The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion has is­sued an of­fi­cial state­ment, re­fut­ing al­le­ga­tions made by the UNC’s can­di­date for Ch­agua­nas East, May­or of Ch­agua­nas Van­dana Mo­hit, that pri­vate da­ta of its clients is be­ing used by the PNM to aid in po­lit­i­cal can­vass­ing.

At a news con­fer­ence at her con­stituen­cy of­fice on Sun­day, May­or Mo­hit stat­ed that her of­fice had re­ceived com­plaints from res­i­dents in Oa­sis Gar­dens that per­sons said to be from the PNM were call­ing them and en­cour­ag­ing them to reg­is­ter with the EBC, so they can vote for Ch­agua­nas East. The May­or al­leged that the pri­vate num­bers of these res­i­dents re­port­ed­ly had been ob­tained from the HDC.

The HDC cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly re­futes such an in­for­ma­tion breach, but has as­sured a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion will be launched in­to the mat­ter, to de­ter­mine whether one ac­tu­al­ly had oc­curred.

The full state­ment from the HDC, fol­lows…

HDC RE­JECTS THE CLAIMS MADE BY PROSPEC­TIVE CH­AGUA­NAS EAST CAN­DI­DATE (UNC)

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) has not­ed the com­ments at­trib­uted to the May­or of Ch­agua­nas and prospec­tive can­di­date for Ch­agua­nas East, Van­dana Mo­hit, which ap­peared in the on­line ver­sion of the Guardian news­pa­pers on Mon­day Ju­ly 13 and ti­tled “May­or ac­cus­es the PNM of us­ing HDC files to can­vass res­i­dents.”

The HDC ve­he­ment­ly de­nies the scur­rilous ac­cu­sa­tions as re­port­ed by Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed. As a state agency, the HDC ad­heres to the strictest stan­dards of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty as it re­lates to clients’ in­for­ma­tion. Ms. Mo­hit’s ac­cu­sa­tion there­fore is un­found­ed giv­en our pol­i­cy and our ap­proach to client in­for­ma­tion and da­ta. Notwith­stand­ing, the HDC will con­duct an in­ter­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion on this mat­ter.

It should al­so be not­ed that over the last few years, the HDC has, through pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paigns, de­nounced at­tempts to de­fraud clients and use their per­son­al in­for­ma­tion there­fore the HDC will not par­tic­i­pate in any ac­tiv­i­ty which utilis­es client’s da­ta for a pur­pose oth­er than that which the or­gan­i­sa­tion is man­dat­ed to do.