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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Joint Trade Unions on water plant contract: A shameless act

by

20140311

The Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) has ac­cused the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment of be­ing "un­scrupu­lous" over the con­tro­ver­sial award of the bil­lion dol­lar con­tract to a con­sor­tium of com­pa­nies for the Beetham Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant.The con­tract was award­ed to a con­sor­tium of com­pa­nies that in­cludes Fos­ter Wheel­er, Su­per In­dus­tri­al Ser­vices (SIS) and Hyflux.The trade union group said the award of the con­tract was yet an­oth­er "shame­less and glar­ing ex­am­ple of the very un­scrupu­lous na­ture of this cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion."

Fol­low­ing a meet­ing of the ex­ec­u­tive, the group stat­ed, it in­tend­ed to make a pub­lic state­ment to­day on the award of the con­tract to the con­sor­tium whose bid was far above the com­peti­tor by $400 mil­lion.A state­ment from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC), in re­sponse to the al­le­ga­tions of im­pro­pri­ety, said SIS sub­mit­ted the ten­der pack­age on the con­sor­tium's be­half and its bid was ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$167 mil­lion.

NGC's state­ment said of the two com­pa­nies who sub­mit­ted ten­der pack­ages, one com­pa­ny quot­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$95 mil­lion with nu­mer­ous vari­ables pro­posed that would have even­tu­al­ly es­ca­lat­ed the over­all cost.A to­tal of 14 com­pa­nies bought ten­der pack­ages while two sub­mit­ted com­plet­ed ten­der pack­ages but 12 of them dropped out due to lim­it­ed time to send in their pro­pos­als.

On Mon­day at a press brief­ing Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­leged that cor­rup­tion was in­volved in the award of con­tract and called on Pres­i­dent An­tho­ny Car­mona to in­ter­vene.Row­ley claimed the bid­ding process was not fair and it was a "rape" on the coun­try's Trea­sury.He al­so said a list of 16 bid­ders were re­duced to two com­pa­nies – SIS and At­latec – and the bid­ding process was con­duct­ed in such a way as to "dri­ve away" the oth­er bid­ders, many of which were more ex­pe­ri­enced than SIS.

NGC's re­sponse was that the ten­ders sub­mit­ted were eval­u­at­ed by a cross-func­tion­al team of six ex­perts from both the NGC and Na­tion­al En­er­gy (NE).The com­pa­ny said that team, fol­low­ing a thor­ough re­view and site vis­its, made its rec­om­men­da­tions to NGC's Man­age­ment Ten­ders Eval­u­a­tion Com­mit­tee (MTEC) and the MTEC re­viewed the rec­om­men­da­tions and made its own rec­om­men­da­tion to the NGC's Board Ten­ders Com­mit­tee (BTC).

The re­lease al­so said the BTC sub­se­quent­ly re­viewed the sub­mis­sion and for­ward­ed its rec­om­men­da­tion for award to the NGC board of di­rec­tors, fol­low­ing which the fi­nal award would have been made.When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day a spokesper­son for SIS de­clined to com­ment on Row­ley's al­le­ga­tions, say­ing it is ob­serv­ing what was hap­pen­ing and would is­sue a state­ment on the mat­ter at an­oth­er time.


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