THE House Committee on Ways and Means will ask the House leadership to allow it to subpoena all the documents from the Office of the Governor relating to the independent contracts of the two special assistants of Gov. Juan N. Babauta.
Committee Chairman Stanley T. Torres, R-Saipan, said the panel will conduct a “full-blown investigation in aid of legislation” on the contracts of Adam B. Turner and Charles D. Jordan who were hired by the governor as policy consultant and special assistant for capital improvement projects.
According to Torres, Turner and Jordan’s contracts are “highly questionable and unethical.”
The Office of the Public Auditor, in a letter to Torres, confirmed most of his findings.
“The committee needs all the information that it could get from the Office of the Governor to be able to objectively look into the issue and come up with credible findings. I already requested the Attorney General’s Office to provide my office with the documents relating to Turner and Jordan’s contracts. However I was not guaranteed that the committee would be able to get all the information, so we have to subpoena documents that could not be provided to us through the Open Government Act,” Torres said.
On June 6, Torres requested AGO to provide his office the copies of an earlier investigation made by OPA on Turner and Jordan’s contracts.
On June 11, Attorney General Robert T. Torres responded to the lawmaker’s request. He said the Office of the Governor “will assemble documents pursuant to (the) request.”
But the attorney general also told the lawmaker that if there were documents exempted from the Open Government Act, the committee “as a legislative body would need to require the production of such documents through the issuance of a subpoena.”
Speaker Heinz S. Hofschneider, R-Saipan, said he would approve the committee’s request “if that would be the consensus of the majority.”
“I don’t see any problem with that. If that is the consensus of the majority then it will be done,” he said.
Jordan, in an interview, said he was not ready to give an official statement on the issue as he just returned from an official off-island assignment.
Turner declined to comment.
Robert Florian, executive assistant to Procurement and Supply Director Herman S. Sablan, said they need to review OPA’s investigation first and the findings of Ways and Means before coming out with a statement.
