Geisha Kow­lessar

Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Sen­a­tor Ger­ald Ramdeen has ac­cused a top Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) of­fi­cial of bid rig­ging.

He made the ac­cu­sa­tion dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, as he al­so urged the Gov­ern­ment to fire the en­tire HDC board for fa­cil­i­tat­ing the process.

Ramdeen al­leged that the of­fi­cial ma­nip­u­lat­ed the process be­cause they want­ed to en­sure a cer­tain me­dia firm earned the high­est eval­u­a­tion for the con­struc­tion of hous­es un­der the new­ly-pro­posed pri­vate/pub­lic part­ner­ship con­tract with the HDC, which was an­nounced re­cent­ly by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

Call­ing for the part­ner­ship to be quashed, Ramdeen said the val­ue of the en­tire pro­gramme was close to $8 bil­lion and if it were not han­dled prop­er­ly it could top­ple the coun­try's econ­o­my.

Ramdeen pre­sent­ed a bun­dle of HDC doc­u­ments he claimed were of­fi­cial, show­ing that the of­fi­cial was "favourably hired" by the HDC in the first in­stance due to her Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment con­nec­tions.

He said he in­tend­ed to pass the doc­u­ments to the act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams, the DPP and the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion.

"There are a lot of ques­tions that have to be an­swered and the per­sons who are in­volved have to an­swer. Per­haps she (the of­fi­cial) could an­swer as to why she is send­ing an email with the ten­der doc­u­ments, as well as the draft bill and telling the per­son to whom that is sent to fill in the blanks ... what to leave out, what to put in and there­after sit­ting on the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee," Ramdeen added.

He said the HDC has ten­der rules, which spoke to con­flict of in­ter­est, which were pub­lished in 2010 and sin­gled out that the process must be fair to all par­ties. The of­fi­cial's sub­stan­tive post at the HDC, he said, was a land co­or­di­na­tor with a $23,000 per month salary. But he al­leged she now re­ceives an en­hanced pack­age of $51,000 per month and an SUV and dri­ver for her pri­vate use.

"She is a mid-lev­el man­ag­er at the HDC earn­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly $64,000 per month. She is re­ceiv­ing the sec­ond largest salary at the HDC, al­most two times the salary of a di­vi­sion­al man­ag­er, who are just be­low the range of man­ag­ing di­rec­tor," Ramdeen said.

Min­is­ter rub­bish­es claim

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Hous­ing Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell de­scribed Ramdeen's claims as rub­bish, say­ing he was con­fused as there was "no $8 bil­lion pub­lic/pri­vate part­ner­ship" arrange­ment.

Say­ing he still had to be ful­ly ap­prised and make a com­pre­hen­sive re­sponse, Mitchell said Ramdeen's claim was mere­ly to dis­tract the pub­lic from the is­sues at hand. He said in Jan­u­ary this year, en­ti­ties from across the coun­try were in­vit­ed to sub­mit ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est for the pub­lic/pri­vate part­ner­ship.

"So any en­ti­ty was free to sub­mit. We had an over­whelm­ing re­sponse. We had one ten­der that was the Mt Hope ten­der and for that ten­der we had 12 bid­ders," Mitchell said, adding that a me­dia com­pa­ny was not among those bid­ders.

The HDC of­fi­cial, he added, was not part of that process. He said in re­sponse to the in­vi­ta­tion, three of those en­ti­ties would have sub­mit­ted pro­pos­als, fol­low­ing which NH was iden­ti­fied as the pre­ferred bid­der for the Mt Hope project.

"I am not sure what the al­le­ga­tions tru­ly are. To me it sounds as just a dis­trac­tion from what is be­ing dis­cussed right now ... profli­ga­cy, waste, mis­man­age­ment and cor­rup­tion of the last ad­min­is­tra­tion."

Re­gard­ing claims lev­elled against the of­fi­cial, he con­firmed she was in charge of land man­age­ment at the HDC but added that he was un­aware of her salary.

"I am not sure of any oth­er ben­e­fits as re­gards her terms of con­tract," Mitchell added.