Richard Lord

Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er yes­ter­day called on for­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning to apol­o­gise to the na­tion for squan­der­ing bil­lions of tax­pay­ers' mon­ey over the past eight years. Warn­er made the de­mand in his con­tri­bu­tion to yes­ter­day's bud­get de­bate in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Warn­er told Man­ning, if he in­tend­ed to speak in the de­bate, he must say he is sor­ry for all the wrong things he did as Prime Min­is­ter. Warn­er said Man­ning must tell the na­tion the truth about the con­struc­tion of the Light­house of the Lord Je­sus Christ Church at the Heights of Gua­napo in Ari­ma.

Man­ning, how­ev­er, did not con­tribute to the four-day de­bate. Deal­ing with the Rapid Rail project, which was an ini­tia­tive of the for­mer PNM Gov­ern­ment, Warn­er said 576 mil­lion had al­ready been paid for a fea­si­bil­i­ty study for the project. He said the Gov­ern­ment was still ow­ing $13 mil­lion for the study. He said the study in­di­cat­ed that the project should not be un­der­tak­en "as its eco­nom­ic costs out­weighed the po­ten­tial ben­e­fits."

Warn­er said the fi­nal cost of the project, if un­der­tak­en, would have ex­ceed $6 bil­lion. The Works min­is­ter claimed the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co) was be­ing used as a slush fund by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment. Warn­er said funds were tak­en from that spe­cial pur­pose com­pa­ny to pay for a US$42,000 ad­ver­tise­ment in Forbes Mag­a­zine. He said the Gov­ern­ment al­so paid ex­treme­ly high month­ly rental for prop­er­ty owned by a for­mer Port-of-Spain may­or.