Chair­man of the Of­fice of Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tion (OPR) Mooni­lal Lalchan said yes­ter­day the ball is in the Fi­nance Min­is­ter’s court to ap­prove the lat­est Draft Reg­u­la­tions on the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­pos­al of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty Act to have the Act ful­ly op­er­a­tionalised.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Lalchan said the OPR sub­mit­ted the draft to the min­istry since Sep­tem­ber 2, 2019, but since then, the OPR has been wait­ing for Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to re­spond.

Last week at its an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute (TT­TI) raised con­cerns about the leg­is­la­tion not be­ing op­er­a­tionalised.

On Feb­ru­ary 7 and March 3, 2017, the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­pos­al of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty (Amend­ment) Bill 2016 was passed by the Sen­ate and the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

The Bill, which amends the Act to re­duce the term of of­fice for the reg­u­la­tor and oth­er board mem­bers ap­point­ed to gov­ern the OPR, was as­sent­ed to by the Pres­i­dent on March 13, 2017.

Yes­ter­day Lalchan said the OPR has done all it can to en­sure the Act was ready for Im­bert’s ap­proval.

“We would have sent all the in­for­ma­tion to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance on Sep­tem­ber 2 and we met with the Min­is­ter and his team on Sep­tem­ber 3. We pre­sent­ed all the reg­u­la­tions and rec­om­men­da­tions to the Act, that is as far as we could have gone with it,” Lalchan said.

He said the Min­is­ter’s Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary did reach out to the OPR to “clar­i­fy” cer­tain changes with the Act but re­it­er­at­ed that the ball was in Im­bert’s court.

In a re­lease on their web­site in No­vem­ber, the OPR an­nounced it had hand­ed over the draft reg­u­la­tions to Im­bert.

“It is to be not­ed that the OPR’s lat­est sub­mis­sion re­flects amend­ments to the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the Draft Reg­u­la­tions sub­mit­ted on No­vem­ber 30, 2018, to the Min­istry of Fi­nance and would have re­sult­ed from mul­ti­ple ex­changes be­tween the OPR, the Min­istry of Fi­nance and oth­er key stake­hold­ers,” the re­lease stat­ed.

At that time, Lalchan said the OPR made rec­om­men­da­tions for the procla­ma­tion of cer­tain sec­tions of the Act, which he said could be done in­de­pen­dent­ly of the Draft Reg­u­la­tions.

Guardian Me­dia tried reach­ing Im­bert but calls to his cell­phone went unan­swered. Im­bert did not re­spond to What­sApp mes­sages sent to his cell­phone, al­though the mes­sages were marked as “read.”

Dur­ing the AGM on De­cem­ber 19, the TT­TI al­so raised the is­sue of cam­paign fi­nance leg­is­la­tion.