I refer to your editorial of Saturday November 17, 2012, headlined "At what cost OPV victory." I believe that there is a misunderstanding of what has occurred. From all available reports, this was not an arbitration award made by the ICC Tribunal, but rather it was a negotiated agreement that brought the arbitration process to an end, and was done outside of the arbitration process. In any arbitration, the parties have the right at any time to reach an agreement.
Agreements of this type pre-empt and preclude findings of fact and liability by the arbitrary tribunal. In other words, therefore, the merits of the arguments made by both sides in the dispute over the cancellation of the OPV contract were not determined, and nobody won and nobody lost, since the end result was by consent.
All that happened was that BAE was able to sell the boats to Brazil and thus recover its losses, hence its decision to agree to compensate Trinidad and Tobago for the disbursements made to BAE for the construction of the OPVs. In essence, BAE couldn't sell the boats twice, and so, having recovered its expenses with the sale to Brazil, it had no choice but to make a payment to Trinidad and Tobago.
However, that is not the end of the matter. In my view, the Government has not been forthright about the true cost of the aborted OPV project and the information available to me leads me to conclude that it cost the country far more than $1.3 billion to cancel the contract with BAE.
From what I can see, when all costs are taken into account, such as the actual disbursements made, the interest on the loan financing for the OPV project between 2009 and 2012, the cost of training coast guard officers, the cost of UK government support, and other unrecoverable costs, the net result of cancellation of the contract is a financial loss.
The myth of a "surplus" that will be used to build schools, etc, is almost certain to be debunked in the near future when the details of the real cost of the OPV project are made public, since in Trinidad and Tobago, very little is secret and strange packages arrive in our mailboxes all the time.
There is also the question of our unprotected maritime borders, which have been left open over the last two years, and the cost to the country of not having proper offshore patrol capability while this contractual squabble was taking place.
As your editorial has implied, it is an indictment on the Government that they are now seeking to acquire other OPVs, whether from Colombia or elsewhere, to do exactly what the OPVs from BAE would have done, after carrying on and gallerying for two years, while drug traffickers and gunrunners made easy work of our porous maritime borders.
Colm Imbert, MP