Yvonne Ba­boolal

North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) chair­man Dr Shene­haz Mo­hammed says the mat­ter of the forg­ing of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar's sig­na­ture by ser­vice providers at the NCRHA, in an at­tempt to re­ceive a mil­lion-dol­lar pay­ment, has been placed in the hands of lawyers."The mat­ter was in­ves­ti­gat­ed and rec­om­men­da­tions were made. Man­age­ment is fol­low­ing through on the rec­om­men­da­tions and has re­ferred the mat­ter to at­tor­neys," Mo­hammed said.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, a bo­gus let­ter with the Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's forged sig­na­ture was re­cent­ly found among a pile of doc­tored doc­u­ments at the NCRHA.A plan was even­tu­al­ly un­cov­ered where­by con­tracts to­talling mil­lions of dol­lars were split up to the val­ue of un­der $50,000 to avoid board ap­proval.The NCRHA board has since ter­mi­nat­ed the con­tracts of three per­sons: the man­ag­er of the projects unit, Carl­son Ram­lal, site con­trol of­fi­cer Wayne Ro­driguez and draughts­man Dar­win Robain.

A law­suit from con­trac­tor, Small's Gen­er­al Con­tract­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd, which had de­mand­ed pay­ment of over $1 mil­lion for works done at the hos­pi­tal, caused the NCRHA to in­ves­ti­gate the mat­ter.Al­so con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan said the mat­ter was in the hands of the NCRHA chair­man and board.He said the project man­age­ment unit, which the scan­dal sur­rounds, were not em­ploy­ees of the NCRHA but ser­vice providers.

The unit, he added, was hired be­cause the NCRHA was not de­liv­er­ing on cap­i­tal projects.