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Hon. Godwin Hulse, Former Minister of Home Affairs
"I was the minister then and I was just in the chair a month and I began to say well what the heck is this? I mean all these compensations, how we get to this. Let's try to stop it first of all, not pay anything else, but get a complete analysis of who we owe and why we owe etc. Even those that were mandated by the courts. A lot of them were mandated by the courts and I didn't see it fair at all from how I sit and how I think. So, very short term I had. We didn't approved any additional compensations and I don't think the present minister is either until that whole matter is settled. But to answer your specific question how we came to that, a lot of the compensations were old compensations that began to be paid. Some people were waiting forever. I want to make this very clear, from where I sit then and now in the future, I don't believe at all even of the court rule and I don't want to step on the courts, so I'll be careful. But I don't believe that you got a piece of land for $4,000, you do nothing to it. It is suggested that you got it in error and then it is valued by at commercial rates and you are paid nearly a million dollars. Just seem odd to me. I would give you back your $4,000 with average interest from the time you paid your $4,000 to now, because I think that's all you deserve and I mean that."

Reporter
"Are you able to say how many cases there were that raised an alarm for you, more or less?"

Hon. Godwin Hulse, Former Minister of Home Affairs
"Not at all. I can't say that. That is why you heard Miss Sharon say sometime in January. I said look, while we are paying compensation, do an inventory to see who and what. I had no idea. I just saw that people were coming in and saying 'oh, government has to compensate me for this, and I have a court ruling' and attorneys were writing left, right and center. But I couldn't say who and what and where and when."

Reporter
"Several of these compensations involve political figures of the UDP. Does that make it worse or what's the justification there?"

Hon. Godwin Hulse, Former Minister of Home Affairs
"I won't put it in a political thing at all really. Forgive me. I'll put it in terms of the compensations for land that people got that they shouldn't have gotten and it doesn't matter who it was, because, if you want to go there, there are people I understand who are supporters of the Opposition who got compensation as well. So I won't go there at all. The compensation is compensation and I believe firmly that if you had development on the land, if it was a genuine title you thought you had, you had development on it, you had to be compensated for your expenditure. I don't believe that if it's just a piece of land you got, nothing on it and within a short time it turned out that it was somebody else's, that you should have been paid that kind of money. That's just my stance."

Government has given Sharon Pitts and Andre Vega until the end of this month to refund four hundred thousand dollars each which they received as what the Ministry believes to be wrongful compensation.