Rowley: Other board members must go
(Trinidad Express) Following a call for his resignation by Prime Minister Patrick Manning, Urban Develepment Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) Executive Chairman Calder Hart resigned on Saturday with immediate effect. In a statement issued yesterday Hart also announced that he had tendered his resignation with respect to all State boards to which he has been appointed including NIB, TTMF, NIPDEC and HMB.

Following his resignation, Hart, his wife Sherrine and young daughter left the country via Caribbean Airlines for Canada, the country of his birth.

The Prime Minister himself departed for London on Saturday to attend Commonwealth Day celebrations today.

The Prime Minister, as head of the Cabinet, has the power to hire and fire the chairman of any State board so a request from Hart to resign is tantamount to a directive.

The Prime Minister, who has ignored calls to remove Hart in the past and whose government, as late as Friday, refused to debate the very same issue-that is Hart’s removal from all State boards-as a matter of urgent public importance, made a complete about-turn and on Friday afternoon called on Hart to resign, sources said. Sources said the Prime Minister who was not in the Parliament on Friday at the time that the motion was presented, did not endorse the position adopted by the Government side in not supporting the call to debate the Opposition Leader motion.

The volte face came at a time when the court ruled to allow the publication of the report of the Commission of Enquiry into UDeCOTT and also coincided with a growing public concern following the release of startling documentary evidence confirming a family link between Hart and a company, CH Development, which won a $368.9 million contract from UDeCOTT.

It has been months of unrelenting exposes involving Hart and UDeCOTT culminating last week with what was described by Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar as the presentation of “incontroversible documentary evidence..in the public domain confiming the family relationship of Hart to two persons in whom the ownershp and control of CH Development and Construction was vested, at a time when UDeCOTT awarded the contract for the construction of the Ministry of Legal Affairs Towers, at a price which was more than $60 million higher than that of the lowest bidder.”