Dear Editor,
Mr Christopher Ram, (‘Postings on website were misrepresented on TV programme,’Sunday Stabroek January 18), much more a practising politician than he is an accountant and lawyer these days, not surprisingly, is upset over a television interview I recently conducted with Mr Winston Brassington on the Marriott Hotel.
Unable to address the substance of the interview, he has opted to attack my professional integrity on the questions I asked.
Mr Ram, for some time now, a full-time critic of every government development project, regardless of their merit, regularly pontificates on his website with that intent. The Kaieteur News faithfully, and, to a lesser extent the Stabroek News, reports extensively what Mr Ram writes as the gospel come down from heaven.
Mr Ram, however, gets very upset when the foolishness he writes is challenged and shown to be grossly inaccurate.
In this case, he rushes to the defence of the Stabroek News which I criticized for indulging in reporting “informed speculation” as hard news, while, rather than address the substance of the responses from Mr Brassington in the interview I conducted, he attacks me for misrepresenting, he says, what he wrote on his website.
The questions I asked Mr Brassington in the interview are all accurately based on what the Kaieteur News reported Mr Ram as publishing on his website. None of them was based on “informed speculation.”
If Kaieteur News has misreported Mr Ram, why has he not complained to them?
Mr Ram also complains that “the articles to which the Kaieteur News refers were posted in February 2013, nearly two years earlier.” The Kaieteur News, however, reports Mr Ram’s opinions as “his recent and most revealing writings on the hotel project.”
Having complained about the relevance of his website opinions reported in the Kaieteur News as being two years old, Mr Ram then contradicts himself by later asserting that his articles are “as relevant today as they are factual.”
Mr Ram then proceeds to question my questions. He says that he never made “any allegations that the Marriott Hotel was a ‘cut price hotel.’” Again, he should complain to the Kaieteur News which reports him as stating that “he [Mr Ram] was recently regaled with the post modern technology and material being employed on the cut price contract.”
The Kaieteur News then goes on to report Ram as surmising that “maybe that explains why none of the local consulting engineering firms were retained by AHI to look after its interest.” In fact, as the interview establishes, Mr Romesh Bhudram, Project Executive Manager of the hotel project and very much a Guyanese, was engaged as a resident representative of M A Angeliades Inc, the New York based company responsible for the construction supervision of the hotel.
Every one of the questions I put to Mr Brassington in the interview was precisely based on what the Kaieteur News reported him to have said on his website. None of them were “contrived”, or “malicious,” or “unethical,” or “unprofessional,” as Mr Ram accuses.
The truth is that Mr Ram published an opinion on his website, quoted extensively in the Kaieteur News, which attempted to show that the quality of the construction of the Marriott Hotel was compromised by the absence of independent supervision and the price which was paid to the contractor. The interview with Mr Brassington and Mr Bhudram and the Marriott General Manager, Mr Roberto Grisi, put Mr Ram’s assertions to the sword and exposes him for publishing inaccurate and irresponsible opinions to his embarrassment.
I am certain that Mr Brassington would be pleased to provide the Kaieteur News with the entire verbatim interview for publication if Mr Ram would persuade them to publish it.
Yours faithfully,
Kit Nascimento
