SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Se­nior In­ves­tiga­tive Re­porter

shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

Less than three weeks af­ter re­sign­ing as chair­man of the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), Ravin­dra Nan­ga has ac­cused Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath of go­ing on a witch hunt by ac­cus­ing the for­mer board of cor­rup­tion and wrong­do­ing.

Nan­ga in­sist­ed that in the four years he served as WASA’s chair­man no one could point fin­gers at him for al­leged cor­rup­tion, con­fu­sion or nepo­tism. He said the board op­er­at­ed trans­par­ent­ly and with­in the law.

He was re­spond­ing to claims made by Padarath that a WASA em­ploy­ee had as­sist­ed a PNM mem­ber in se­cur­ing a con­tract on March 17.

Padarath called on for­mer pub­lic util­i­ties min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les to tell the coun­try why a PNM cam­paign man­ag­er walked away with $3 mil­lion in con­tracts just be­fore the gen­er­al elec­tion.

Nan­ga said Padarath was “clear­ly on a witch hunt. I don’t know what they are look­ing for.”

How­ev­er, Padarath fired back: “It’s fun­ny com­ing from the PNM about witch hunts when they spent ten years witch hunt­ing and spend­ing mil­lions of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars to witch hunt for­mer min­is­ters of the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment. So to hear that from Mr Nan­ga is pre­cious. I would say to Mr Nan­ga, if there’s noth­ing to hide, then there is noth­ing to fear.”

Padarath said a whistle­blow­er pro­vid­ed in­for­ma­tion about the $3 mil­lion con­tract.

“As an at­tor­ney, Mr Nan­ga should know bet­ter than to cas­ti­gate whistle­blow­ers who are seek­ing the pub­lic’s in­ter­est,” he added.

Nan­ga said he ex­pects the witch hunt to in­ten­si­fy and con­tin­ue.

“If the min­is­ter un­der­stands pro­cure­ment, what they would re­alise is that there would be a ten­der and there would be the eval­u­a­tion of that ten­der and based on that, the pro­cure­ment of­fi­cer and the CEO would award a con­tract,” he ex­plained.

Nan­ga said no con­trac­tor would in­di­cate their po­lit­i­cal pref­er­ence.

“So that what­ev­er con­tracts were award­ed would have been award­ed in ac­cor­dance with the law at the time . . . which would have been the pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion, in­de­pen­dent of par­ty af­fil­i­a­tion.”

He said he was not sure what Padarath was get­ting at.

“But let’s as­sume that he’s cor­rect—and I’m not at all ac­cept­ing that he’s cor­rect— is it that this al­leged cam­paign man­ag­er is not a con­trac­tor or is not qual­i­fied to be award­ed a con­tract?” he asked.

The for­mer chair­man said $3 mil­lion would be for a con­struc­tion con­tract.

“Ei­ther for the lay­ing of pipes or leak re­pairs or road restora­tion or some­thing like that. Our pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion does not al­low for us to award an in­di­vid­ual such a con­tract,” he said.

De­clar­ing that he is not sure what Padarath was al­lud­ing to, he added: “I can tell you for sure, no per­son, no in­di­vid­ual was award­ed any such con­tract. March of this year, I think we would have award­ed, or we would have ex­tend­ed, for ex­am­ple, leak re­pair, and road restora­tion. Things like $3 mil­lion will not be a sub­stan­tial con­tract in the con­text of WASA.”

Nan­ga said un­til he gets fur­ther par­tic­u­lars, “this is a non-is­sue.”

“I can say with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion, at the lev­el of the board, ab­solute­ly no cor­rup­tion took place,” he said.

The for­mer chair­man said dur­ing his tenure all of WASA’s projects were com­plet­ed on time and with­in bud­get.

“We had one or two ex­cep­tions to that, but that was it.”

He added: “Pri­or to the OPR (Of­fice of Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tions) com­ing in, we were very, very metic­u­lous and care­ful in terms of the con­tracts that we award­ed.

“Even when the OPR came in, we had an over­sight com­mit­tee of the board to en­sure that the ex­ec­u­tives were com­ply­ing with the leg­is­la­tion be­fore con­tracts went out. So I can say the on­ly time cor­rup­tion would have tak­en place is if the board was by­passed, which I don’t think has hap­pened.”

Since re­sign­ing af­ter the April 28 gen­er­al elec­tion, Nan­ga said he has been sleep­ing “very com­fort­ably” be­cause WASA was a tremen­dous task.

“I’ve worked very hard to build my rep­u­ta­tion and I have left WASA in­tact with my rep­u­ta­tion,” he said, adding that the board had been try­ing to root out the in­ter­nal cor­rup­tion it had in­her­it­ed.

He said there had been cor­rup­tion in the New Ser­vices De­part­ment, where peo­ple had been await­ing wa­ter con­nec­tions for years. WASA had to mod­ernise and com­put­erise the de­part­ment to stop the cor­rup­tion.

He added: “The cor­rup­tion of not turn­ing on the valves so that you can have a thriv­ing wa­ter truck­ing sup­ply so that the wa­ter truck­ing con­trac­tors would have ben­e­fit­ed. If there was cor­rup­tion, there would have been in­ter­nal cor­rup­tion that we were try­ing to stamp out.

“So I am pret­ty sure that there still ex­ists cor­rup­tion with­in WASA but not at the lev­el of the ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment and the board.”

Nan­ga said a lot had been done to cut down on over­time, clear a back­log of 5,000 pipeline leaks and ef­fi­cient­ly dis­trib­ute wa­ter.

