Hospital boss ‘shocked’ by email revelations

Cayman Islands Hospital, George Town

(CNS): Seeing emails for the first time showing Canover Watson planned to set up a pharmacy company with bidders on hospital contracts while he was sitting as chair of the Health Services Authority, Lizette Yearwood, the HSA’s chief executive, said she was shocked by the revelations. The first witness in the CarePay corruption trial when it resumed Monday, the hospital boss said that emails Watson sent with costings and other commercially sensitive information from the HSA to contractors about rival bidders were a conflict.

As Yearwood answered questions put to her by Patrick Moran, the deputy director of public prosecutions, she said that Watson had never revealed to her that he was involved with AIS (Cayman) Ltd, the company that was given the contract for the hospital payment system, which she said she believed was owned by the Jamaican businessman, Doug Halsall. Although she said she knew Watson was deeply involved with the contract process, she knew nothing about the involvement of Jeffrey Webb or why Watson was emailing him over the CarePay contracts.

Answering questions on the stand about events at the time the contracts were being discussed, she spoke about a meeting in 2011 in which Watson had become very angry over the awarding of a pharmacy contract. During discussions about the possibility that Cerner, an existing hospital partner with which the HSA was having some issues, could be given the contract for the payment system at the pharmacy, she described how Watson behaved.

“Mr Watson was angry and stood over me and shouted. He was determined that Cerner was not awarded the new contract,” she said. He used a divorce an analogy with regards to the existing contractor, Yearwood explained. He asked her, if the hospital was planning on getting a divorce, “why would we sleep again with the person” that the hospital was planning on divorcing?

“He was angry, agitated, and I was quite alarmed as before then I had never seen him like that,” she said, adding that no decision at that time had been made to separate from Cerner though a re-tender was expected the following year.

As the crown presented copies of Watson’s correspondence with Webb and Doug Halsall, Yearwood described the information he was sending as proprietary and she did not know why he would have sent such sensitive information to bidders and contractors because it should not have been sent to them.

Moran asked the hospital boss if she knew why costings from a rival bidder were sent by Watson to Halsall. She said she did not know and explained that such information would not even have been seen by the board at that point. “It is a direct conflict of interest,” she said.

When the prosecutor showed her the documents relating to plans by Watson and Halsall to set up a pharmacy company at the time he was chairing meetings over the hospital pharmacy contract, she said she had no idea about it.

“I’m shocked,” she said. “I am seeing this for the first time.”

The hospital CEO was aware that Watson was in communication with AIS. She said he had a good relationship with them and when things were going wrong, he always seemed to get things back on track. Asked if she was aware that he had collected and paid in the first cheque from the hospital to AIS (Cayman) Ltd of some $686,000, she said she learned he had picked up the cheque, not that he had also paid it into the account, but she agreed that even collecting a contractor’s cheque was not normal for a board chair.

As Trevor Burke QC, began his cross-examination, he asked Yearwood not to make rash assumptions about his client yet.

Asking her about the enthusiasm surrounding the plan to contract AIS, as it was seen as the only solution to the hospital’s debt problems, she agreed that debt was growing and there was an urgency to implement a system that worked. She was aware, she said, that people who had seen the AIS system in action were hugely impressed.

Yearwood also agreed that the government had wanted to roll out any new verification and payment system nationally to include the private sector insurers to ensure that it could work properly and reduce all of the hospital’s bad debts,d not just with CINICO. But she said the goal was to deal with just CINICO first. Because the system was so complex the hospital wanted to start there and iron out the kinks before it expanded.

The case continues.