Close scruti­ny of the Gov­ern­ment's con­tract with the Ital­ian-owned, he­li­copter man­u­fac­tur­er AgustaWest­land re­veals that the con­tract fig­ure quot­ed by the com­pa­ny is US$1.07 mil­lion (TT$6.7 mil­lion) less than the num­bers cit­ed by Trade Min­is­ter Mar­i­ano Browne last week. On Ju­ly 30, Ital­ian de­fence and aero­space gi­ant Fin­mec­ca­ni­ca an­nounced that its whol­ly-owned sub­sidiary, AgustaWest­land, had been award­ed a con­tract by the Gov­ern­ment of T&T to sup­ply four AW139 he­li­copters. The con­tract, ac­cord­ing to the Ital­ian com­pa­ny, which al­so in­cludes an ex­ten­sive train­ing and lo­gis­ti­cal sup­port ser­vice for five years, is val­ued at US$348 mil­lion (TT $2.188 bil­lion).

But Trade Min­is­ter Mar­i­ano Browne, in a let­ter to the ed­i­tor pub­lished as a com­men­tary last Fri­day, dis­closed that the Gov­ern­ment pro­posed to pay US$93.56 mil­lion (TT$589.43 mil­lion) for the four he­li­copters, US$125.77 mil­lion (TT$792.26 mil­lion) for the train­ing pack­age and US$129.74 (TT$817.42 mil­lion) for the main­te­nance pack­age. When tal­lied, the min­is­ter's num­bers to­tal US$349.07 mil­lion or $2,199.11–some US$1.07 mil­lion more than the con­tract amount cit­ed in the Fin­mec­ca­ni­ca news re­lease. The dis­par­i­ty in the num­bers was first not­ed by a blog­ger on the Guardian Web site who goes by the tag, "la di­va."

A Guardian e-mail to AgustaWest­land spokesman Ge­off Rus­sell yes­ter­day morn­ing, re­quest­ing that the com­pa­ny ac­count for the dis­par­i­ty, was not an­swered up to press time. In his let­ter, Browne al­so stat­ed that "ne­go­ti­a­tions are un­der­way" with the US Ex-Im Bank and Bank Paribas for the train­ing and main­te­nance com­po­nents of the con­tract which to­geth­er are worth US$255.51 mil­lion (TT$1.6 bil­lion). On Au­gust 12, the US Ex-Im Bank is­sued a state­ment in which it said that it was "guar­an­tee­ing an ap­prox­i­mate­ly $80 mil­lion, ten-year loan from BNP Paribas of New York, N.Y."

Ex-Im Bank chair­man and pres­i­dent Fred Hochberg said the ex­port cred­it agency was "es­pe­cial­ly pleased to sup­port this trans­ac­tion" be­cause it "al­so paves the way for fol­low-on busi­ness for this com­pa­ny to ex­port train­ing and oth­er ser­vices for years to come." The US Ex-Im Bank is co-fi­nanc­ing the trans­ac­tion with Italy's ex­port-cred­it agency SACE. The US Ex-Im Bank state­ment dis­closed that two of the he­li­copters will be de­liv­ered in Sep­tem­ber 2010.