In the 2020 re­port of the Cab­i­net sub­com­mit­tee ap­point­ed to re­view WASA’s op­er­a­tions, the unions were ac­cused of sup­ply­ing goods and ser­vices while the man­age­ment of WASA turned a blind eye.

“There was a cer­tain com­pa­ny be­long­ing to a for­mer se­nior mem­ber of the union that got award­ed mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar con­tracts and based on the feed­back we got is that the com­pa­ny would utilise in­ter­nal WASA staff to car­ry out those con­tracts,” Nan­ga said.

He pre­dict­ed that the unions would re­turn to con­trol WASA as they did in be­fore 2020.

“We should not for­get what took place at WASA be­tween 2010 and 2015,” he said.

On Thurs­day, Padarath claimed the bold move to re­scind WASA’s trans­for­ma­tion plan on­ly tar­gets 34 se­nior man­agers with salaries bal­loon­ing over $100,000 with perks.

“There was a fo­cus on big jobs for the boys and girls in­side of WASA, bal­loon­ing a fig­ure of over $70 mil­lion, while peo­ple con­tin­ue to suf­fer in the sup­ply of 24/7 wa­ter for peo­ple,” the min­is­ter said.

He promised in the com­ing weeks to dis­close some of the “scan­dalous rev­e­la­tions” un­earthed at WASA re­gard­ing its ex­pen­di­ture, stat­ing that some of the names in­volved are “mind-bog­gling.”

Gon­za­les crit­i­cised the UNC’s de­ci­sion to scrap WASA’s trans­for­ma­tion plan and warned Padarath that cor­rup­tion would reign at WASA once more.

Padarath fired back, stat­ing he had nev­er agreed to the trans­for­ma­tion plan of send­ing home work­ers.

“It meant putting the man­age­ment of WASA in the hands of a se­lect few amount­ing to over $70 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly and, there­fore, there was no re­al plan in terms of de­liv­er­ing wa­ter,” he said

Gon­za­les al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence, stat­ing that WASA’s CEO Kei­throy Hal­l­i­day had to re­port to two ju­nior em­ploy­ees, Je­van Joseph and Kr­ish­na Per­sads­ingh.

How­ev­er, Padarath said the Hu­man Re­source De­part­ment is re­spon­si­ble for the ad­min­is­tra­tion of em­ploy­ees at WASA and no such move had been com­mu­ni­cat­ed to him about such al­le­ga­tions.

Nan­ga said Hal­l­i­day has been re­port­ing to Joseph, who is Padarath’s li­ai­son of­fi­cer and three ju­nior em­ploy­ees have been op­er­at­ing out of WASA’s board­room.

“And the CEO, in ef­fect, has to re­port to them. Now that the names are out, I want to see if he (Padarath) is bold enough to de­ny it,” he said.

Padarath was con­tact­ed yes­ter­day about re­ports that Joseph’s name is be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed on a list as Hal­l­i­day’s re­place­ment. That list con­tained 12 oth­er names as WASA’s new ex­ec­u­tive team. and an­oth­er list with sev­en names has been mak­ing the rounds at WASA as the new board.

“The lists are in­deed fake. No such de­ci­sions have been made. In the fullest of time, there will be a board and there will be an ex­ec­u­tive struc­ture,” the min­is­ter in­sist­ed.

He said some­one is at­tempt­ing to cre­ate mis­chief with the lists now in the pub­lic do­main.

“I have my sus­pi­cions of who it is based on the pol­i­tics that is play­ing out,” he said.

Nan­ga said it would be dif­fi­cult to re­move Hal­l­i­day, giv­en his three-year con­tract with WASA.

Hal­l­i­day re­signed as the CEO of the Bar­ba­dos Wa­ter Au­thor­i­ty to join WASA last De­cem­ber for a month­ly salary of $100,000 plus perks.

Nan­ga said WASA had made tremen­dous progress with their projects and more than 500,000 peo­ple have ben­e­fit­ed from an in­creased wa­ter sup­ply.

What the sub­com­mit­tee re­port says (put in box)

The sub­com­mit­tee re­port found that cash-strapped WASA had be­come an un­wieldy, over­staffed, cor­rupt, un­pro­duc­tive, and un­re­spon­sive or­gan­i­sa­tion and its ef­fi­cien­cy had been sac­ri­ficed for po­lit­i­cal pa­tron­age.

The re­port stat­ed that WASA had huge cost over­runs, poor project man­age­ment, out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, derelict as­sets, high lev­els of un­record­ed payables, high re­liance on de­sali­na­tion wa­ter, cus­tomer dis­sat­is­fac­tion, wa­ter truck­ing ser­vice cor­rup­tion and was over­staffed by 2,000 em­ploy­ees.

WASA has on its pay­roll 4,828 em­ploy­ees, con­sist­ing of 3,043 month­ly paid and 1,785 dai­ly paid work­ers.

The re­port said there was ev­i­dence that the unions had be­come sup­pli­ers of goods and ser­vices to WASA and the man­age­ment had turned a blind eye to this prac­tice.

Al­though $21 bil­lion had been in­ject­ed in­to WASA be­tween 2010 and 2020, on­ly 34 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion re­ceived a 24/7 wa­ter sup­ply.

The sub­com­mit­tee con­clud­ed that the dys­func­tions in­her­ent in WASA are so deeply en­trenched that, in its cur­rent form, it is in­ca­pable of ef­fec­tive­ly sat­is­fy­ing cus­tomers’ de­mands and the state’s man­date.