Gail Alexan­der

For­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan has said the change of a clause in the con­tract with OAS Con­stru­to­ra on the Point Fortin High­way would have been a de­ci­sion tak­en by the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co), based on the ad­vice of US firm AE­COM, which was work­ing with Nid­co on the project.

For­mer Nid­co pres­i­dent Dr Car­son Charles al­so said yes­ter­day that AE­COM’s scope in­clud­ed rec­om­mend­ing what should be done in any ad­den­dum. He said AE­COM was hired for the project by the pre­vi­ous Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“I’m tired of point­ing out, we just con­tin­ued the PNM’s project,” Charles said.

Both spoke to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, at a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment meet­ing in Ari­ma on Tues­day night, con­firmed the Gov­ern­ment has to pay OAS TT$852 mil­lion af­ter the de­ci­sion by the ar­bi­tra­tor on the is­sue be­tween OAS and Gov­ern­ment.

It was stat­ed that Nid­co wasn’t en­ti­tled to ter­mi­nate the con­tract un­der clause 15(2).

Row­ley said Nid­co had waived such right due to an ad­den­dum to the con­tract, adding the ad­den­dum was en­tered in­to by the par­ties on Sep­tem­ber 4, 2015—three days be­fore the 2015 gen­er­al elec­tion.

Row­ley called for the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er to en­ter Nid­co and find out by what au­thor­i­ty and un­der whose au­thor­i­ty that clause “which pro­tect­ed T&T’s in­ter­est” was re­moved from the con­tract, not­ing this was what ul­ti­mate­ly made Nid­co li­able in the mat­ter.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Ram­bachan, who was Works Min­is­ter in Sep­tem­ber 2015, said he had to as­cer­tain what the change was, as he didn’t have the doc­u­ment.

Former Nidco president Dr Carson Charles

Charles, how­ev­er, ex­plained that while he was at Nid­co, two ad­den­dums were done. He said he be­lieved one was in 2012 and the oth­er in 2015.

He said ad­den­dums ba­si­cal­ly have to do with the set­tle­ment of claims with­in the con­tract and are used to set­tle this while work is in progress.

He said if more mon­ey had to be paid, one could set­tle claims by mak­ing ad­just­ments to the work.

He said, “We met the Amer­i­can AE­COM en­gi­neers on the project when we be­gan work.”

Charles said AE­COM, as the project en­gi­neer, had the pow­er to eval­u­ate and set­tle the con­trac­tor’s claims, make ad­just­ments to the work and had the pow­er to rec­om­mend what should be done on an ad­den­dum.

He didn’t have the ad­den­dum, so couldn’t com­ment fur­ther on that. But Charles said the ad­den­dum was not a mat­ter for the then-Cab­i­net and would have been sanc­tioned by the board and man­age­ment of the con­tract­ing com­pa­ny—Nid­co.

He said the min­istry would have been in­formed but added that there wasn’t “re­al­ly dis­cus­sion” on it, since it was a (Nid­co) man­age­ment is­sue.

Charles said Nid­co had a big con­tract to man­age and was do­ing it with­out call­ing on tax­pay­ers to pay more mon­ey, in the face of le­git­i­mate claims by the con­trac­tor.

He re­called there was an is­sue of con­tention with the de­ci­sion on whether that gov­ern­ment should have ter­mi­nat­ed OAS when it filed for bank­rupt­cy pro­tec­tion but he said OAS was nev­er de­clared bank­rupt.

“The cur­rent is­sue has more to do with the ap­proach Nid­co took af­ter ter­mi­na­tion of the con­tract with OAS. This $852 mil­lion isn’t mon­ey they’re los­ing to OAS, it’s OAS’ mon­ey they took and the ar­bi­tra­tor is say­ing, give it back to OAS,” Charles added.

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