Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter An­cil An­toine says the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) is "bur­dened with mas­sive debt and (is) fi­nan­cial­ly strapped for funds."

He said the state-owned util­i­ty com­pa­ny was cur­rent­ly op­er­at­ing with deficit is $1.6 bil­lion and its re­ceiv­ables were $33.9 mil­lion.

Con­tribut­ing to yes­ter­day's 2016 bud­get de­bate in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, An­toine said WASA had used $403.1 mil­lion of its over­draft fa­cil­i­ty and "was fast ap­proach­ing the lim­it of $420 mil­lion."

He said WASA's "gov­ern­ing struc­ture is weak and not sus­pir­ing­ly the moral of em­ploy­ees at the au­thor­i­ty is at a very low ebb."

He said his pre­de­ces­sor Gan­ga Singh had em­barked on an ex­ten­sive and ex­pen­sive pipe-lay­ing ex­er­cise across the coun­try and quot­ed from doc­u­ments to show that the projects were not done eq­ui­tably as in Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress con­stituen­cies more projects were done at sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er costs.

An­toine said while there were some 15 con­trac­tors qual­i­fied to do the re­spec­tive jobs, on­ly "two con­trac­tors were al­lowed to feed at the trough and were giv­en mil­lions to pave most of the roads af­ter pipes were laid."

He said the cor­rup­tion did not end there, as "there were in­stances of over-in­voic­ing to the tune of hun­dreds of mil­lions of tax­pay­ers' dol­lars, in­voic­ing would come in for longer dis­tances than roads paved and no ques­tions were asked."

"An­oth­er form of cor­rup­tion was the use of WASA in-house crews to un­der­take works which were out­sourced to con­trac­tors," An­toine said, adding this meant that "the tax­pay­er paid twice for the same scope of works.

"WASA paid the con­trac­tor and then they (it) would have paid the wages and oth­er costs for the in-house crews for the same projects. This was the sting in this pipe-lay­ing ex­plo­sion un­der the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment," he said.

An­toine then gave some ex­am­ples "of how this rack­et was car­ried out." He said in one project, "tem­po­rary restora­tion was billed for a two-me­tre trench width in­stead of one me­tre. So (a) one me­tre trench was dug but the billing was for two me­tres.

"Sep­a­rate in­voic­es were sent for road restora­tion for the en­tire road­way. So on­ly a por­tion of the road re­ceived the pipe but the tax­pay­ers paid for the paving of the en­tire road."

In an­oth­er project in­volv­ing road restora­tion in Chan­der­nagore, Chase Vil­lage, the min­is­ter said "ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3,096 me­tres were in­voiced. How­ev­er, on­ly 1,790 me­tres can be seen and mea­sured."

Ac­cord­ing to An­toine, the con­trac­tor said the MP for the area, Ra­mona Ram­di­al, "in­struct­ed him to pave oth­er roads in the vicin­i­ty which he did and billed the au­thor­i­ty. WASA project man­ag­er ap­proved."

Ram­di­al, who was seat­ed op­po­site, said that claim was un­true. She at­tempt­ed to have the claim with­drawn on the grounds that the min­is­ter was im­put­ing im­prop­er mo­tives.

But An­nisette-George over­ruled her, say­ing she did "not see any­thing im­prop­er in that."

Ram­di­al shout­ed: "It is not true, Madame Speak­er. – Richard Lord