Even though Housing Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal says T&T is getting preferential conditions from government-to-government arrangements in the construction of the $1 billion Penal hospital project, the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) says this is not so. The CCC was quoted in an article written by Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International, which was published in the Huffington Post last week.
In her article, Adams said the CCC disagreed with Moonilal’s claim it was offering preferential conditions in the project, which involved Canadian firm SNC-Lavalin. She quoted the CCC as saying the project was not being financed on concessionary terms, or by the Canadian government, but "through commercial terms."
In a recent interview, Moonilal said T&T got low interest rates and other preferential conditions whenever it embarked on a government-to-government arrangements in mega projects. He said T&T did not have domestic resources to sustain mega projects, so government-to-government arrangements were made.
However, told yesterday of the CCC’s claim it was not offering preferential conditions in the Penal hospital contract, Moonilal said, via a text message, he was checking on it. He did not explain what preferential conditions entailed. Since the Post reported the latest controversy, the Joint Consultative Council (JCC) and the Local Content Chamber have renewed their calls for an end to government-to-government arrangements.
President of the chamber, Lennox Sirjusingh, said yesterday government-to-government arrangements have always been detrimental to national interest. “I am convinced now, more than ever, because we were told that the reason they are giving government-to-government contracts is because they were beneficial. However, now we are hearing something else. It is very confusing and contradictory to what we are told,” he added.
Sirjusingh said the Local Content Chamber has been looking at the process of due diligence but was concerned because the SNC-Lavalin contract was lacking in transparency. He explained local contractors and suppliers were being bypassed.
Also contacted yesterday, chairman of the JCC, Afra Raymond, said at a time of excess liquidity, local financial institutions were being denied the opportunity to participate in national development through their exclusion from the project. He called on Government to publish details of the contract. “Nothing less will do, everything else is unsatisfactory,” Raymond said. SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based Canadian company, is being investigated for bribery and corruption scandals.
Former CEO, Pierre Duhaime, and former executive vice-president, Riadh Ben Aissa, are accused of bribery and fraud in connection with a contract to build the McGill University Health Centre. A due diligence review is currently ongoing by the CCC for the construction phase of the project and once it was completed, the CCC would decide whether SNC-Lavalin qualified for the project.
In a statement last month, president and CEO of the CCC, Marc Whittingham, said the T&T Government had signed a contract in February with SNC-Lavalin to design the Penal hospital, on the recommendation of the CCC. This was two months before the World Bank banned SNC-Lavalin Inc for the next ten years from bidding on projects funded by the bank, citing company misconduct by the company in Bangladesh and Cambodia.
Whittingham said a framework agreement was signed between the governments of Canada and T&T on May 1, 2012 to promote co-operation in the health sector. He explained that in early 2012, CCC and Udecott decided to split the work into two phases: The design of the hospital and the construction and installation of medical equipment. He said the design phase was almost completed and Udecott and CCC were now working on a contract for phase two.