Renu­ka Singh

A vague mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar con­tract and poor­ly out­fit­ted cen­tres cost the Life Sport pro­gramme $34 mil­lion for an in­com­plete train­ing project.The con­tract be­tween lo­cal ed­u­ca­tion provider eBeam and the Min­istry of Sport/Sport Com­pa­ny (Sportt) is de­tailed in the Cen­tral Au­dit Unit's re­port and shows a De­cem­ber 2012 agree­ment for nu­mer­a­cy and lit­er­a­cy train­ing as part of the ed­u­ca­tion­al as­pect of the Life Sport pro­gramme.

The agree­ment man­dat­ed the pay­ment in two tranch­es, one $17 mil­lion pay­ment at the start of train­ing and the sec­ond, fi­nal, pay­ment on or be­fore Sep­tem­ber 2, 2013.By Jan­u­ary 2014, Sportt had not yet made the fi­nal pay­ment and sought le­gal ad­vice, ask­ing at­tor­neys at JD Sel­l­i­er & Co, whether it was still bound to pay the sec­ond and last tranche, even though eBeam Ltd had not de­liv­ered on the agree­ment.

Sportt's le­gal head, Lisa Solomon, was in­formed that be­cause the con­tract was not sub­ject to de­liv­ery there was no le­gal rea­son to with­hold pay­ment."Fail­ure on Sportt's part to pro­vide fa­cil­i­ties re­quired by eBeam puts Sportt in breach of its con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions," the lawyer found."The pay­ment of the re­main­ing 50 per cent of the con­tract­ed price (the re­main­ing fee of $17M) is linked to a date ie Sep­tem­ber 2, 2013 and not up­on cer­tain ser­vices be­ing com­plet­ed with­in a time­frame," the let­ter not­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to the doc­u­ments, eBeam was un­able to be­gin its ed­u­ca­tion­al train­ing be­cause of dif­fi­cul­ties and in­ad­e­qua­cies at the Life Sport cen­tres in­clud­ing lack of ba­sic ameni­ties such as wa­ter, elec­tric­i­ty and toi­let fa­cil­i­ties. There was "lit­tle or no ta­bles and desks, few chairs, poor light­ing and lack of fans," the le­gal re­port stat­ed.

"It is not clear who owns or has con­trol over the cen­tres and if there was a con­tract be­tween a third par­ty and Sportt and/or Min­istry of Sport to en­sure the build­ings and fa­cil­i­ties were up to a cer­tain stan­dard in prepa­ra­tion for eBeam to car­ry out its scope of ser­vices un­der the con­tract," the le­gal let­ter stat­ed."How­ev­er, as it stands Sportt is legal­ly ob­lig­at­ed un­der the con­tract to have pro­vid­ed the fa­cil­i­ties for eBeam as set out in the con­tract."

This le­gal ad­vice, con­tained in the let­ter dat­ed Jan­u­ary 17, 2014, al­so sug­gest­ed that Sportt in­ves­ti­gate the short­com­ings at the Life Sport cen­tres."As pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned, Sportt should con­duct an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the al­le­ga­tions made by eBeam re­gard­ing the in­ad­e­qua­cies of the cen­tres, as Sportt is legal­ly ob­lig­at­ed un­der the con­tract to pro­vide fa­cil­i­ties/places that are re­quired and nec­es­sary for eBeam to car­ry out its ser­vices," the let­ter stat­ed.Sev­er­al calls to the com­pa­ny went unan­swered.