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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Corruption Galore

...un­der new pro­cure­ment bill

by

20140420

The draft Pro­cure­ment Bill, leaves pro­cure­ment by the State and State-owned com­pa­nies wide open to cor­rup­tion and is a "waste of time" in its present state, said Win­ston Ri­ley, chair­man of the Pub­lic Sec­tor/Civ­il So­ci­ety Group on Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment.

"You can burn the bill as it is a waste of time. There are loans from the in­ter­na­tion­al lend­ing agen­cies for the pro­cure­ment of goods, works and/or ser­vices that are out­side of the re­mit of the Pro­cure­ment Bill. We know that over 50 per cent of pro­cure­ment for goods, works and ser­vices in our re­gion is out­side reg­u­la­tions."With our ap­proach of gov­ern­ment to gov­ern­ment it is about 70 per cent in T&T. So what are you hav­ing the Pro­cure­ment Bill for? We are wast­ing time," he told the Guardian yes­ter­day in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

In the first week of April, the Pro­cure­ment Bill was brought to the Sen­ate by Plan­ning Min­is­ter Bhoe Tewarie, who said the bill would not be de­bat­ed un­til three weeks have elapsed to al­low time for pub­lic scruti­ny and dis­cus­sion.Tewarie said the bill was fi­nal­ly ap­proved by the Leg­isla­tive Re­view Com­mit­tee (LRC) on March 17 and sub­se­quent­ly ap­proved by the Cab­i­net on March 20.

Ri­ley de­scribes Clause 7 of the bill as "dis­turb­ing" and said this clause, which ex­cludes gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment arrange­ments from the purview of the leg­is­la­tion, should be re­moved."Clause 7 states that the act does not ap­ply to the pro­cure­ment of goods, works or ser­vices aris­ing out of a treaty to which T&T is a par­ty with one or more states or with an in­ter­na­tion­al lend­ing agency. Any in­ter­na­tion­al treaty that has to do with goods or ser­vices is out­side the bill.

"The Prime Min­ster just came back from Chi­na with bil­lions of dol­lars worth of in­vest­ment. There are oth­er gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment arrange­ments on the cards with Aus­tria and Cana­da. There is the SNC Lavalin mat­ter where the ques­tion of the sov­er­eign­ty of the na­tion was in ques­tion."If we al­low coun­tries to do what they want and choose who they want, then we have left out pro­cure­ment it­self. The core is­sues in any pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion are ac­count­abil­i­ty, trans­paren­cy and the ef­fi­cient use of pub­lic mon­ey.

"Just look at the mas­sive ex­pen­di­ture spent on the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (Na­pa) and the South­ern Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (Sapa) af­ter they were opened."Ri­ley said the is­sue of pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion goes back many years.He said 35 years ago the then ad­min­is­tra­tion amend­ed the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board Act to ex­clude gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment con­tracts from the scruti­ny of the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board.

As a re­sult of that, the gov­ern­ment was able to pro­ceed with gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment con­tracts.In an at­tempt to by­pass the pub­lic sec­tor slow­ness, ad­min­is­tra­tions have al­so set up a pletho­ra of spe­cial pur­pose state-owned en­ter­pris­es "which de­stroyed all of our in­sti­tu­tions re­spon­si­ble for the de­liv­ery of good, works and ser­vices util­is­ing pub­lic mon­ey in T&T. Even now the boards are just ar­eas where you dis­trib­ute po­lit­i­cal pa­tron­age," he said.

He said there were "shock­ing" things in the first two or three drafts of the bill."The bill was a com­plete repli­ca of sev­er­al bills. It was high­ly reg­u­la­to­ry, thus in con­tra­dic­tion with Par­lia­ment's di­rec­tives. The very foun­da­tion of the ear­li­er ver­sions of the draft bill was wrong in the first place."He crit­i­cised the Op­po­si­tion for ask­ing the Gov­ern­ment to set up a pol­i­cy po­si­tion on the bill as he said this had been done be­fore.

"What has been sur­pris­ing to us was that the Op­po­si­tion asked the Gov­ern­ment to put up a pol­i­cy po­si­tion which will car­ry the whole process back­ward. The White Pa­per was ac­cept­ed as far back as the first bud­get speech of this Gov­ern­ment. I do not wish to com­ment on why they did this."De­spite this, he said he is in dis­cus­sions with the Gov­ern­ment.

"The ma­jor ob­jec­tive is that Clause 7 must be delet­ed or re­draft­ed be­fore the bill comes for de­bate in Par­lia­ment. I am still in con­sul­ta­tion with the Min­is­ter of Plan­ning on this is­sue. We are still hop­ing changes and amend­ments will be made to the Bill be­fore it is de­bat­ed."


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