Derek Achong

The Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) has been or­dered to pay a com­pa­ny over $350,000 it with­held from a con­struc­tion con­tract due to al­leged faulty work. 

De­liv­er­ing a writ­ten judge­ment yes­ter­day, Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad up­held the law­suit of Pre Camp TT Lim­it­ed against the state-fund­ed ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tion, as he ruled that it (UTT) should have raised the is­sues with the faulty work dur­ing the pe­ri­od for do­ing so un­der the con­tract. 

Seep­er­sad said, “It may well be that as­pects of the Claimant’s work were de­fec­tive but the De­fen­dant failed to un­der­take the nec­es­sary ver­i­fi­ca­tion process­es with­in the con­trac­tu­al­ly stip­u­lat­ed time pe­ri­od as it re­lates to as­ser­tions of de­fec­tive work.”

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence in the case, in Sep­tem­ber 2007, UTT en­tered in­to a $12.6 mil­lion con­tract with the com­pa­ny to con­struct a pre­fab­ri­cat­ed build­ing at its Ch­agua­nas cam­pus to house class­rooms. 

Al­most four years lat­er, the par­ties en­tered in­to a sup­ple­men­tal agree­ment for ad­di­tion­al work at an ad­di­tion­al cost of $2.8 mil­lion. 

Un­der the terms of the con­tracts, UTT was al­lowed to re­tain five per cent of the con­struc­tion costs un­til the work was com­plet­ed to its sat­is­fac­tion.

The com­pa­ny claimed that af­ter it com­plet­ed the project and re­me­di­al works in May 2013, it re­quest­ed that UTT re­lease the re­tained sums. 

While UTT al­lowed the re­lease of the com­pa­ny’s per­for­mance bond for the project, which was held by a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, it re­fused to pay the re­ten­tion sums, as it claimed that it found nu­mer­ous faults with the work which had to be re­paired by new con­trac­tors.

The com­pa­ny sued UTT for its de­ci­sion and UTT coun­ter­sued the com­pa­ny in a bid to keep the mon­ey. 

Based on UTT’s de­fence to the law­suit, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad or­dered it to pay the com­pa­ny $426,413.33 in Jan­u­ary 2019, as the law­suit con­tin­ued over the re­main­der. 

In his judge­ment, Seep­er­sad stat­ed that it was un­for­tu­nate and un­ac­cept­able that UTT did not deal with the qual­i­ty as­sess­ments in a time­ly man­ner. 

“The De­fen­dant, es­pe­cial­ly, since it is de­pen­dent on state fund­ing, should have op­er­at­ed with a height­ened de­gree of care and cau­tion so as to en­sure that op­ti­mal val­ue had been re­ceived,” he said.

“There can be no room for com­pla­cen­cy when state funds are in­volved. Now more than ever all or­gan­i­sa­tions and en­ti­ties which de­pend up­on state fund­ing must en­sure that con­trac­tors, providers, and all sup­pli­ers strict­ly ad­here to all con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions, as cit­i­zens de­serve to get max­i­mum val­ue for their funds when they are ex­pend­ed.”

The com­pa­ny was rep­re­sent­ed by Leisa Kisto and Jen­nifer Rogers, while Stephen Singh and Kendell Alexan­der rep­re­sent­ed UTT. 

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