Kall­co CEO Roger Ganesh has de­fend­ed the com­pa­ny owned by his son-in-law Arvin Kalloo, say­ing they en­gaged in a com­pet­i­tive ten­der­ing process for ther Man­zanil­la High­way con­tract like all the oth­er com­pet­ing firms.

He said Kall­co par­tic­i­pat­ed in a process that was “ex­treme­ly rig­or­ous, even more rig­or­ous than in the past, you need to have a lot of bonds in place as­sets etcetera, we ten­dered com­pet­i­tive­ly and we qual­i­fied at all lev­els, tech­ni­cal­ly and fi­nan­cial­ly.” He added they “par­tic­i­pat­ed in a very fair and very trans­par­ent process” and won the bid “fair­ly and square­ly.”

He dis­missed al­le­ga­tions that the com­pa­ny got the con­tract be­cause of its re­la­tion­ship with Sinanan, say­ing “the Min­is­ter had no say, he could not make a rec­om­men­da­tion for the con­tract. This was NID­CO. No Min­is­ter gets in­volved in the process.”

Ganesh said while “mau­vais langue, gos­sip and bad talk is the norm” in this coun­try, he want­ed peo­ple to “stop the un­fair crit­i­cism be­cause it is dan­ger­ous.”

He said: “I have my fam­i­ly, chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, and when peo­ple say things it both­ers me a lot.”

Ganesh, who was the longest serv­ing di­rec­tor of high­ways in the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture and re­tired in 2014, ad­mit­ted that Kall­co was ter­mi­nat­ed from the Mara­cas Bay project, but he said this was “not be­cause the com­pa­ny could not do the job,” but be­cause of the fail­ure of the en­gi­neer­ing firm re­tained by the Min­istry of Tourism, which he said “failed in ad­min­is­ter­ing and man­ag­ing the project” prop­er­ly.

As a for­mer di­rec­tor of high­ways, he said he had the knowl­edge and ex­per­tise to do any project.