Derek Achong

State-com­pa­ny Ed­u­ca­tion Fa­cil­i­ties Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (EF­CL) has been or­dered to pay $18 mil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion to a con­trac­tor over a ter­mi­nat­ed con­tract for the con­struc­tion of the Par­vati Girls’ Hin­du Col­lege in Debe. 

Dur­ing a brief vir­tu­al hear­ing on Mon­day, High Court Judge Frank Seep­er­sad ap­proved a de­fault judg­ment in the case brought against EF­CL by NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean) Lim­it­ed. 

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence in the case, in 2013, NH In­ter­na­tion­al en­tered in­to a con­tract with EF­CL to car­ry out build­ing works on the school for $127,597,950.22. 

The com­pa­ny be­gan work on the school and re­ceived sev­er­al in­ter­im pay­ments un­der the con­tract. 

With the project still in­com­plete, in May 2018, the par­ties agreed to forth­with ter­mi­nate the con­tract. 

NH In­ter­na­tion­al made sev­er­al re­quests for their pay­ment of the $14,074,648.43 left out­stand­ing up­on the ter­mi­na­tion of the con­tract and was forced to file the law­suit af­ter EF­CL re­peat­ed­ly failed to clear the debt, fi­nanc­ing charges and in­ter­est. 

In Oc­to­ber last year, the com­pa­ny’s at­tor­neys filed an ap­pli­ca­tion for a de­fault judge­ment af­ter EF­CL failed to file a de­fence to its law­suit. 

The de­fault judg­ment was on­ly ap­proved when the case came up for hear­ing be­fore Jus­tice Seep­er­sad yes­ter­day morn­ing. 

Over the past few years, the State-com­pa­ny, which man­ages re­pairs and con­struc­tion of schools, has faced an avalanche of lit­i­ga­tion from con­trac­tors over un­paid fees. 

Some of the suc­cess­ful law­suits re­sult­ed in con­trac­tors tak­ing levy ac­tion against the com­pa­ny for pay­ment.  

The most re­cent took place in Feb­ru­ary last year, when court mar­shals, bailiffs and lawyers for GM Trans­port Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed went to the State-com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters at Long Cir­cu­lar Road in Mar­aval to seize ve­hi­cles, of­fice fur­ni­ture and com­put­ers, which were to be auc­tioned off to re­coup $1 mil­lion it was owed for work done on four schools. 

The un­paid fees in that case were re­lat­ed to sew­er, plumb­ing, and elec­tri­cal re­pairs that were per­formed at the Clax­ton Bay Ju­nior AC Pri­ma­ry, Siparia Road Pres­by­ter­ian Pri­ma­ry, South Oropouche Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry and Point-a-Pierre Spe­cial Schools. 

NH In­ter­na­tion­al was rep­re­sent­ed by Ja­son Mootoo and Joan Byrne.