The Jean De La Valette (JDLV) fast fer­ry is ex­pect­ed to dock in Port-of-Spain in about sev­en days time.

The ves­sel de­part­ed Spain on June 14 short­ly af­ter 6 pm.

A state­ment from the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (NID­CO) on Fri­day stat­ed that the ves­sel would be mak­ing one bunker­ing stop in Cape Verde, Africa and that it was pro­ject­ed to ar­rive at the Port in Port-of-Spain with­in ten days, de­pen­dent on good weath­er con­di­tions.

The Jean De La Val­lette is be­ing leased at a cost of 34,500 Eu­ros or TT$263,580 per day.

The ves­sel was sourced from Mal­ta and was leased from Vir­tu Fer­ries, whose man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Fran­cis Por­tel­li of the par­ent com­pa­ny Vir­tu Hold­in­gs had been named in a huge oil scan­dal in Mal­ta, in­volv­ing al­le­ga­tions of mon­ey laun­der­ing and bribery.

Al­though the Op­po­si­tion claimed the pro­cure­ment of the ves­sel was ques­tion­able be­cause of the is­sues in­volv­ing Por­tel­li, NID­CO Chair­man Es­ther Farmer de­fend­ed the con­tract say­ing Por­tel­li's court mat­ter was not rel­e­vant to the pro­cure­ment process.

Farmer told the me­dia that NID­CO "deals with the le­gal­i­ty of some­thing, not the con­cept".

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan when con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day on when the ves­sel is ex­pect­ed to ar­rive on­ly said "not this week."

Ef­forts to reach Nid­co's chair­man Es­ther Farmer for fur­ther de­tails proved fu­tile yes­ter­day as calls to her phone went unan­swered.