Shal­iza?Has­sanali

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi has promised to prompt­ly deal with the find­ings of two fi­nan­cial au­dits in­to the Ed­u­ca­tion Fa­cil­i­ties Com­pa­ny Ltd (EF­CL) which are now on his desk.Al-Rawi con­firmed yes­ter­day that pack­ages of the files ar­rived re­cent­ly at his Port-of-Spain of­fice in "sev­er­al stages."

While he ad­mit­ted that some parts of the au­dits "still re­quire fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion and fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tions" he promised to deal with the fi­nan­cial doc­u­ments "in the four cor­ners of the law and with alacrity. It is re­ceiv­ing co-or­di­nate ad­vice from the re­spec­tive au­thor­i­ties," Al-Rawi said.

The two au­dits–one by Price­Wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers and an in­ter­nal hu­man re­sources au­dit–were both com­plet­ed re­cent­ly.

Last Mon­day, the board of EF­CL, led by its chair­man Arnold Pig­gott, ter­mi­nat­ed the em­ploy­ment of sus­pend­ed man­agers Ve­da Ram­nath, Ria Nar­i­nesingh, Frank Ma­habir, Suren­dra Bal­go­b­in and De­va Shar­ma.

The sack­ings came sev­en months af­ter a se­cret "con­tract mill­house" was dis­cov­ered at the EF­CL's head of­fice in Mar­aval, which re­sult­ed in armed guards be­ing called in to se­cure a moun­tain of po­ten­tial­ly damn­ing ev­i­dence which point­ed to the il­le­gal man­u­fac­tur­ing of back­dat­ed ten­der doc­u­ments worth hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars.

The re­cent fir­ings brought the to­tal num­ber of EF­CL man­agers who were axed to sev­en in the last four months.In Feb­ru­ary, EF­CL's sus­pend­ed CEO Shar­ma Ma­haraj and the chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer Ki­ran Shah were al­so ter­mi­nat­ed.

Last Wednes­day, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia con­firmed that Shah and Ma­haraj have since tak­en le­gal ac­tion against the EF­CL over their dis­missals. As the guardian of the pub­lic in­ter­est, Al-Rawi said he would en­sure the re­spec­tive au­thor­i­ties that work hand-in-hand with his of­fice do their jobs.

"There are pa­ra­me­ters and bound­aries that must be ob­served and the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al in­tends to dis­charge that very care­ful­ly. It is for that rea­son we have not con­de­scend in­to par­tic­u­lars and tri­al by the news­pa­pers."He said he did not want to prej­u­dice in any way the mat­ters that were be­fore him.

"What the pop­u­la­tion is look­ing for is a re­spon­si­ble ap­proach and for ac­count­abil­i­ty where it is to be had."The AG said T&T has all the laws which are nec­es­sary to give cit­i­zens good val­ue for mon­ey and in­sis­tence.

"It is re­al­ly in ap­ply­ing the laws and, in some cir­cum­stances, broad­en­ing a few of those laws."Al-Rawi said his of­fice has spent a lot of time deal­ing with mat­ters such as mon­ey laun­der­ing, im­pro­pri­ety and or­gan­ised crime.

"You will be see­ing sta­tis­tics and in­for­ma­tion come out in due course."In last nine months nine, Al-Rawi said his of­fice has done a lot of work in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, start­ing with the pris­ons.

"You will see that I have tak­en the same ap­proach with the child mar­riage is­sue. Very short­ly, we will be tak­ing a de­tailed ap­proach on mon­ey laun­der­ing and se­ri­ous crimes. But all of this re­quire some work prod­uct."

About the EF­CL

The EF­CL is a spe­cial state en­ter­prise formed to build, de­liv­er and main­tain mod­ern build­ing fa­cil­i­ties, util­is­ing best prac­tices in project man­age­ment.