Richard Lord

Plans by the Gov­ern­ment to con­struct a tun­nel from Tu­na­puna to Mara­cas have stalled, ac­cord­ing to Sen­ate Leader Sub­has Pan­day. He was re­spond­ing to a ques­tion for oral an­swer in the Up­per House on Tues­day. It was filed by Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor Ter­rence Deyals­ingh. The ini­tia­tive was con­tained in the 2011 na­tion­al bud­get, which was pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an last Sep­tem­ber.

Pan­day said Nid­co was un­der­tak­ing a study of the first phase of the project which, he said, would run from Curepe to Tu­na­puna. He said the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment tun­nel project had been "stymied by the lack of funds" be­cause of "gross nepo­tism, in­ef­fi­cien­cy, in­com­pe­tence and cor­rup­tion" by the for­mer PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion.

"That's the rea­son why that (tun­nel) has not ad­vanced as we would have liked," Pan­day said. He said when the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship as­sumed gov­ern­ment, "the na­tion­al debt was in the vicin­i­ty of $62 bil­lion." "Had we had those funds, had there been no wastage, had there been no cor­rup­tion, we would have been ad­vanced on this project," he said.

He said in ad­di­tion, there were many Gov­ern­ment guar­an­tees to be ho­n­oured and gave a break­down:

• $1.32 bil­lion at the Air­port Au­thor­i­ty.

• $911 mil­lion at the Port Au­thor­i­ty.

• $466 mil­lion at the PTSC.

•$176 mil­lion at Re­gion­al (Health) Au­thor­i­ties.

• $3.98 bil­lion at WASA.