Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath has dis­missed as “gos­sip and a con­coct­ed sto­ry” re­ports that the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) is now an­swer­ing to two ju­nior staff mem­bers with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

A so­cial me­dia blog­ger al­leged that, “The re­cent­ly in­stalled CEO of WASA is now be­ing forced to an­swer to ju­nior mem­bers of WASA. In the line min­is­ter’s ab­sence, all de­ci­sions are made through these two ju­nior, non-ex­ec­u­tive staff mem­bers.”

Sources with­in WASA have al­so al­leged to Guardian Me­dia that CEO Kei­throy Hal­l­i­day has been re­port­ing to two non-ex­ec­u­tive man­agers in re­cent days, with the au­thor­i­ty op­er­at­ing with­out a for­mal board fol­low­ing the mass res­ig­na­tion of all 11 mem­bers ear­li­er this month.

When con­tact­ed by Guardian Me­dia, Min­is­ter Padarath re­spond­ed, “I have asked you to find more cred­i­ble sources, be­cause it is un­true.”

“More will be said about WASA lat­er to­day, maybe then you would un­der­stand why some are mo­ti­vat­ed to cre­ate lies and in­nu­en­dos at this time,” Padarath added.

Last week, nine of the 11-mem­ber board re­signed, a de­vel­op­ment con­firmed by Padarath.

Re­spond­ing to the res­ig­na­tions on Tues­day, Padarath not­ed that it is stan­dard prac­tice for a board to re­sign when a new ad­min­is­tra­tion takes of­fice.

At the time he in­di­cat­ed, “I have been spend­ing a lot of my days and nights at WASA be­cause in the ab­sence of a board, the man­age­ment and op­er­a­tions of WASA do not stop, and while we cam­paigned on the elec­tion trail a lot on is­sues that im­pact state en­ter­pris­es like WASA, it al­so re­quires us to bring about short-term and long-term changes to the or­gan­i­sa­tion, so the or­gan­i­sa­tion is not rud­der­less with­out a board.”

He was al­so asked how op­er­a­tions would con­tin­ue with­out a chair­man. Padarath said, “The min­is­ter is in­struct­ing the CEO as we go along. I have a healthy work­ing re­la­tion­ship with Mr (Kei­throy) Hal­l­i­day at this time and we are en­sur­ing that the op­er­a­tions at WASA will con­tin­ue seam­less­ly.”

Asked whether this could be con­sid­ered po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence, Padarath sought to as­sure, “It is not a mat­ter of po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence. What this has to do [with] is that there is no board of di­rec­tors at this point in time. It will take a few weeks for the Gov­ern­ment to put in place a board be­cause it’s a process in which for that to hap­pen, so that ques­tion does not arise at all.”

Yes­ter­day, Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion Pres­i­dent Fe­li­cia Thomas de­fend­ed the Min­is­ter’s in­volve­ment in WASA, say­ing over­sight and re­form were es­sen­tial to re­build­ing pub­lic trust in the util­i­ty’s per­for­mance.