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Thursday, July 31, 2025

Status of charged CTTRC workers still in doubt

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20160810

While two fraud ac­cused em­ploy­ees of the Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (CT­TRC) re­port­ed to the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment's head of­fice yes­ter­day, lo­cal gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials could not say whether or not they were dis­missed.

Coun­ty su­per­in­ten­dent, Mani­ram Mo­hess, and en­gi­neer­ing and sur­vey of­fi­cer, Bar­ry Sama­roo, re­port­ed to the of­fice of the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary.They were or­dered to the Min­istry's Port-of-Spain of­fice af­ter they re­port­ed to work fol­low­ing Mon­day's ap­pear­ance at the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates' Court.

One of the men were said to be in­volved in a meet­ing to rec­on­cile con­struc­tion ma­te­r­i­al worth mil­lion of dol­lars. That meet­ing had to be stopped by a mu­nic­i­pal po­lice of­fi­cer.

Check­er, Ian Gokool, who is al­so ac­cused in the mat­ter, showed up for work as well but was sent on leave by act­ing CEO Char­maine Dook­ie.One se­nior of­fi­cer at the CT­TRC would on­ly say that both em­ploy­ees "were gone."

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Dook­ie did not de­ny or con­firm whether the men were sus­pend­ed or fired, say­ing that she was a pub­lic of­fi­cer and not al­lowed to speak to the me­dia.She re­ferred the ques­tion to CT­TRC chair­man Hen­ry Awong, who she said was ap­prised of work­ers' sta­tus.

How­ev­er, Awong said while he knew Mo­hess and Sama­roo re­port­ed to the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, it was all he knew. He said he was un­aware whether they were sus­pend­ed but may know to­day.

Mo­hess, Sama­roo, Gokool, Cor­po­ra­tion CEO Car­ol Dyal and busi­ness­man Ma­hase Sookhai ap­peared be­fore mag­is­trate Chris­tine Charles on Mon­day, charged with con­spir­ing to de­fraud the CT­TRC of $149,500.

The charges re­late to a con­tract award­ed for the in­stal­la­tion of out­door ex­er­cise equip­ment at the San Pablo Recre­ation Ground and Todd's Road Ac­tiv­i­ty Cen­tre.

Mean­while, In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty (ILP) al­der­man, Sunil Ramjits­ingh, said Op­po­si­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tives at the CT­TRC were hap­py that Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Franklin Khan or­dered foren­sic au­dits in­to all re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions.

Ramjits­ingh said they be­lieved a de­tailed au­dit of the CT­TRC was re­quired ur­gent­ly. Since me­dia re­ports of the po­lice ar­rest­ing CT­TRC em­ploy­ees and con­trac­tors linked to the cor­po­ra­tion last week, he said they have re­ceived nu­mer­ous phone calls from the burgess­es, pub­lic of­fi­cers and lo­cal gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives from var­i­ous po­lit­i­cal par­ties.

He said the callers shared some of their ex­pe­ri­ences and ob­ser­va­tions in their own re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions with re­spect to pro­cure­ment of ma­te­ri­als and ser­vices, from con­struc­tion ma­te­ri­als to sim­ple ser­vices, such as cater­ing.They al­so dealt with the is­su­ing of con­tracts and ac­count­abil­i­ty for ma­te­ri­als.

"We be­lieve these are crit­i­cal ar­eas that must be in­clud­ed in the au­dits. Fur­ther, we be­lieve the au­dit should not just be an au­dit of the pa­per trails but that the qual­i­ty of work done on con­tracts should al­so be ex­am­ined to de­ter­mine if the qual­i­ty is sat­is­fac­to­ry and if projects have been done ac­cord­ing to the scope of works," Ramjits­ingh said.


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