CONTRACTOR-GENERAL Greg Christie says the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) should be punished for failing to comply with his requirement for information on the Sandals Whitehouse Hotel project.

In fact, Christie, appearing yesterday for the second week in a row before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) examining his report on the Whitehouse hotel project, said the time “may have come when the full force of the law should be brought to bear upon delinquent public bodies and public officers who, with flagrant impunity, persist in ignoring the lawful requisitions of the contractor-general”. He also suggested that legislation be drafted to provide for punitive sanctions against them.

The contractor-general first put his suggestion in a letter he wrote on Monday to the chairman of the PAC, Audley Shaw.

In the letter, he said he would not pursue criminal charges against the UDC under Section 21 of the Contractor-General’s Act, although he had looked at the possibility, because he did not have evidence to support criminal neglect. However, he felt that sanctions should be pursued under Section 29, which makes it an offence to, “fail to comply with any lawful requirement of a contractor-general or any person under this Act…”.

The penalty is, on summary conviction before a Resident Magistrate, a fine not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months, or to both such fine and imprisonment.

Christie said, however, that the UDC’s deliberate conduct in failing to provide the requested information to the Office of the Contractor-General, “despite several and repeated requests to do so”, was not an isolated event.

“In point of fact, the records of past annual reports of the contractor-general (including those from the previous contractor-general) will show that this sort of behaviour is symptomatic of what has been a long-standing and pervasive attitude among several public sector agencies. The problem is systematic,” he said in his letter.

“It is vitally imperative, therefore, that public bodies and public officers are held to book. All state organs, inclusive of the Cabinet, the Government, Parliament and parliamentarians, should publicly give unequivocal support to this endeavour,” he pleaded.

He suggested legislation to provide for punitive sanctions for public officials or public bodies which breach the government procurement procedures which are not now regulated by any law in Jamaica.

Auditor-General Adrian Strachan agreed, stating that if there was a breach of procedure in relation to procurement, there was no legal sanction available, and the contractor-general had indicated that over the years his office had made recommendations to provide for sanctions.

“We have also made recommendations that appropriate legal provisions be made to deal with these issues and we have recommended this,” Strachan said.