SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has ap­point­ed a new act­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, af­ter an in­ves­ti­ga­tion found its for­mer act­ing CEO was guilty of in­ter­fer­ing with a list of bad pay­ing com­pa­nies that was sup­posed to be made pub­lic.

This was con­firmed by Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les, who said yes­ter­day that for­mer CEO Sher­land Shep­pard has been rel­e­gat­ed back to his se­nior man­age­ment po­si­tion at the au­thor­i­ty and Kelvin Ro­main has been ap­point­ed to act as CEO.

Shep­pard, who was pre­vi­ous­ly on un­paid leave, has been sent on 50 days va­ca­tion leave.

Speak­ing af­ter a rib­bon-cut­ting cer­e­mo­ny for the Lopinot Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant, Gon­za­les broke his si­lence on the rea­son for Shep­pard’s sus­pen­sion more than six weeks ago.

“The board would have ap­proved a list of names of cus­tomers, huge cor­po­rate, com­mer­cial cus­tomers who owed WASA hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars and the board ap­proved a list of 30 names to be pub­lished in the me­dia and when the pub­li­ca­tion came out in the me­dia, on­ly 28 names were pub­lished,” Gon­za­les said.

He said when Shep­pard was asked why the names of two com­pa­nies were re­moved from the list, he could not give a sat­is­fac­to­ry re­sponse.

Gon­za­les con­firmed the Five Is­lands Amuse­ment Wa­ter Park was one of those two com­pa­nies.

Asked to ad­dress ru­mours that he prompt­ed Shep­pard to re­move the com­pa­ny’s name from the list, Gon­za­les said, “I heard that fool­ish talk from the UNC, again. This is non­sense. If I, the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties or­dered that Five Is­lands be re­moved, why would the board sus­pend the CEO if the in­struc­tions came from the min­is­ter? It does not make sense.”

Gon­za­les said if that was true, Shep­pard would al­so not have been re­moved from his po­si­tion.

He said he has in­struct­ed the board to con­tin­ue its work, adding, “These types of be­hav­iour with­in the au­thor­i­ty will not be tol­er­at­ed and there will be ab­solute­ly no sa­cred cows.”

He said the delin­quent com­pa­nies owe the au­thor­i­ty some $5 mil­lion. Gon­za­les said he has in­struct­ed WASA to take ag­gres­sive steps to col­lect the out­stand­ing mon­ey.

As for Shep­pard’s fu­ture with the au­thor­i­ty, Gon­za­les said he will leave this up to the WASA board.

“Af­ter he ex­pires his 50 days va­ca­tion, the board will de­ter­mine what’s next…I will leave it en­tire­ly up to the board,” he said.

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