authorities to determine whether the prime minister’s companies failed to pay income taxes, and urged the securities regulator to review the basis on which an investment/brokerage house loaned J$50 million to one of Mr Holness’ companies.

There may, indeed, be elements of the IC law in need of reform. But mostly this should be to allow the commission to act with greater efficiency and openness about its investigations. Not to neuter it.

For all the angst in the government over the IC, we still hope that Thursday can signal a reset.