Once again, and not sur­pris­ing­ly, al­le­ga­tions have been made of cor­rup­tion in the award of mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar Gov­ern­ment con­tracts.

The lat­est al­le­ga­tions and con­tes­ta­tions sur­round the $129 mil­lion Land­mark­TT Prop­er­ties Lim­it­ed con­tract to con­struct apart­ments on the ba­sis of a de­sign-build-fi­nance arrange­ment.

This process in­volves con­trac­tors tak­ing up the cost of build­ing the fa­cil­i­ties, with the Gov­ern­ment sub­se­quent­ly pay­ing back the debt to the con­trac­tors.

How­ev­er, one of the first red flags to be raised over this arrange­ment has been the fact that the very first con­tract award­ed by the land man­age­ment agency has gone to a com­pa­ny that was among 11 re­cent­ly flagged by the Of­fice of Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tion (OPR), af­ter it re­ceived a bil­lion-dol­lar award from the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC). In fact, Mooti­lal Ramhit & Sons Con­tract­ing Lim­it­ed was the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ry of those HDC awards, to­talling $3.4 bil­lion that are cur­rent­ly un­der OPR re­view.

More­over, ac­cord­ing to the line min­is­ter with re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Land­mark­TT, Sad­dam Ho­sein, “se­lec­tive, com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment” was the method utilised to award the con­tract. This means there was no open ten­der­ing in which the com­pe­ti­tion would be ex­pect­ed to have been far tougher.

Fur­ther­more, unan­swered con­tentions have sur­faced about the hir­ing process at Land­mark­TT it­self, since ac­cord­ing to a Sun­day Guardian in­ves­ti­ga­tion, cer­tain prin­ci­pals of the com­pa­ny are known friends and as­so­ciates of the line min­is­ter.

Spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence was made of Nis­chall Shane Poona, who was hired as Land­mark­TT’s chief ex­ec­u­tive af­ter it was es­tab­lished in Feb­ru­ary. His wife, Saman­tha, is a di­rec­tor, along with Min­is­ter Ho­sein, in Sad­dam Ho­sein and Co Lim­it­ed, which was in­cor­po­rat­ed on April 11, 2022.

The Sun­day Guardian in­ves­tiga­tive re­port al­so re­vealed that the broth­er of Ho­sein’s per­son­al ad­vi­sor, Jerome Jag­ger­nauth, has al­so been hired by Land­mark­TT.

It al­so notes that sig­nif­i­cant State con­tracts were trans­ferred from the Min­istry of Hous­ing to Ho­sein’s Min­istry of Land and Le­gal Af­fairs. But notwith­stand­ing this news­pa­per’s re­quests for com­ment from Min­is­ter Ho­sein, no re­spons­es have come from him up to the point of pub­li­ca­tion of this ed­i­to­r­i­al.

Based on the his­to­ry of the award of con­tracts by all gov­ern­ments in of­fice over the post-In­de­pen­dence pe­ri­od, al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion have be­come stan­dard fare, giv­en that po­lit­i­cal par­ties usu­al­ly con­test elec­tions based on mul­ti-mil­lion con­tri­bu­tions made by in­di­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies to those cam­paigns with­out hin­drance, and not hav­ing to ac­count for source of funds.

The ma­jor al­le­ga­tions of such non-trans­par­ent cam­paign fi­nanc­ing come from the par­ties them­selves. In this par­tic­u­lar pe­ri­od, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has been in­sist­ing that the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) has been fund­ed by drug deal­ers.

She has not been shy nor apolo­getic about her claims. In its time, the PNM has made sim­i­lar al­le­ga­tions about Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress re­ceiv­ing cam­paign fi­nanc­ing from ques­tion­able sources.

The is­sue here, while not be­ing ex­clu­sive to un­con­trolled cam­paign fi­nanc­ing, is that with­out the coun­try hav­ing knowl­edge of how par­ties are fund­ed and by whom, there will al­ways be a sus­pi­cion that those com­pa­nies award­ed big con­tracts are be­ing re­paid for fund­ing par­ty cam­paigns.

As a promis­ing min­is­ter in the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion, Min­is­ter Ho­sein al­so needs to re­spond to pub­lic con­cerns about a lack of trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in his min­istry, giv­en all that has been re­vealed to date.