AG to advise Govt on TTEC

Responding to questions from the media at yesterday’s post Cabinet press conference at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair, on whether there was a connection between any TTEC officials and contractors, Public Utilities Minister Emmanuel George said, “that will be one of the issues the AG will have to look at and he will have to look at it much more deeply than when we looked at the documents but the document does seem to suggest that type of collusion”.

The Report of the Finance Ministry’s audit committee was presented to former Minister of Public Utilities Mustapha Abdul-Hamid a year ago and the Oilfields Workers Trade Union had been clamouring for the report to be laid in the Parliament and its findings made public.

The OWTU had alleged that there was corruption with the SLP. George provided the media with some of the findings of the audit of the SLP: contract values were broken up into smaller sums in order to bypass supervisor’s approval, sole tendering was used for contracts instead of Requests for Tender, materials were purchased on the grounds of “urgency where no urgency exists.” The question of oversight was raised with respect to the former TTEC Chairman also serving as Chair of the Tenders Committee and Audit Committee.

George told the media that the supervisor could approve contract sums of $50,000 and upwards but as the contract costs reached in the millions of dollars, approval had to be given by the tenders committee of the board of TTEC. George said, “In order to avoid some of these supervisory limitations the contract values as I said were broken up in order to award the contract”.

He illustrated the case of goods with a total value of $2.7 million which were broken down into six purchase orders in one day, “in favour of one firm for the supply of these materials”.

He said there were instances where “technical specifications” were changed after tenders were received to favour a particular contractor. George said the tendering procedures were bypassed to make direct purchases from suppliers.

He said there was a “blatant disregard for the tendering and purchasing procedure” with goods and services being supplied “weeks in advance of purchase orders being generated”.

George said $5.9 million of nuts, bolts, and washers were purchased “by direct purchases rather than by competitive bidding”. George told the media that there were other examples he could have cited.

He said the “natural checks and balances” of having different officials head the Tenders and Audit committees to provide oversight “was done away with” when the Chairman of