Death threat

Senior director probing contracts corruption at National Housing Trust is targeted, says CG

Thursday, January 07, 2010

A senior director in the Office of the Contractor General (OCG) who has been leading a probe into what the OCG described as "a criminal conspiracy involving the award of Government contracts by the National Housing Trust (NHT)" has received a death threat, Contractor General Greg Christie made public yesterday.

Christie said he has reported the threat to Assistant Commissioner of Police in Charge of Serious Crimes Les Green, after which the senior director met with police assigned to the Protective Services Division, an indication that the director is being given police protection.

Christie, who said that the threat came from an anonymous telephone caller on Tuesday, revealed that the probe involved four employees of the NHT, as well as five contractors, four of whom, he said, are bogus.

"The five contractors have, during the past four years, been awarded contracts from the NHT totalling at least $87 million in value," Christie said in a characteristically detailed news release.

At the same time, Christie said that a director of the OCG, who admitted to falsifying Contractor Verification Forms for the four sham contractors, was fired on Monday.

Efforts last evening to contact the NHT for a comment were unsuccessful. However, yesterday, Christie said that over the past two weeks, the senior director who was threatened and his team uncovered that one of the four bogus contractors is a full-time social studies school teacher at a prominent St Andrew high school, while another is an information technology specialist.

"The four sham works contractors are presumably utilised by the fifth to funnel contract awards from the NHT," said Christie. "The contracts which are awarded in the names of the four sham contractors are then apparently performed by the fifth contractor."

The information, he said, was received during several audio-recorded interviews with representatives of all five contractors as well as four NHT employers.

He also said that joint bank accounts in the name of the fifth contractor are maintained with at least two of the sham contractors "to presumably facilitate Government contract payments in the names of the sham contractors", and at least two of the bogus contractors "allege that they were approached by the fifth to act as sham contractors".

According to Christie, the managing director of the fifth contractor is a church brother of one of the sham contractors and a neighbour of one of the other sham contractors. He also said that one of the sham contractors alleged that the discussions with the managing director of the fifth contractor, regarding the arrangement, took place at the church where they both worship.

The contractor general said, too, that one NHT employee has been listed as a full-time employee on the application documentation of the fifth contractor for the past four years, while two other NHT workers are listed as full-time employees of two of the sham contractors.