A group of contractors have partially succeeded in their lawsuit over almost $100 million in infrastructure work they allegedly performed for an Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) project of the Ministry of Food Production.
Junior Fabian Creighton, Cleophas Alexander Orr and Associates, K&A Holdings Limited, Rev’s Mechanical & Engineering Services, JDR Construction Limited, Hypolite General Contractors Limited, and R&S Boodoo Equipment Rental and Transport Limited sue the Office of the Attorney General after they allegedly completed the drainage works at various locations in Trinidad in mid-2013 and were not paid.
In defence of the lawsuit, the State’s legal team claimed that the companies were not requested or contracted to do the claimed work.
It also claimed that officials of the ministry who allegedly requested the work from the contractors were not authorised to do so based on procurement rules and regulations.
Delivering a 201-page judgment late last week, High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad ruled that the contractors were unable to prove that there were effective contracts for the work.
“The court’s finding is that the defendant has been successful in proving that the process for formulating a contract with the State under the Central Tenders Board Act was not established and the parties that engaged the services with the claimants did not have the necessary authority to formulate or grant such contracts,” the judge said.
However, he ruled that some of them should still be paid a reasonable sum for what services they did perform based on the legal principle of quantum meruit as the State would have benefited from their work.
The principle allows for the payment of a reasonable sum for services in the absence of a binding contract between parties.
Rampersad ruled that K&A, Rev’s and Cleophas Alexander Orr and Associates could not benefit from the assessment of the reasonable sums, which is to be done by a quality surveyor selected by the parties at a later date, as they maintained that they would only accept the fees claimed in the lawsuits.
Rampersad also noted that the contract process between the parties was wrapped in a “web of bureaucracy.”
“The contractors were all contacted and were verbally told what they had to do and that what they had to do was emergency work,” Rampersad said.
“As a result, they said that they did the work but there were no records maintained by the relevant ministry that were produced in court,” he added.
The judge criticised the State for forcing the contractors to prove the existence of a contractual relationship.
“If the defendant failed to secure its records properly, the claimant companies ought not to be penalised for that, but that seems to be what went on,” he said.
“One gets the impression that there was something more in it, though that was never revealed,” he added.
In his judgment, Rampersad raised concerns with reports from the Internal Audit Unit of the Ministry of Works and Infrastructure and the Ministry of Finance’s Central Audit Committee on the work, which he described as flawed and skewed.
Dealing with the Ministry of Works report, Rampersad said: “No real attempt was made to communicate with the contractors and the shroud of fraud and deception seemed to have clouded their judgement.”
Referring to the central audit committee report, Justice Rampersad noted that it was limited by constraints including delay between the completion of the work and the audit and the remote location of some of the work.
“To this court, the last constraint was an absolute stunner. The unit was being called upon to conduct an exercise without appropriate tools or trained personnel,” he said.
As part of his decision, the judge gave the parties until March 6 to appoint the surveyor, whose report would be considered by him in determining the appropriate compensation.
Creighton and Hypolite were represented by Lemuel Murphy, while Jai and Dinesh Naraine represented JDR Construction and R&S Boodoo Equipment Rental. The other companies were represented by Ronald Simon, Augustus Thomas, Kia Baptiste and Lindianne Marshall.
Seenath Jairam, SC, Jagdeo Singh, Nisa Simmons and Adana Hosang represented the State.
