The City Council’s Director of Finance Dwain Davis - he’s the man at the center of the under-depositing investigation – but from what we can tell, he’s gone underground.
We’ve been calling for him at his office and for the past two days where have been repeatedly told he is not in office. He’s also unavailable by cell phone – where we’ve left voice messages that have gone un-answered. And similarly, he did not appear before a caucus of the councillors this afternoon; that meeting was postponed.
But we can’t say if that was because Davis wasn’t in, as some suggest, or because the council – under the leadership of acting Mayor Dion Leslie has changed its tack and wants not to be seen as meddling in a criminal investigation by conducting its own administrative inquiry. Whatever the strategy, the council has backed off for the time being but acting Mayor Leslie today assured us that the council will keep to a commitment made earlier in the week and issue a statement tomorrow.
As we’ve reported, the council is focusing on $19,677.50 that is un-accounted for in under-deposits for the month of April. Documents presented in July by the Mayor purporting to account for the thirty thousand plus dollars in under-deposits for April have turned out to be inadequate, or in some cases, just plain bogus. That’s the finding of the special audit conducted by the Audit Department. They also found that for the months of January, February and March of 2009, there were combined under-deposits amounting to $274,667.46 - broken down as follows: $52,493.59 in January, $86,534.61 in February and a whopping $101,948.81 in March.
Those figures are huge, but the case is inconclusive because the file containing the documents which supposedly accounted for those under-deposits was stolen from the audit department’s office at the City Council. It was the only thing stolen when the office was broken into.
