Police Guarded the Door While Investigators Raided the NHT’s Own Files

• The Contractor General’s team arrived without warning
• Jamaica Constabulary Force officers guarded the six-hour search
• The probe targeted suspected contractor registration fraud
• NHT’s own director welcomed the inspection publicly

An investigative team from the Office of the Contractor General, accompanied by police, turned up unannounced at the National Housing Trust’s New Kingston headquarters to conduct a snap audit, part of a continuing probe into suspected contract irregularities at the agency, according to Contractor General Greg Christie. The team, led by an accountant and including two members of the OCG’s construction contracts inspectorate, spent roughly six hours combing through official documents under the watchful guard of Jamaica Constabulary Force personnel.

The letter authorising the search was addressed to NHT executive director Earl Samuels and copied to Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who held ministerial responsibility for the Trust, as well as the acting permanent secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister and the Trust’s own board chairman, a distribution list that ensured the political leadership was formally notified of the raid at the same moment it happened.

Samuels’s public response was notably welcoming rather than defensive. They turned up with a letter and we allowed them to inspect all the records, he confirmed that evening, adding that no advance notice had been necessary because the NHT was not attempting a cover-up. We are an open book. Anyone is free to come at anytime. We are under the Access to Information Act. We have nothing to hide. If there is anything untoward, we would like to know that also, he said.

The specific target of the probe, suspected fraud surrounding contractor registration rather than the housing project mismanagement this publication has documented in later NHT audits, illustrates a distinct category of vulnerability inside the agency’s operations: not just how large sums get spent on specific projects, but whether the underlying process for approving who is even allowed to bid as a registered contractor had itself been compromised.

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