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.