Paria divers’ prosecutions in limbo over six-month time limit

Over four years af­ter the trag­ic in­ci­dent at Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny’s Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ty, where four divers lost their lives, the fate of par­al­lel pros­e­cu­tions brought by the Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Au­thor­i­ty (OSH Au­thor­i­ty) is still up in the air.

The case ini­ti­at­ed by the OSH Au­thor­i­ty was left in lim­bo af­ter the Unit­ed King­dom-based Privy Coun­cil de­liv­ered a land­mark judg­ment in Sep­tem­ber last year, in which it up­held a six-month time lim­it for bring­ing such charges af­ter statu­to­ry breach­es come to the at­ten­tion of its in­spec­tors.

The out­come of the case may lead to the dis­missal of the charges de­pend­ing on whether the time lim­it is de­ter­mined to be­gin when the in­ci­dent oc­curred in Feb­ru­ary 2022 or when the Com­mis­sion of In­quiry (CoI), ap­point­ed to look in­to the in­ci­dent, de­liv­ered its fi­nal re­port rec­om­mend­ing the charges in Jan­u­ary 2024.