More al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion in pub­lic of­fice were re­vealed on THE PDP cam­paign trail on Mon­day night as the car­a­van made a stop at the Black Rock hard­court.

View­er­ship on so­cial me­dia peaked as cu­ri­ous cit­i­zens tuned in to hear more from the PDP’s Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader Far­ley Au­gus­tine about the con­tents of a stack of To­ba­go House As­sem­bly Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil notes on the in­fa­mous zip line project.

On Sun­day Au­gus­tine pre­sent­ed the stack of doc­u­ments at a Char­lot­teville meet­ing, where he re­vealed that the orig­i­nal bud­get for the project was $4 mil­lion, and al­though the project was set for com­ple­tion in 2015, $3.5 mil­lion dol­lars has been spent and the on­ly ev­i­dence of the project is a por­tion of rope.

He said the doc­u­ments al­so point to ques­tion­able pro­cure­ment prac­tices, this time by PNM stal­wart Neil Wil­son, who passed away in June last year.

“I find it strange that the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil would have ap­proved 147 thou­sand dol­lars for the pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dure that EI­DI­COTT was sup­posed to em­ploy. EI­DI­COTT was at that time run by their god­fa­ther Neil Wil­son and EI­DI­COTT took 147 thou­sand dol­lars just to go and point and say ‘aye you come build we a zip line’ no pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dure at all.”

Au­gus­tine said he al­so found it strange that through­out the en­tire doc­u­ment there were no sig­na­tures by the then Ad­min­is­tra­tor for the Di­vi­sion at the time and it con­tained in­stances where con­tracts re­lat­ed to the project had a num­ber of ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties.

“Imag­ine the first con­tract giv­en out for the project took ef­fect the very same day the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil note was signed so that means that dis­cus­sions were had even be­fore the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil met.”

The PDP Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader said there were al­so ques­tion­able ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion bills and oth­er in­stances of monies paid for items that were nev­er re­ceived.

“I al­so read that we were sup­posed to re­ceive poles from Guyana for the con­struc­tion of the zip line and all now the poles can’t reach, as far as I know, Guyana clos­er than Mi­a­mi and if the poles were to come from Guyana where the mon­ey for the poles gone who take the mon­ey for the poles.”

He said un­der the PDP such oc­cur­rences would be a thing of the past as he plans to de­vel­op and im­ple­ment fi­nan­cial rules that would en­sure that the fi­nances of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly are man­aged ef­fi­cient­ly with trans­paren­cy.

Au­gus­tine pub­licly is­sued a warn­ing to his would-be Sec­re­taries, say­ing that he does not plan to pre­side over any in­stance of cor­rup­tion even if it means go­ing back to the poles.