The House of Assembly voted Friday to amend a 2021 integrity law that never took effect and strengthen an Integrity Commission that was never established.
The Integrity in Public Life (Amendment) Bill, 2024 — which passed with amendments after less than two hours of public debate and a closed-door committee session — would grant new powers to the as-yet-unestablished Integrity Commission and expand the definition of family members to widen protections against conflicts of interest, among other changes.
The bill, which now awaits the governor’s assent, would also remove the HOA from under the law’s umbrella, though Cabinet and junior ministers would still be subject to its provisions.
Before any of those changes take effect, however, the original bill the HOA amended will have to be brought into force.
Though the HOA passed the original Integrity in Public Life Act in December 2021 and the governor assented to it in February 2022, the law never came into force and the Integrity Commission was never appointed — delays noted in the 2022 Commission of Inquiry report.
Denniston Fraser report
When explaining the bill on Friday, Premier Dr. Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley noted that some of the proposed amendments stemmed from recommendations in a post-COI report by Denniston Fraser that reviewed HOA members’ practice of contracting with government.
The review, Dr. Wheatley said, found a wider issue with the strength of the integrity framework in government.
“In summary, the reviewer Mr. Denniston Fraser concluded that the challenge wasn’t necessarily with members of the House of Assembly contracting with government, but that the integrity framework needed to be strengthened for members of the House of Assembly,” Dr. Wheatley said. “And, therefore, Denniston Fraser made a series of recommendations to strengthen the Integrity in Public Life Act.”
Though removing HOA members from the act’s umbrella was not among Mr. Fraser’s recommendations, the “objects and reasons” section of the new bill states that matters “relating to integrity in public life relating to the House of Assembly are expected to be addressed in a separate piece of legislation.”
During the Friday HOA meeting, Dr. Wheatley explained further.
“We wanted to respect the universally accepted principle of separation of powers, and so the House of Assembly should be governed by an institution specifically set up for the legislative branch,” Dr. Wheatley said. “And we sought the advice, we sought the direction from the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which clearly stated that it is best practice for House of Assembly members and the members of the executive to be governed by separate institutions to hold them accountable to standards of integrity.”
He added that although HOA members were being removed from this bill, the legislation “will still apply to ministers of government in their capacity as ministers as a part of the executive branch, and it will also apply to junior ministers and also to statutory board members.”
Dr. Wheatley added that a new bill designed to “establish an integrity framework” for HOA will be introduced soon.
Expanded powers
The new powers proposed for the Integrity Commission under the Friday bill include the authority to impose a fine up to $5,000 for non-compliance.
Additionally, the bill would empower the commission to “make inquiries and carry out investigations as is necessary in order to verify and determine the accuracy of any declaration or statement of registrable interest.”
As part of efforts to discourage conflicts of interest, the bill would also widen the definition of family members to include spouses of different sexes who are not married but live together as if they were married as well as adopted children, stepchildren and children born out of wedlock.
Debate
HOA members debated the bill for under two hours on Friday, with Opposition Leader Ronnie Skelton and opposition members Julian Fraser and Myron Walwyn contributing along with the premier.
Mr. Skelton said he generally supported the bill, but he noted a few provisions he believed should be changed. Among the amendments he opposed was a provision granting the chair of the Integrity Commission power to impose fines without first getting the approval from the other commission members.
“We appoint chairmans of a lot of organisations, and they go off acting in their own deliberate judgments,” Mr. Skelton said. “This thing needs to say something like, just like how we put ‘with the approval of Cabinet,’ you could issue fines with the approval of the commission. Because if you leave it like this, there’s nothing stopping her from issuing fines to anybody. So that needs to be corrected.”
Moving too fast?
Mr. Walwyn (R-D6) agreed. He also took issue with how quickly the HOA has proposed and passed legislation in recent months.
“With this bill, albeit the amendments are small, but the public has no knowledge of what we are doing in this House and what changes are being made in this House,” Mr. Walywn complained.
Though the Integrity in Public Life Act was originally passed in 2021, he added, the “commission was not in place to give effect to the act.”
Mr. Walwyn also said he was “concerned” that the public lacks sufficient knowledge of the law.
“I can tell you if you find three out of 10 persons that know about this act and how it affects their conduct and their duties in their job, they won’t be able to tell you, and I’m concerned about that,” he said.
Mr. Walwyn also took issue with the new definition of “spouse” in the proposed bill, arguing that it doesn’t fully capture what could be a spouse in “modern society.”
He said that two women or two men can live together “in circumstances better than husband and wife,” but such couples are not captured in the current iteration of the bill.
When giving his closing comments regarding the bill, the premier spoke of his “disappointment” in how opposition members characterised the bill. He also pushed back against Mr. Walwyn’s comments about how quickly HOA is passing new legislation.
“We paint a picture almost as though everything was perfect in the Virgin Islands before the COI came along, and all of this is just coming out of nowhere; it’s just falling out of the sky,” Dr. Wheatley said. “And so we completely ignore the fact that there were acts taking place that were unacceptable — some of what we ourselves have been involved in: behaviour unbecoming when it comes to procurement, when it comes to all types of nonsense that used to happen in the past. We act like we don’t acknowledge any of these things at all and then we criticise the government for rushing legislation in place and failing to negotiate deadlines.”
He added that he would have hoped for “some level of unity in the House” on such legislation.
‘You have no authority’
In response, Mr. Walwyn spoke directly to the premier.
“You have no authority to speak about anybody being involved in anything,” Mr. Walwyn said. “The matter involving me is a court matter. Last time I checked you were not a magistrate; you were not a judge. And if you want to go down the road about who has been involved in things, don’t start that, because it won’t end good.”
Dr. Wheatley pointed out that he did not directly mention the court matter involving Mr. Walwyn, who was arrested in November 2022 and charged with breach of trust by a public officer in connection with a perimetre wall built around Elmore Stoutt High School when he was serving as education minister.
“I said nothing about the member’s matter which is in court,” Dr. Wheatley said. “I don’t know if he feels guilty.”
Moving on
After this exchange, Speaker of the House Corine GeorgeMassicote asked members to move on from the court matter, and she asked the premier to wrap up discussion of the bill so the House could begin its closed-door committee session.
Returning to the topic of the bill, Dr. Wheatley reiterated his “disappointment” in how opposition members spoke of its components.
“To come in here and to seek to water down and to dismantle this bill in favour of what has been described here I think would be an injustice to the people of the Virgin Islands,” Dr. Wheatley said.
He added that some of the bill’s provisions, such as rules against giving gifts to family members, are very “standard across the world.”
Apology
Later, after the HOA returned from the closed-door committee session, Mr. Walwyn apologised to the speaker for using “unparliamentary” language.
“I wanted to apologise to your House because I used the term ‘mash up’ today,” Mr. Walwyn said. “I didn’t mean that at all. You know sometimes we get heated, and we use terms — but it wasn’t meant in any way physical at all. The premier stepped on a little corn there, and I expressed myself in a particular way. But I just wanted to — I know the term is unparliamentary and, Madam Speaker, I wanted to be able to apologise to you for doing that.”
The premier responded, saying that although Mr. Walwyn did not apologise to him, he “accepted” the apology “anyways.”