Dr Car­son Charles is the new pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co).

Car­son's ap­point­ment took ef­fect yes­ter­day, stat­ed an e-mail cir­cu­lat­ed to Nid­co staff by Gyl­lis Noel, hu­man re­source man­ag­er. Charles, 54, who en­tered pol­i­tics in 1987 as the Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for St Joseph, is a for­mer Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port in the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) gov­ern­ment. He has a de­gree in civ­il en­gi­neer­ing and a doc­tor­ate in trans­porta­tion en­gi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. In a phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Charles said he's an en­gi­neer­ing con­sul­tant and chair­man of Pol­i­cy Con­sul­tants Ltd, a com­pa­ny that does land de­vel­op­ment for pri­vate sec­tor hous­ing projects.

He said Pol­i­cy Con­sul­tants has projects in Pe­nal, Rousil­lac, La Ro­maine, Clax­ton Bay, San­ta Cruz and Or­ange Hill in To­ba­go. Charles, who's al­so po­lit­i­cal leader of the NAR, said the par­ty lent all its sup­port to the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship for the gen­er­al elec­tion and is do­ing the same for the Ju­ly 26 lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion. Re­gard­ing his pres­i­den­cy at Nid­co, Charles said vir­tu­al­ly all of his con­sul­tan­cy ser­vices will have to be cur­tailed.

"Nid­co will take a con­sid­er­able amount of time from me. I agreed to this as­sign­ment be­cause en­gi­neer­ing and trans­porta­tion are my field," Charles said. He said he was once an en­gi­neer at the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port, at which he was al­so a min­is­ter. "This my way of con­tribut­ing to what has to be done in the coun­try, in pub­lic works, and par­tic­u­lar­ly, in the trans­porta­tion sec­tor, the area I have been a spe­cial­ist for a long time," Charles said.