Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford

The board of the Na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Mar­ket­ing and De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (Namde­v­co) has sus­pend­ed CEO Kr­ish­na Ram­rat­tan.The T&T Guardian has learned the de­ci­sion to sus­pend Ram­rat­tan was tak­en at an emer­gency meet­ing on Tues­day, af­ter it was dis­cov­ered that con­tracts to­talling ap­prox­i­mate­ly $3 mil­lion were award­ed with­out board ap­proval.The con­tracts were award­ed to four com­pa­nies in Jan­u­ary and March of this year, for project man­age­ment ser­vices for the de­sign of four pack­ing hous­ing fa­cil­i­ties.

The pack­ing hous­es are to be built in area in east, cen­tral and south Trinidad at an es­ti­mat­ed cost of $8 mil­lion each.How­ev­er, Ram­rat­tan, al­leged­ly act­ing on his own ac­cord, gave in­struc­tions for the project man­age­ment phase of the con­tracts to be is­sued.Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj yes­ter­day con­firmed Ram­rat­tan had been sus­pend­ed. He said there was no board minute in­di­cat­ing ap­proval was giv­en for the award of four con­tracts.

"As the CEO, he does not have the au­thor­i­ty to award con­tracts of that val­ue. His lim­it is $50,000. The project man­age­ment fees are ten per cent of the con­tract so we are look­ing at $600,000 to $800,000 per con­tract," Ma­haraj said in a tele­phone in­ter­view."My at­ten­tion was drawn to what ap­pears to be ques­tion­able prac­tices at Namde­v­co. The board brought the mat­ter to my at­ten­tion and ap­pro­pri­ate ac­tion was tak­en by the board to sus­pend the CEO."

Ma­haraj said claims by Ram­rat­tan that he was giv­en au­tho­ri­sa­tion to award the con­tracts by for­mer chair­man Robert Ram­samooj could not be sub­stan­ti­at­ed.T&T Guardian learned that by an e-mail dat­ed April 13, Ram­samooj said he gave no di­rec­tive to award any con­tracts re­lat­ing to the pack­ing hous­ing fa­cil­i­ties.

Con­tents of the e-mail stat­ed: "Please be ad­vised that at no time dur­ing my tenure as chair­man of Namde­v­co did I ever take part in any dis­cus­sion with any­one what­so­ev­er in the se­lec­tion of providers of con­sul­tan­cy ser­vices for the de­signs of the pack­ing hous­es."Ram­rat­tan has since been asked to sub­mit a re­port on the mat­ter.

Yes­ter­day, Ma­haraj said le­gal ad­vice is al­so be­ing sought to de­ter­mine whether the con­tracts could be deemed void or le­git­i­mate be­cause prop­er pro­ce­dures were not fol­lowed.When T&T Guardian con­tact­ed Ram­rat­tan yes­ter­day, ask­ing if he had been in­formed of his sus­pen­sion, he on­ly replied: "That is pub­lic knowl­edge," be­fore he hung up the phone.