The High Court has dis­missed a $24 mil­lion claim brought by Main­way In­dus­tri­al In­stal­la­tion Ltd against State-owned Es­tate Man­age­ment and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (EM­BD), rul­ing that the com­pa­ny wait­ed too long to pur­sue the al­leged out­stand­ing pay­ments.

In a de­ci­sion dat­ed Oc­to­ber 30, Jus­tice Sher­lanne Pierre found that the claim was filed out­side the four-year lim­i­ta­tion pe­ri­od pre­scribed by law. Main­way was seek­ing $9.4 mil­lion for con­struc­tion work car­ried out un­der two con­tracts, along with ap­prox­i­mate­ly $14.6 mil­lion in in­ter­est and fi­nance charges. The dis­pute re­lates to the La Ro­maine Res­i­den­tial De­vel­op­ment Project, con­tract­ed in 2008, and the Util­i­ty Cor­ri­dor Project, con­tract­ed in 2010.

EM­BD en­gaged Main­way to car­ry out the con­struc­tion works un­der both agree­ments.

Main­way main­tained that it was owed mon­ey for work com­plet­ed un­der the con­tracts but did not re­ceive pay­ment for four out­stand­ing pay­ment re­quests sub­mit­ted through Plan­v­i­ron Ltd, the en­gi­neer­ing com­pa­ny ap­point­ed by EM­BD to over­see the projects.

Un­der the con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments, Plan­v­i­ron was re­spon­si­ble for as­sess­ing Main­way’s work and is­su­ing in­ter­im pay­ment cer­tifi­cates to EM­BD.

The cer­tifi­cates were al­so sup­posed to be copied to Main­way.

How­ev­er, Main­way said it did not re­ceive copies of the rel­e­vant cer­tifi­cates un­til No­vem­ber 2023, de­spite the cer­tifi­cates hav­ing been is­sued in 2015.

The com­pa­ny ar­gued that it could not prop­er­ly pur­sue pay­ment with­out first re­ceiv­ing the cer­tifi­cates. It al­so con­tend­ed that EM­BD’s fail­ure to dis­close that the cer­tifi­cates had been is­sued amount­ed to the de­lib­er­ate con­ceal­ment of in­for­ma­tion rel­e­vant to its claim. But Jus­tice Pierre re­ject­ed that ar­gu­ment, find­ing that Main­way had op­por­tu­ni­ties to make fur­ther in­quiries years ear­li­er.

The judge not­ed that Main­way had writ­ten to EM­BD five times be­tween 2018 and 2019 de­mand­ing pay­ment and in­ter­est. How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny did not specif­i­cal­ly raise the fail­ure to re­ceive copies of the pay­ment cer­tifi­cates.

The court al­so not­ed that Main­way had pre­vi­ous­ly sought dis­clo­sure of the cer­tifi­cates in le­gal pro­ceed­ings ini­ti­at­ed in 2019, but those pro­ceed­ings were dis­missed af­ter the claim form ex­pired be­fore it was served on EM­BD.

Jus­tice Pierre found that Main­way had been put on no­tice to in­ves­ti­gate the mat­ter long be­fore re­ceiv­ing the cer­tifi­cates in 2023. The com­pa­ny had not demon­strat­ed that any­thing pre­vent­ed it from mak­ing those in­quiries ear­li­er.