Rhon­dor Dowlat

Em­ploy­ees of the Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (RDC) will be paid at least 50 per cent of the $.75 mil­lion in salaries owed to them be­fore the end of this week, a Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­istry of­fi­cial said yes­ter­day.

Ac­cord­ing to the em­ploy­ee, who did not want to be iden­ti­fied, some of the RDC em­ploy­ees will al­so be paid up to 75 per cent of their out­stand­ing salaries.

"The bal­ance of their salaries will be paid by month end. The em­ploy­ees were ex­pect­ed to be no­ti­fied by their chief (chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Taje­lal Sar­wan). Maybe some of them would have al­ready re­ceived their part pay­ment in their bank ac­counts by now (yes­ter­day at 6 pm)," the min­istry of­fi­cial said.

How­ev­er, the of­fi­cial could pro­vide no in­for­ma­tion on the RDC's fi­nan­cial stand­ings.

The work­ers re­ceived the promise yes­ter­day af­ter the T&T Guardian ex­clu­sive­ly re­port­ed that some 23 work­ers had not re­ceived their salaries since the start of the year.

Em­ploy­ees were re­port­ed­ly called in­to a meet­ing yes­ter­day by CEO Sar­wan, where the is­sue was dis­cussed. But some em­ploy­ees came out of the meet­ing still un­con­vinced and say­ing they would be "look­ing on close­ly from hence­forth."

The T&T Guardian learned that the 23 work­ers' salaries range from $3,500 to $25,000 a month, while di­rec­tors had al­so not been paid and ser­vice providers were al­so owed mon­ey since the start of the year as the com­pa­ny ran in­to fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ty.

The ex­tent of the fi­nan­cial woes at the spe­cial pur­pos­es com­pa­ny, an agency un­der the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, was high­light­ed in a March 24 memo in which em­ploy­ees were promised their out­stand­ing salaries by this month end.

It stat­ed: "In the ab­sence of re­ceipt of fund­ing from the Min­istry and the cur­rent cash po­si­tion of the com­pa­ny, please be ad­vised that salaries for March 2016 will not be paid by the 26th of the month as cus­tom­ary.

"It is ex­pect­ed that funds to meet op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es, in­clud­ing salaries and al­lowances, will be re­ceived in April 2016. Up­on re­ceipt of the funds, salaries for Feb­ru­ary and March 2016 and ar­rears for Jan­u­ary 2016, will be paid."

It is al­leged that the dire fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion has al­so put the $201 mil­lion Moru­ga Fish­ing Port project, orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled to be­gin in No­vem­ber, in jeop­ardy as well.

Es­tab­lished in 2005, the Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T has been man­dat­ed by the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment to im­prove the liv­ing con­di­tions of res­i­dents in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties. Ef­forts to reach Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Franklin Khan for com­ment yes­ter­day were un­suc­cess­ful as he did not re­spond to calls to his cell­phone or re­turn mes­sages.