Fear­ing they will not be hired for the Gov­ern­ment's new Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) South Cam­pus project, lo­cal con­trac­tors are plan­ning to ask for an ur­gent meet­ing with Fazal Karim, Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy & Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion. The half-bil­lion-dol­lar con­tract in Pe­nal/Debe has re­port­ed­ly been award­ed to a Chi­nese con­struc­tion firm, Chi­na Jiang­su In­ter­na­tion­al, and lo­cal con­trac­tors are claim­ing there are no lo­cal-con­tent con­di­tion­al­i­ties in it.

"The pos­si­bil­i­ty of 100 per cent for­eign con­tent on this project is a re­al pos­si­bil­i­ty," the T&T Con­trac­tors As­so­ci­a­tion said in a re­lease. The as­so­ci­a­tion, in the state­ment, said Chi­na Jiang­su's tech­ni­cal-com­pe­tence rank­ing was not in keep­ing with in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice.

"In in­ter­na­tion­al bid eval­u­a­tion pro­ce­dures, tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence is al­ways weight­ed heav­ier than cost con­sid­er­a­tion," said the as­so­ci­a­tion. "World Bank guide­lines use 80 per cent for tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence and 20 per cent for fi­nan­cial ca­pac­i­ty/low­est price.

"From UWI's re­port­ed tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion, Chi­na Jiang­su had a sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er tech­ni­cal score and low­est score (some 35 per cent be­low the next bid­der). "Yet their over­all score was on­ly 1.5 per cent high­er than the next bid­der who had the high­est tech­ni­cal score."

Not­ing that the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment promised to give pref­er­ence to lo­cal con­trac­tors, the as­so­ci­a­tion protest­ed against the award. "The T&T Con­trac­tors As­so­ci­a­tion puts on record its strong ob­jec­tion to the pro­posed award to Chi­na Jiang­su In­ter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ic-Tech­ni­cal Corp, for the new UWI South Cam­pus project at Debe."

The as­so­ci­a­tion list­ed the ben­e­fits of hir­ing lo­cal con­trac­tors.

• A lo­cal con­trac­tor would en­sure the max­i­mum en­gage­ment of lo­cal busi­ness and skills on the project;

• a lo­cal con­trac­tor would pre­serve valu­able for­eign ex­change by keep­ing the mon­ey in T&T; and

• em­ploy­ing lo­cal re­sources en­sures in­dus­try de­vel­op­ment, lead­ing to the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my.

The as­so­ci­a­tion said UWI, which was charged with the de­vel­op­ment of young pro­fes­sion­als, would fail the coun­try by deny­ing its grad­u­ates an op­por­tu­ni­ty to work lo­cal­ly and de­vel­op their skills. The T&T Guardian re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly last week that Chi­na Jiang­su got the nod over three oth­er com­pa­nies at a Cam­pus Fi­nance and Gen­er­al Pur­pos­es Com­mit­tee meet­ing last Fri­day.

The ap­proval of the rec­om­men­da­tion to award the project to the Chi­nese firm came af­ter a year-long pro­cure­ment ex­er­cise.