Editorial | FLA has work to do

The flat rejection by Firearms Licensing Authority (FLA) chairman, retired judge Glenworth Brown, of the authority continuing to seek judicial review of the Integrity Commission’s (IC) report on alleged corruption at the authority places squarely on the table questions of how authority’s governors will deal with the commission’s findings. These include whether they continue to have confidence in the organisation’s management.

The Gleaner’s editorial board presumes that Justice Brown spoke with the full authority of his board when he told Nationwide Radio last week that from his stand point, the FLA’s failure in its initial stab at engineering the review was “the end of the matter”.

Further, on a full reading of Justice Brown’s interview, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that he - if not the entire board - was sceptical of the FLA’s possibility of a success in convincing a judge there were merits to its arguments for a judicial review.  If that was indeed the case, another reasonable inference that the board merely accommodated the FLA’s management and legal advisers in going to court, while believing that the grounds on which they were proceeding were not sound. 

Which brings the issue back to next steps at the FLA, and what might happen to its senior management, including its CEO, Shane Dalling, after the IC concluded that manipulated information in its database in a targeted move against former gun dealer, Kent Brown. 

REFUTED ALLEGATIONS

Mr Dalling vehemently refuted those accusations, claiming they were an attempt by Mr Brown to hit back at the FLA because of audits on his businesses and the loss of his operating licences. He also rejected the IC’s framing of unaccounted for bullets as missing, suggesting that they were more likely to be among sundries, having fallen from old, deteriorated storage pouches kept in inadequate and overcrowded facilities.

While the government has declared confidence in the authority’s management, it is the board which, under the law, appoints the CEO – albeit with the approval of the minister – and gives him instructions with respect to policy.  The flip side of this is that the board has to, or ought to have confidence not only in the CEO’s competence, but his capacity to carry out his job effectively.

The FLA, which issues gun users’ licences and regulates the domestic firearms trade, has been the subject in the past of contentions and suspicions, over its operations.  Indeed, three years ago, the IC issued a report which was scathing about the laxity with which a former chairman signed off on documentation for gun licences. It was also critical of how a former overturned a review panel’s rejection of appeals by applicants who were denied gun licences.

The current controversy erupted last month when it emerged that Parliament had for six weeks not tabled the latest IC investigative report, ostensibly on the grounds the FLA was seeking an injunction and/or judicial review, questioning the conduct of the commission’s investigation and the conclusions therefrom.

Parliament initially argued that the matter was sub judice and should therefore not be commented on publicly.  However, it was a well-known and settled legal principle that Courts could not interfere in how Parliament conducted its business - a fact that likely caused the FLA to abandon its effort to gain an injunction to prevent the tabling of the report.

FULL SIGHT

Instead, the FLA asked the court to force the Integrity Commission to give it full sight of the document, before its tabling in Parliament, so that it could prepare its case for judicial review.   That request, the authority argued, did engage the law’s requirement that IC investigations, and reports from them, be kept secret until the reports are tabled in the legislature.

Justice Tara Carr rejected that interpretation of the provision. She also held that the FLA, with which the commission had shared its conclusions, had sufficient information to mount any case for a judicial review. It was after this ruling Speaker Juliet Holiness tabled the report.

There was a possibility of the FLA appealing Justice Carr’s decision, making it among several by government agencies attempting to rein in the reach of the IC.

But Justice Brown, the FLA chairman, told Nationwide: “As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter… I have done (as a judge) a number of reviews. I must know. I have an idea about success.”

While conceding that he didn’t know what arguments lawyers for the FLA would possibly pursue in advancing the case for judicial view – a process by which the courts determine whether agencies of the state followed correct procedure in arriving at their decision - Justice Brown added: “... My considered position is that we should not waste judicial time. They (judges) have much work down there to do.”

There is no irrefutable smoking gun in the report to determine who might have instructed an IC technician to input information about Mr Brown’s alleged sales of ammunition to people (including to a dead man) who didn’t purchase. The computer database irretrievably crashed, without back-up. 

Neither could Brown’s claim that a former FLA audit supervisor attempted to shake him down for J$2 million to keep his operating licences.  That man couldn’t be found.

The FLA, however, has much work to do to clean-up its image and rebuild trust. Justice Brown is on the frontline.