Sascha Wil­son

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fice (CEO) of Ju­nior Sam­my Group of Com­pa­nies Dave Aqui has dis­missed as a "smoke­screen, ab­surd and sen­sa­tion­al­ism," al­le­ga­tions of a bi­tu­men rack­et in­volv­ing lo­cal con­trac­tors. In a press state­ment yes­ter­day, Aqui took Lake As­phalt of T&T (LATT) to task, deny­ing claims that lo­cal con­trac­tors owed the com­pa­ny more than $24 mil­lion. At a meet­ing with Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er on Mon­day, Lake As­phalt chair­man Kuar­lal Ram­per­sad in­formed him that their in­ves­ti­ga­tion had re­vealed that mil­lions of gal­lons of bi­tu­men sold to con­trac­tors for gov­ern­ment projects can­not be ac­count­ed for.

Aqui said it was a smoke­screen as Lake As­phalt had no valid jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the con­cern raised by Warn­er that con­trac­tors were com­plain­ing that they could not get bi­tu­men from Petrotrin to do their work. "The Gov­ern­ment and, in par­tic­u­lar, the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture are not the on­ly users of as­phalt as was im­plied in the me­dia re­port," he said. "While the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture is the ma­jor con­sumer of as­phalt in the coun­try, there are sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers such as pri­vate hous­ing de­vel­op­ers, heavy in­dus­tries, oth­er state com­pa­nies-EM­BD, HDC, AATT, etc-so to sug­gest that the ex­cess of bi­tu­men pur­chased from Petrotrin and not used on gov­ern­ment roads is lend­ing some sort of "rack­et" akin to the dieso­line sit­u­a­tion is shal­low and ab­surd and demon­strates a to­tal ig­no­rance of the mar­ket place."

Con­tact­ed for a com­ment yes­ter­day, Petrotrin se­nior cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer Wal­ford Cok­er said: "All we have to say is that Lake As­phalt is re­spon­si­ble for the sale of all bi­tu­men in T&T...They are re­spon­si­ble for all lo­cal sales." Warn­er, who has ex­pressed his as­ton­ish­ment over the al­le­ga­tions, in­di­cat­ed that he would be meet­ing with the con­trac­tors to hear their side of the sto­ry.