Derek Achong

The State has been or­dered to pay a lit­tle over $300,000 in com­pen­sa­tion to a sta­tionery sup­pli­er, who was owed for goods sup­plied to the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and Rur­al De­vel­op­ment since 2015.

De­liv­er­ing an oral judg­ment at the end of a brief tri­al at the Hall of Jus­tice in Port-of-Spain on Tues­day, High Court Judge Frank Seep­er­sad ruled that busi­ness­man Bob­by Mun­gal and his com­pa­ny KBM En­ter­pris­es were en­ti­tled to the com­pen­sa­tion de­spite not hav­ing a writ­ten con­tract with the min­istry.

Seep­er­sad re­ject­ed the min­istry’s claims over the va­lid­i­ty of the oral agree­ment be­tween Mun­gal and of­fi­cials of the min­istry as he stat­ed that records, show­ing that the min­istry pur­chased $1.8 mil­lion in sup­plies from the com­pa­ny dur­ing their busi­ness deal­ings be­tween 2008 and 2014, proved that the min­istry had a run­ning ac­count with it and was re­quired to clear the out­stand­ing bal­ance.

In his judg­ment, Seep­er­sad crit­i­cised the min­istry’s of­fi­cials for en­gag­ing in the arrange­ment.

“This court takes ju­di­cial no­tice of the fact that though there ex­ists many prac­tice and pol­i­cy di­rec­tives, far too many pub­lic au­thor­i­ties op­er­ate on an ad hoc ba­sis and prop­er pro­cure­ment prac­tices are not en­gaged...This type of op­er­a­tion has to cease and every ef­fort has to be made to adopt and im­ple­ment prop­er pro­cure­ment prac­tices,” Seep­er­sad said.

He al­so sug­gest­ed that such arrange­ments put small busi­ness own­ers in a pre­car­i­ous po­si­tion.

“Busi­ness­es are then caught in the web and are placed in un­ten­able sit­u­a­tions as their eco­nom­ic sur­vival be­comes con­tin­gent up­on the whims and fan­cies of of­fi­cials,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence pre­sent­ed dur­ing the tri­al, when the arrange­ment be­gan in 2008, Mun­gal’s com­pa­ny agreed to pro­vide cred­it to the min­istry on the pro­vi­sion that the pay­ment is made with­in six months.

The com­pa­ny cut ties with the min­istry in June 2015 af­ter it failed to ad­here to the pay­ment plan un­der the agree­ment. At the time, the min­istry’s charge ac­count was $323,281.36 in deficit.

Seep­er­sad or­dered the State to pay the statu­to­ry in­ter­est on the debt, start­ing from the date of his judge­ment, un­til it cleared.

Mun­gal and his com­pa­ny were rep­re­sent­ed by Reah Sookhai, while Rachel Thurab and Ryan Grant rep­re­sent­ed the State.