Mysteries of WASA

DECISION of the Government to assign forensic accountant Bob Lindquist to investigate questionable legal settlements made by the Water and Sewerage Authority will be welcomed. This decision was announced by Junior Finance Minister Ken Valley on Friday, the same day that Opposition Chief Whip Ganga Singh had written to Director of Public Prosecutions Geoffrey Henderson calling for an investigation into the same transactions. He urged the DPP to refer the matters to the police "with a recommendation for an immediate investigation".

Doubts about these WASA settlements arose some weeks ago as a result of information given by Public Utilities Minister Rennie Dumas in Parliament replying to questions asked by the member for Caroni East. We ourselves found the level of payments disclosed by the Minister to be quite surprising and raised questions about them in an editorial headlined, "More answers, Mr Dumas," published on Thursday March 27. We were particularly concerned with the payment by WASA of $51.5 million to a firm called Waterfarms Trinidad Limited in settlement of a dispute about which nothing is publicly known. Minister Dumas chose simply to state the figure without giving the House any details about the recipient and the nature of the dispute. Among WASA's legal settlements, he disclosed that another company by the name of Walker Well Ltd collected $16.5 million from the authority. On the face of it, it seemed absurd that a Minister would reveal such huge amounts of public funds being paid by a utility to unknown companies in settlement of publicly unknown disputes without seeing the need for transparency and accountability by explaining what they were all about.

What however made Mr Dumas' revelation about the Waterfarms payout more mysterious was Mr Ganga Singh's observation that the firms of Ernst & Young and Lee Young and Partners had done evaluations on the Waterfarms issue and both had suggested that the quantum of settlement should range between $9 million and $13 million. The UNC Chief Whip should be fully aware of these evaluations since they were done during his term as Minister of Public Utilities in the former UNC government when WASA's disputes with Waterfarms and Walker Well had occurred. When asked about the disparity between the eventual WASA payout and the figure suggested by the evaluators, Minister Dumas was at a loss to answer; all he could say was that the matter was under investigation by the Central Audit Committee of the Finance Ministry, suggesting to the Caroni East MP that he should file this as a supplementary question for another time.

The Opposition Chief Whip has raised another matter which we feel needs to be investigated, and that is the large compensation package given to WASA CEO Errol Grimes apparently without the necessary approval of the Ministry. Last January, in answer to another question, Minister Dumas told the Senate that Mr Grimes had received a basic monthly salary of $50,000, plus a $5,000 housing allowance and overseas travel grant of $25,000 between March 2002 and January 2003. One understands the relatively high remuneration levels negotiated for expatriate officials of the British firm Severn Trent during their contractual association with WASA, although we have no idea of how the country's water supply system has benefitted from this expensive connection.

However, what brilliance does Mr Grimes bring to the job of managing WASA and who approved this large increase in his emoluments, if not the Minister? The country, surely, would like to know. Over the years, WASA's operations have been a costly and mysterious burden; the time has come to make the working of this troubled utility transparent.