Board minutes battle

The Government’s principal training agency is heading to court to challenge an order by an appeal tribunal requiring it to hand over unredacted and authenticated minutes of all board meetings over a four-year period, along with related documents, to the attorneys representing a senior manager.

The order was made by the Access to Information (ATI) Appeal Tribunal on October 12. It requires the Human Employment and Resource Training/National Service Training Agency (HEART/NSTA) Trust to disclose the full minutes of all board meetings held between 2020 and 2023, as well as reports submitted by its audit, human resources and financial sub-committees.

The audit sub-committee reports are expected to shed light on a $1.2-billion over-expenditure on personal emoluments for a select group of employees during the 2021-2022 financial year, according to insiders.

The three-member tribunal, chaired by former Supreme Court judge Justice (retired) Glen Brown, gave HEART/NSTA 21 days to comply with the order. That deadline expired on November 2.

Andre Earle, King’s Counsel, whose law firm Earle & Wilson represents the HEART/NSTA senior manager, said the documents had not been handed over.

Natalie Robinson, senior director for Marketing, Communications and Community Engagement at HEART/NSTA, said “the matter to which you refer is currently receiving legal attention”.

“In the circumstances, the Trust will refrain from commenting substantively while the legal process is underway,” Robinson said in an email on November 3, responding to questions submitted by The Sunday Gleaner.

However, Earle said senior officials at the training agency indicated in a letter to his law firm on October 30 that they had recently received instructions to challenge the tribunal’s decision through judicial review.

The attorney said the letter also indicated that an application for leave, or permission, to seek judicial review and a stay of the order “will be filed shortly”.

Sonia Ingleton, a former senior manager for human resource management at HEART/NSTA, requested the documents on April 15, 2024, under the country’s ATI law, which gives citizens access to certain public documents.

Ingleton was suspended on January 31, 2023, and was facing an internal investigation into alleged irregularities involving personal emoluments, including an overpayment of $14.3 million at HEART/NSTA during the 2022-2023 financial year, according to documents before the tribunal.

The disciplinary proceedings against Ingleton ended with her retirement in December 2024.

However, internal communications seen by The Sunday Gleaner and a 2023 audit report put the personnel emoluments over-expenditure at $1.2 billion.

In one internal document, Kofi Nkrumah-Young, then chairman of the board’s finance committee, wrote to Marlon Morgan, then chairman of the audit committee, in August 2022, requesting a special audit of the agency’s human resource expenses for the 2021-2022 financial year, “which resulted in an over expenditure of $1.2 billion”.

The figure was attributed to “information presented to the finance committee at its meeting in July 2022”.

“I am very disturbed by this overspend as the committee has been expressing concerns about the huge and disproportionate PE [personal emolument] budget since 2020,” Nkrumah-Young wrote.

He further said the committee had made “repeated requests” for the agency’s management to explain the budget and “thereafter explain the noticeable monthly variations”.

“A complete response was not received until July 2022 when this alarming over expenditure was presented,” he said.

HEART/NSTA had previously disclosed the minutes requested by Ingleton, but with significant redactions. The agency argued before the appeal tribunal that the exemptions were justified under several sections of the ATI law.

In one instance, the welcome given at a board meeting held on June 22, 2023, was redacted from the minutes disclosed to Ingleton’s attorneys.

In another, 26 agenda items from a nearly four-hour board meeting held on February 23, 2022, were redacted from the minutes disclosed by HEART/NSTA.

Among the redacted items were reports from the audit sub-committee and the projects and programmes committee, according to documents seen by The Sunday Gleaner.

However, the tribunal chaired by Brown, in its October 12 decision, said HEART/NSTA had failed to provide any lawful reasons for the redactions and had not explained or justified the exemptions it claimed.

“There were numerous redactions and they failed to justify even one,” the panel ruled, more than two years after the appeal was filed.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com