If you have ev­i­dence, take us to court.

This was the stance tak­en by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, in re­sponse to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s state­ments fol­low­ing the open­ing of the Archibald De Leon High­way, al­so known as the Solomon Ho­choy High­way Ex­ten­sion to Point Fortin on Sat­ur­day.

The Prime Min­is­ter stat­ed the coun­try may still have to pay out over a bil­lion dol­lars to the for­mer con­trac­tor Con­stru­to­ra OAS due to a clause that was re­moved dur­ing the tenure of the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment.

But yes­ter­day Mark said this claim was be­ing re­peat­ed and it was time for those do­ing the talk­ing to take ac­tion.

“The Gov­ern­ment has been talk­ing about this mat­ter for years now since 2010. The Gov­ern­ment is talk­ing, al­leg­ing, mak­ing all kinds of al­le­ga­tions, im­pu­ta­tions. Let them take the mat­ter to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties. Let the mat­ter be pros­e­cut­ed. If you said I did some­thing wrong, take me to the court,” Mark said.

He al­so said that the pre-ap­provals for OAS’ in­volve­ment in the con­struc­tion of the high­way were done un­der the watch of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment Gov­ern­ment.

The UNC yes­ter­day post­ed a sec­tion of the Hansard from Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 28, 2011 to sup­port its claim.

The ex­tract read por­tions of a speech at­trib­uted to Diego Mar­tin North East MP Colm Im­bert which stat­ed:

“Ten­ders were in­vit­ed for three high­ways just in the month lead­ing up to the gen­er­al elec­tion, but I would deal with one specif­i­cal­ly.

“The Point Fortin high­way was de­scribed as pack­age three and ten­ders were re­ceived; I am ad­vised on or around May 07, 2010. This would have been a lit­tle less than three weeks be­fore the gen­er­al elec­tion, say two and one-half weeks.

“Three pro­pos­als were re­ceived from in­ter­na­tion­al con­trac­tors. Con­stru­to­ra OAS Lim­it­ed, a Brazil­ian firm, came in with a bid of $5.285 bil­lion; Chi­na Rail­way, an­oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al firm, came in, ob­vi­ous­ly, from Chi­na, with a bid of $6.366 bil­lion; and GLF, an Ital­ian firm, with op­er­a­tions in North Amer­i­ca, came in at a price of $5.378 bil­lion.

“Af­ter the gen­er­al elec­tion, the day af­ter, as a mat­ter of fact, on May 25, deal­ing with this spe­cif­ic project, a let­ter was sent to Con­stru­to­ra OAS and they were in­formed the day af­ter the gen­er­al elec­tion that the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny had cho­sen OAS as the pre­ferred re­spon­dent for the con­tract for the Point Fortin high­way project,” ac­cord­ing to the ex­tract.

The Point Fortin High­way project start­ed in 2011 and faced nu­mer­ous de­lays over the course of its 12-year con­struc­tion.