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Monday, July 7, 2025

Farley makes more claims about missing $$

by

Loyse Vincent
1630 days ago
20210120
PDP Deputy Political Leader, Farley Augustine, as he spoke to supporters at the meeting in Black Rock on Monday.

PDP Deputy Political Leader, Farley Augustine, as he spoke to supporters at the meeting in Black Rock on Monday.

PDP

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.


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