FORMER Sinn Féin minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir said the DUP's Simon Hamilton "hindered" finding a solution to the RHI debacle after freezing him out in the months after the scale of the botched scheme was revealed.
Mr Ó Muilleoir, who was finance minster at the time, said he was "baffled and frustrated" at Mr Hamilton's failure to "bring forward proposals" to him, but accepted "in good faith" the assurances given by the DUP economy minister.
The two men will appear before the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) inquiry today. But in witness statements to the inquiry, they have clashed over their interpretations of events surrounding the closure of the scheme.
Mr Hamilton became economy minister in May 2016 and was tasked with bringing forward plans to the assembly to cut the scheme's costs. Mr Ó Muilleoir was to give approval to those proposals in his role as finance minister.
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But in his statement to the RHI inquiry, Mr Ó Muilleoir said he believed Mr Hamilton "was not co-operating with me to find a solution" to the overspend.
Mr Ó Muilleoir said while he was "frustrated by the failure to bring forward proposals promptly", he was willing to give Mr Hamilton the "benefit of the doubt...that he was working on solutions".
But he said less than two months later, at the end of 2016, he "came to the conclusion" that Mr Hamilton was "not co-operating with me to find a solution".
He said he was "bemused" by Mr Hamilton's announcement to the media in January 2017 that he "had agreed with Minister Foster a plan to deal with RHI".
"I considered this announcement, made in this way, as evidence that Minister Hamilton did not intend to include me in developing a solution."
A week later, Martin McGuinness resigned as Stormont's deputy first minister in protest against the handling of the botched scheme.
Mr Ó Muilleoir also said he became aware of the scheme's problems in February 2016, shortly before it closed, during a briefing with civil servants, but "the nature of this potential abuse was not specified".
The incentives of the scheme were revealed by the Audit Office in May 2016.
He said he "did not take any action to promote the scheme", but did seek to delay it for a grace period due to the risk of legal challenges and job losses.
His statement refers to correspondence he had in February 2016 with Aisling Brady of Torrent Complex, Co Tyrone, which had applied to join the scheme but was running out of time to get accredited, telling her "we are assessing our options at the minute and will do our utmost to have as many projects as possible green-lighted".
Explaining his remarks, he states: "The communication was reflecting the fact that I was sympathetic to the plight of those who would be adversely affected by closure of the scheme".
Meanwhile, Mr Hamilton's statement to the inquiry reveals his views on his relationship with Mr Ó Muilleoir was one of "distrust... maybe unsurprising and probably mutual".
He accuses Mr Ó Muilleoir of "interfering and stepping beyond his brief" and "other executive ministers had similar experiences and shared my concerns".
He said the DUP's "uneasy" relationship with Sinn Féin was not helped by his belief that the party was casting itself as the saviour of the RHI situation, while leaking material to "undermine the successful production of cost limiting measures".
He said he believed the cost control solution to the scheme "certainly took longer than I would have liked" and he believed civil servants treated the need to cut the cost of the scheme with a "startling lack of awareness of the problem".
