Confident that the documents submitted by Surendra Engineering Company Limited (SECL) for the specialty hospital contract are bogus, government has asked the Guyana Police Force to begin criminal investigations.
“We have handed over to the Police Commission-er, on behalf of the Government of Guyana, the documents and the confirmation from the Central Bank of Trinidad with the request to launch an investigation,” Attorney General Anil Nandlall yesterday told Stabroek News.
Addressing an announcement by the government of its intention to terminate the hospital project contract and pursue legal action to recover public funds paid over to the company, SECL’s Manag-ing Director Brijen Parikh, in a statement on Thursday, rejected the allegations as baseless.
The company also accused the Donald Ramotar administration of seeking to back out of its commitments to the US$18M specialty hospital project and being responsible for the stoppage of work. The row between the two is a major embarrassment to the PPP/C government as both the Jagdeo and Ramotar administrations had been accused of favouring Surendra for high-profile contracts.
On Tuesday, the administration revealed that since late June of this year it has been engaging SECL on a number of issues relating to allegations of fraud and financial irregularities.
“Initially, the Govern-ment’s concerns related to delayed milestones and inadequate accountability by SECL for public funds the company had received on signing the contract with the Ministry of Health,” the statement said.
“Subsequently, the Government of Guyana discovered that SECL’s representative in Guyana had submitted a fraudulent document purporting to emanate from the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago,” it added, while noting that the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago had since confirmed the fraud and this prompted its decision to write the company and inform it of its intended action.
But on Thursday, Parikh denied the claims of fraud, while saying that the company strongly rejected the allegations made in the letter from the Office of the President (OP). “SECL is not aware of the document and has not provided any such document as referred to in the reports in respect of Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago. We hereby reiterate that all such allegations of fraud or financial irregularities are completely baseless and without any merit,” he said.
Parikh further said that the company will be consulting its lawyers to determine SECL’s future course of action against the Government of Guyana.
A government official close to the contract, when asked about Parikh’s reply, said that the response from the company was shocking. “I have never seen such barefacedness, I tell you…,” the official said. “They know it is false so I don’t know what that is about.”
When Nandlall was asked about SECL’s response, he said that government has confirmation of its assertions in writing from the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago.
“We have the documents which impugn the integrity and authenticity of the two documents which were made,” he said, while noting that he himself spoke with senior officials from the Trinidad and Tobago Central Bank and subsequently received documents confirming the fraud.
Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon had also assured that before making the decision to terminate Surendra’s contract, an extensive investigation was done and that the Trinidad and Tobago Central Bank was consulted and had put in writing its findings. “What they basically said was, ‘Well this letterhead is we own but all these other things we aint know nothing about that,’” Luncheon said.
Nandlall said that in addition to asking for local criminal investigations on the matter, government would also now seek to ascertain how much money, if any, it lost as a lot of work was done at the site.
“One cannot discount in assessing the financial aspect of this matter the amount of work which has already been done. Ground work have been done and a host of preparatory works have been completed so that the value will have to be juxtaposed against the works to see whether government sustained a loss. There is a possibility that government might have come out with a gain having regard to the fact that it is the sub-contractors who did lots of work and were paid…but they at the end of the day will have to sue Surendra as it was with them that they had contractual agreements,” he said.
“This might be an act of serendipity and government might come out as the beneficiary of those works” he added.
He said that on the way forward, government would engage the two other “main players” India’s Exim Bank—which had extended the credit—and the Government of India, which had crafted the project with Guyana, to work out what would be the next step.
Nonetheless, the Attorney General pointed out that his government remains committed to bringing closure to its embarrassment. Said the Attorney General, “The Government of Guyana is committed to moving with speed to bring closure to this imbroglio so that we can move forward with the construction as we have promised the people of Guyana.”
