MIGNOTT. signed invoices

Noel Mignott, the former deputy director of tourism for the Americas, approved the payment of at least US$46,000 earlier this year to a company with a Fort Lauderdale, Florida address which could not be found and whose existence city officials could not confirm.
The payments were for printing services for the Jamaica Tourist Board, which apparently were delivered.

Two invoices submitted by ZEB Tech Designs in January and February this year bear Mignott's signature approving payment for 175,000 brochure shells with instructions for the jobs to be delivered to the JTB's warehouse at 8237 NW 66th Street, Miami. People who often order printing jobs in similarly large volumes say that ZEB Tech Designs prices appear "excessive".
For instance, one of the ZEB Tech invoices bills the JTB a total of US$24,350 for 100,000 brochure shells.
"That works out to about five times more than I pay for that amount of work," one tourism industry executive, who declined to be named, told the Observer .

A comparable quote obtained by the Observer from Insty-Prints in West Palm Beach, Florida last week totalled US$5,675.
Although ZEB Tech Designs is listed on the website of the Florida Division of Corporations, the company is unknown to the Broward County Occupational Licences Bureau, the agency with which all firms must be registered to operate legally in Florida.
In addition, ZEB Tech Design's address on the invoices - 965 N Knob Hill Road, Suite 179, Ft Lauderdale, Fla - could not be located by the Observer on a visit to that city last Monday. No one answered the company's telephone and a telephone company operator told the Observer that the number "has not been in service for some months".

"I have nothing under that name or address or telephone number," a representative of the Broward County Occupational Licences Bureau told the Observer in Fort Lauderdale last week.
Mignott, whose resignation was announced by the tourism ministry on September 6, could not be contacted for comment on the matter.
He signed the invoices, dated January 16 and February 7, 2002, on January 18 and February 12, 2002 respectively. The Observer had obtained two other invoices but they were illegible due to poor reproduction.

The Florida Division of Corporations website shows that ZEB Tech Designs was filed with that agency on May 6, 2002 and its registered agent is someone named Marie Henry.
Late last week, the Florida Division of Corporations told the Observer by telephone that firms "are not supposed to be operating before registering" with them.

Mignott, who spent most of his 20 years working from the JTB's New York office, resigned after Tourism Minister Portia Simpson Miller ordered a probe into the operations of that office.
The probe was triggered by the release of an anonymous e-mail containing a raft of allegations of financial and professional misconduct by three senior staffers at that office.
Last week, the JTB announced that it had fired Marie Deeble Walker, the advertising relations manager at its New York office and had accepted the resignations of Mignott and that of Yvonne Sawyers, the accountant/administrator.
According to the JTB, it cashiered Deeble Walker because it had lost "confidence in her judgement as a senior officer".
The JTB, however, did not elaborate.

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