Rhon­dor Dowlat

The Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) has con­firmed that it owes $55.6 mil­lion to con­struc­tion firm Car­il­lion (Caribbean) Ltd.

Ude­cott's me­dia, events and com­mu­ni­ty out­reach man­ag­er, Rox­anne Sta­ple­ton-Whyms told the T&T Guardian the sum was for base build­ing works on the PK 3 � Board of In­land Rev­enue Tow­er at Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza in Port-of-Spain.

"As a re­sult of the out­stand­ing claim, Car­il­lion sus­pend­ed works on the project," Sta­ple­ton-Whyms said.

In 2010, Ude­cott al­leged­ly ter­mi­nat­ed the $302.9 mil­lion con­tract award­ed to Car­il­lion to fit-out the Board of In­land Rev­enue Tow­er and an in­de­pen­dent claims con­sul­tant was hired to as­sess the con­struc­tion firm's claim. Ude­cott and Car­il­lion ne­go­ti­at­ed a sum to restart work on the project in 2012 and the com­pa­ny car­ried out base build­ing works from 2012 to 2014, when the con­tract end­ed.

Sta­ple­ton-Whyms said Ude­cott and Car­il­lion are in the fi­nal stages of set­tling the fi­nal ac­count.

Asked to com­ment on the monies owed, Car­il­lion Cana­da's di­rec­tor, Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, An­drew Brown would on­ly say: "As I'm sure you can ap­pre­ci­ate, deal­ings with any clients are strict­ly con­fi­den­tial."

Just week, the T&T Guardian re­port­ed that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 55 em­ploy­ees at Car­il­lion (Caribbean) Ltd's Cara­pichaima fa­cil­i­ty have been of­fered vol­un­tary sep­a­ra­tion pack­ages (VSEP) There are re­ports that the com­pa­ny plans to wind up its lo­cal op­er­a­tions by year's end.

It was al­so al­leged that man­age­ment gave in­struc­tions not to take on projects that would ex­ceed No­vem­ber/De­cem­ber this year.

Brown said due to the drop in oil prices over the past year and the cur­rent eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion in T&T, Car­il­lion has had to take steps to re­main com­pet­i­tive in the mar­ket. He the com­pa­ny has be­come more se­lec­tive in works ten­dered and will fo­cus on the core skills of fab­ri­ca­tion, in­clud­ing off­shore in­stal­la­tion and fab­ric main­te­nance works.