The Commission of Inquiry (COI) will be implementing a specialist IT system to manage the thousands of documents submitted during its investigations into the British Virgin Islands government and public sector.
This is according to the COI’s Commissioner Sir Gary Hickinbottom, who made the statement during a recent live hearing on the Inquiry’s YouTube page.
He said the system is one that has experience in managing files of a large nature and has been used in numerous high-profile inquiries in Europe.
“I’ve commissioned a specialist IT system called Relativity to manage the documents that we have. This system is widely used in public inquiries and major judge led inquest in England and Wales including some which receive material of a highly personal nature such as the inquiring into the Grenfell Tower fire and Infected Blood inquiry, or which engage national security such as the Undercover Policing inquiry and the Jermaine Baker inquiry,” he explained.
Documents will remain secure
Sir Hickinbottom assured that the technology will keep the submitted documents secured and will help allow the inquiry process to run more smoothly.
“The system provides me with the necessary confidence, the documents provided to the COI will continue to be held in a secure way, but it also has powerful search and analysis functionality which with the affidavits to which I’ve referred, will reduce the risk that poor or incomplete documents will disrupt future hearings,” he stated.
Government allegedly submitted incomplete documents
The commissioner had early stated that some of the documents submitted by the government of the Virgin Islands to assist in the investigations were deemed incomplete and were poorly kept.
To support this allegation, Sir Hickinbottom said that the Attorney General’s legal representation, Queens Council Sir Geoffrey Cox, also confirmed the poor keeping of government’s documents which he said has slowed down the investigation process.
More than 85,000 documents submitted by government
In a subsequent media statement to dispel rumors suggesting that Members of the House of Assembly were not cooperating with the COI, Speaker of the House of Assembly Julian Willock stated that the BVI government has submitted more than 85,000 documents to aid with the investigations to date.