Prof John Uff has a professional resume almost as long as your arm. Uff is a distinguished civil engineer with extensive practice, tremendous involvement in academia, including being founding director of a centre for construction law and management at renowned King’s College in London.

The senior counsel is now professor emeritus. His interna-tional reputation has led him to serve as investigator and arbitrator at vital public inquiries around the world. His dazzling CV includes a PhD, several gold medals, fellowships and directorships, with impressive appointments to exalted professional bodies. The Urban Development Corporation of T&T (Udecott), on the other hand, is the most tarnished state enterprise, widely accused of multi-million-dollar bid-rigging, naked nepotism and monstrous time and cost overruns. Damning revelations about contract favouritism and premature payouts and whopping free-for-all budgeting at the Brian Lara Stadium project-without-end would, in other circumstances, lead to a spree of Piarco Airport-type criminal probes. 

In a land of effective governance and law enforcement, there would have been an exhaustive forensic and criminal inquiry into the Lara shame and Ministry of Legal Affairs’ tower, where a contractor was reportedly selected in spite of bidding $60 million more than two pre-qualifiers.To boot, the lucky contracting firm was said to have been formed, with unseemly family links, mere weeks before securing the golden Udecott handshake. The directorship of CH Development Ltd would have rocked most administrations, and, at best, led to the summary sacking of Udecott’s board of directors and rigorous probe into the auditing and executive team. The cost of setting up the Chancery Lane, San Fernando, behemoth, to cite another sample, soared from $296 million to some $732—and the justification is both alarming and deeply distressing.

Udecott’s rationale is that it had not budgeted for removal of occupiers of the land, in addition to basic infrastructural works. The Udecott saga is surely the most unholy financial and administrative mess in T&T’s modern history, riddled with contract carpetbagging that turns the Piarco Airport disgrace into a rum shop lime. The late and lamented corruption whistleblower Gene Miles would have been mortified. Instead, the Patrick Manning regime has remained studiously aloof of the Udecott abomination, permitting the agency to singularly manage some 60 costly projects—and worse, tossing new assignments at the woefully-tainted taxpayer-owned enterprise. Udecott handles a numbing $7.3 billion of taxpayer assets at a time when the Government is moving to raise funds “chirrup chirrup,” to adopt Dr Keith Rowley’s depiction. For his part, big-wig Calder Hart is chairman of four other important state agencies, including the NIB fat cat.

And then there is this disgust-ing and distasteful tangle in which this smeared corporation has attempted to slur the professional integrity of the eminent Prof Uff. On what basis did Udecott pitch its case of bias by Uff and his commissioners against Hart, who has led a charmed public existence? The legal arguments for the corporation’s bid to torpedo the inquiry remain murky, but they may be as facile as those that led Israel Khan and Kenneth Sirju to desert their commissioners’ chairs.

In the aftermath of his recent take-no-prisoners-anti-corruption spiel and his avowal of the commission’s purpose, Attorney General John Jeremie was duty-bound to throw the book at Udecott. Jeremie also sorely needed some professional triumph, what with his roasting in the Senate for last-minute passage of the Financial Intelligence Unit Act. In addition, his advocacy of anti-money laundering legislation was promoted as a modern measure when, in fact, there is a decade-old such law. Indeed, at least two accused in the Piarco ignominy, including an ex-government minister, are facing money laundering charges facilitated by that legislation. As Jeremie takes the high moral and legal road in the Udecott debacle, there are still open-ended and burdensome issues. Just why is Prime Minister Patrick Manning—who, by the way, is keeping a stony silence on the matter—clutching onto Hart and his cohort directors?

After all, he has sacked office-holders for less, Dr Rowley losing his entrenched Cabinet status for speaking out at a closed-door meeting. How could Udecott be permitted to carry on business as usual, with the swirling testimony of a rank absence of accountability and transparency? When would the procurement policy, promised since 2005, be introduced to tame this and other wild taxpayer-owned enterprises? Couldn’t the police investigate sworn corruption testimony? After all, they have conducted such probes in the past, without the head start of sworn evidence. Who, in all of this, is seeking the public’s interest?

• Ken Ali co-hosts the popular weekday morning discussion
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