Ot­to Car­ring­ton

The is­sue of ca­ble theft is now be­com­ing preva­lent across the is­land, as many are steal­ing the ca­bles to sell as scrap met­al. Sev­er­al peo­ple have al­ready been ar­rest­ed while two have been killed dur­ing such acts.

Ad­dress­ing the is­sue on Tues­day, Scrap Iron Deal­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Al­lan Fer­gu­son said they are not the ones to blame. In­stead, he blamed the sit­u­a­tion on lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion provider TSTT.

He said, “About two months ago, we wrote TSTT and this pro­ceed­ed to have a meet­ing with them to try to solve the prob­lem that we would have fore­seen hap­pen­ing to­day. We worked with TSTT back in 2008, as dur­ing this time there was an up­surge in the theft of these ca­bles and we, as an as­so­ci­a­tion, worked with them to stop this from hap­pen­ing and this is on record.”

He added: “I am putting all the blame on TSTT and our as­so­ci­a­tion is not tak­ing the blame for any­one that climbs any pole and cut ca­bles. I am not putting my or­gan­i­sa­tion in that po­si­tion to take any blame for what is cur­rent­ly hap­pen­ing across the coun­try, it was about two months ago we wrote TSTT ask­ing them for a meet­ing for an un­der­stand­ing to solve this sit­u­a­tion and a way for­ward.

“We showed them a pro­pos­al that would al­low them to con­trol these thefts im­me­di­ate­ly. We sub­mit­ted this pro­pos­al in one week, how­ev­er, we pro­posed a part­ner­ship rather than al­low­ing them to pay us, which would have to go to ten­der or bid. We want­ed to pay them for the ca­bles and we would even use their con­trac­tors to re­move these ca­ble wires that are be­ing stolen every day. We would have done that and we were will­ing to pay them in US dol­lars.”

Fer­gu­son said he wants the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les to in­ter­vene in this mat­ter.

He thanked act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Mc Don­ald Ja­cob for a meet­ing with the as­so­ci­a­tion and hav­ing fruit­ful meet­ings and plans that will erad­i­cate this type of be­hav­iour.

He said, “Right now, TSTT is los­ing mil­lions of dol­lars and had they lis­tened to us from the start, they would not have lost any mon­ey, and for those buy­ing the cop­per, I can say that no small scrap iron yard in this coun­try can full a con­tain­er of cop­per and this is based on knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence in the sec­tor.”

He added: “I am telling you that small scrap yards can­not ful­fil this amount, a ton of cop­per is over $65,000 and one con­tain­er car­ries 20 tons, so this is big busi­ness.”

Fer­gu­son and his ex­ec­u­tive will be send­ing an of­fi­cial let­ter to Gon­za­les.

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