Richard Lord

Gov­ern­ment has se­cured the ser­vices of British QC Alan New­man to ad­vise whether there was fraud in the con­tro­ver­sial bil­lion-dol­lar Broadgate Place project in Port-of-Spain.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan re­vealed that dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at his Ca­bil­do Cham­bers Of­fice, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. Broadgate Place, a pro­posed 26-storey build­ing on South Quay, op­po­site City Gate, is be­ing ex­e­cut­ed by the Broadgate Place Prop­er­ty Com­pa­ny Ltd, a sub­sidiary of the Transcorp De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny. The con­struc­tion was ex­pect­ed to be­gin ear­li­er this year with a pro­ject­ed two-year com­ple­tion date. Ram­lo­gan said if the project was de­ter­mined to be fraud­u­lent "we will be tak­ing ac­tion against those re­spon­si­ble." The AG called on for­mer Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­is­ter Kennedy Swarats­ingh and for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning "to ex­plain to the pop­u­la­tion how such trans­ac­tion could have been im­posed on the peo­ple of this coun­try. Ram­lo­gan said a bank was now seek­ing to re­cov­er funds from the Gov­ern­ment from the planned $1 bil­lion project.

He said Transcorp Cred­it Union was the own­er of the par­cel of land but was "in­debt­ed to the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (UTC) to the tune of US$20 mil­lion." He added that the state had "ap­proached Transcorp to pur­chase this land di­rect­ly (but) all of a sud­den, for rea­sons un­known to my­self, Transcorp en­tered in­to an agree­ment with the Gov­ern­ment of T&T where­by a new com­pa­ny, Broadgate, was formed."

He list­ed the fol­low­ing events in­volv­ing Broadgate:

�2 Ap­proach­ing First Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al Bank and tak­ing a US$20 mil­lion loan;

�2 pay­ing off the loan that Transcorp was ow­ing Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion; and,

�2 en­ter­ing in­to an agree­ment where­by the Gov­ern­ment guar­an­teed the re­pay­ment of the US$20 mil­lion loan and the cost of con­struct­ing a mul­ti-storey build­ing on the land owned by Broadgate – guar­an­tee­ing the cost of the con­struc­tion of the build­ing.

He said the Gov­ern­ment was sup­posed to rent part of the build­ing but the cost of the struc­ture was nev­er "pre­cise­ly quan­ti­fied" in the agree­ment.

The AG added that the rental "was tied to the loan and debt-ser­vic­ing oblig­a­tions of Broadgate. He said that meant that ef­fec­tive­ly "we were guar­an­tee­ing a loan to a pri­vate de­vel­op­er and all he had was the land which was fi­nan­cial­ly-bur­dened." Ram­lo­gan stressed: "If that is not a scan­dal, then I don't know what is, quite frankly."