To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

The Gov­ern­ment is con­tin­u­ing to al­low Ude­cott to act with in­dif­fer­ence for pub­lic opin­ion, notwith­stand­ing what has so far been re­vealed be­fore the Uff Com­mis­sion of En­quiry. And this is most ev­i­dent with the con­fir­ma­tion by Ude­cott that it has hired Sun­way Con­struc­tion Caribbean Ltd to out­fit the Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs Tow­er with fur­ni­ture.

To re­mind read­ers, Sun­way is the Caribbean sub­sidiary with the Malaysian par­ent and it is the com­pa­ny which suc­ceed­ed CH De­vel­op­ment, a com­pa­ny that was a few months old be­fore it was award­ed the orig­i­nal con­tract to con­struct the MLA Tow­er. Be­fore the Uff Com­mis­sion, quite an amount of tes­ti­mo­ny has emerged al­leg­ing less than forth­right con­nec­tions be­tween Calder Hart, his wife and fam­i­ly mem­bers back in Malaysia and the Sun­way com­pa­ny. One bit of ev­i­dence has been a shar­ing of a fax num­ber be­tween Calder Hart and the Sun­way com­pa­ny, a mat­ter yet to be suit­ably and con­vinc­ing­ly ex­plained. Now in the face of all of that, Ude­cott calm­ly awards the con­tract for Sun­way to fol­low through from con­struct­ing the tow­er to out­fit­ting it with the ne­ces­si­ties and to do so with­out en­gag­ing in a process of ten­der­ing. While not ad­dress­ing the is­sue of the lack of ten­der­ing, Ude­cott has af­firmed that the award was made "af­ter care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of val­ue for mon­ey, main­tain­ing the com­ple­tion sched­ule of the build­ing and hav­ing the build­ing ful­ly op­er­a­tional, oc­cu­pied and gen­er­at­ing in­come in the short­est pos­si­ble time frame."

Gen­er­al as­ser­tions about val­ue for mon­ey and main­tain­ing dead­lines are all well and good, but for the fact that the $269 mil­lion con­tract for the con­struc­tion of the build­ing was award­ed in May 2005 and the con­trac­tor en­vis­aged that the build­ing would be com­plet­ed in 27 months. While changes in the scope of work may ac­count for some of the slip­page be­yond the orig­i­nal Au­gust 2007 dead­line, the pub­lic has no way of know­ing how much weight to give that is­sue as against oth­er is­sues such as in­ad­e­quate man­pow­er, poor plan­ning or flawed man­age­ment sys­tems. But the per­for­mance is­sues are on­ly part of the pic­ture. Ude­cott should al­so pro­vide in­for­ma­tion to the pub­lic on the ex­tent of the cost over­runs at the Le­gal Af­fairs Tow­er and all of the build­ings un­der its su­per­vi­sion. And the state-owned com­pa­ny should pro­vide the pub­lic with the cur­rent per square foot cost of out­fit­ting this build­ing com­pared with oth­er build­ings in the Rich­mond Street cam­pus and, in­deed, whether oth­er con­trac­tors there would be for­tu­nate enough to be grant­ed con­tracts "in line with the de­sign-build op­tion."

There is too the con­sid­er­a­tion of how the pub­lic must feel about such a mat­ter giv­en all that has hap­pened, more so when it is con­sid­ered that Ude­cott is spend­ing funds which do not be­long to the com­pa­ny or in­deed the Gov­ern­ment, but rather to the tax­pay­ers and own­ers of the re­sources. From the start of the build­ing boom, the Gov­ern­ment has dis­played the same kind of in­dif­fer­ence for pub­lic opin­ion in these mat­ters. It must be re­mem­bered too that for months the Gov­ern­ment re­fused to heed pub­lic opin­ion on the seem­ing run­away op­er­a­tions of Ude­cott and the Prime Min­is­ter on­ly re­spond­ed to the call for a pub­lic in­quiry when it was clear­ly po­lit­i­cal­ly detri­men­tal for him to con­tin­ue ig­nor­ing the ev­i­dence that was be­ing put in­to the pub­lic do­main about this com­pa­ny which is spend­ing bil­lions of pub­lic funds. But even be­fore es­tab­lish­ment the Uff Com­mis­sion, Dr Kei­th Row­ley was ter­mi­nat­ed when he dared to raise con­cerns about the seem­ing lack of Cab­i­net over­sight over Ude­cott.

What all of this means is that the Gov­ern­ment may have tied its po­lit­i­cal for­tune to Ude­cott and its ex­ec­u­tive chair­man, Calder Hart. The Gov­ern­ment will find it dif­fi­cult to dis­en­tan­gle it­self from the even­tu­al find­ings of the Uff Com­mis­sion–es­pe­cial­ly if wrong­do­ing and gross in­com­pe­tence are de­ter­mined by the com­mis­sion.