BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – OVER the past weeks, the Beacon Heights saga has given rise to widespread public outcry with the most recent coming from former Chairman of the Social Security Board Richard Caines.
Caines, a minister of government under the then People’s Action Movement administration and current member of Operation Rescue, has joined with the likes of Mark Brantley in calling for the peaceable and immediate resignation of the Board of the Directors of Social Security.
The Beacon Heights project, an initiative of the SSB which is projected to see the construction of 191 homes, became the subject of many discussions in recent times.
As part of the first phase of the project which is to see the construction of 10 residential spaces, CONTEC was awarded the contract and had received millions of dollars for the infrastructural development.
With a July 2011 deadline set for the completion of that phase, and with the houses in a state of incompletion to date, red flags were waved and questions asked of both the SSB and CONTEC.
Caines, in an interview with SKNVibes, made reference to a memorandum which was purportedly written by the Director of the SSB, Sephlyn Lawrence, to the Chairman of the Board, Halva Hendrickson, and copied to the other Board members.
In the last paragraph of the memo dated July 23, 2011 and issued five days later, the Director reiterated her stance, in which she said, “We should not outlay any more funds in additional infrastructure before concretisting any zone 4 sale. I think we need to be more prudent and deliberative and from now wait for the project to generate sales. We budget $50M expenditure before sales; we have now spent $80M with only the first $25,000 generated in sales. Let us think carefully. Let me reiterate my position to terminate the contract immediately and we would not have to be considering these new zone 4 proposals at this time.”
Caines’ call for the Board members’ resignation is based on the memos purportedly written by Lawrence.
“I am calling for the members of the Social Security Board to resign and to do so peaceably. The background for me to be speaking this way is in respect of the memos that were written to the Chairman of the Social Security Board…that is by the Director, Mrs. Sephlin Lawrence. She wrote and first memo and I will have to assume she did not get a proper response so she wrote a second memo.
“…I think this is ludicrous! It is unbelievable that an institution, a government or anything, could have an outlay of EC$80M and up to the point of this memo they have only collected $25 000. Where are they going? It is upon that basis that I am calling for the resignation of the Board.”
In support of his resignation call, Caines explained that a $25 000 return on $EC80M is “simply unacceptable”.
“It was not even a question of the returns, because returns might mean interest and so on. This is not what this is referring to. This is referring to sales. If you are spending $80M and you are doing sales, you should have either complexly sold or nearly sold some of the buildings, and whatever the values are then you would see $1M, $20M or some sort of return. But that $25 000 is so unacceptable that the Director made mention of it to the Chairman.
“This sort of behaviour is mismanagement of funds and gross negligence. But to go further, I want to think that there is somebody who is telling the Board what to do but it is not stated anywhere. My reason for saying this is that there is a Minister of Social Security, the Honourable Sam Condor, he made a statement…And what is distasteful for me and mistrustful is the fact that the Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas’ office issued two releases, one on behalf of the SSB and another on behalf of CONTEC. This, to me, is highly irregular.”
In light of the above, Caines expressed that he is convinced that “the proper course of action is that the Board should resign”.
