Jesse Ramdeo

The Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) is ow­ing US$9 mil­lion (TT$60.8 mil­lion) to the de­sali­na­tion com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The rev­e­la­tion was made on Thurs­day dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee on land and phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture with fo­cus on WASA.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions from JSC mem­ber Bar­ry Padarath, WASA's Head of Fi­nance Giselle Spence pro­vid­ed an up­date on the sta­tus of the ar­rears.

"There was one fa­cil­i­ty used to help us as­sist in pay­ing De­sal­cott which was a re­volv­ing fa­cil­i­ty. That fa­cil­i­ty has ex­pired how­ev­er we have been us­ing our rev­enue to pay Descal­cott and en­sure the ar­rears we owe them is kept at a min­i­mum amount. So as of this month we owe one in­voice and part of an­oth­er in­voice for De­cem­ber. The amount owed is ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$9 mil­lion."

De­spite plans to set­tle the out­stand­ing bal­ance, ques­tions emerged as to whether or not the com­pa­ny's shut down for main­te­nance works were de­lib­er­ate and linked to late pay­ments.

"It may be co­in­ci­den­tal, it may be that they don't have the fi­nances, I am not sure but there are in­stances where it is maybe, I can­not say yes or no but there are in­stances."

The fu­ture of WASA has con­tin­u­ous­ly been un­der the mi­cro­scope af­ter a spe­cial­ly-com­mis­sioned re­port in­to its op­er­a­tions found the cash-strapped en­ti­ty was plagued by fi­nan­cial mis­man­age­ment, a lack of man­age­r­i­al ac­count­abil­i­ty, cor­rup­tion, par­al­lel op­er­a­tions by rep­re­sen­ta­tive trade unions and a gen­er­al re­fusal by em­ploy­ees to work.

The find­ings were con­tained in a 135-page re­port which has since been pre­sent­ed to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

There have been pro­posed plans to re­struc­ture the state com­pa­ny how­ev­er, Shep­pard main­tained there is no plan to axe work­ers.

"We have not iden­ti­fied any­one that is re­dun­dant, this man­age­ment sys­tem was placed in this po­si­tion nine months ago to en­sure we con­tain the op­er­a­tion of WASA and we about ef­fi­cien­cies in ar­eas we can. We are not en­gaged in any re­struc­tur­ing as such."

Mean­while, chair­man of the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion as­sured that while no moves have been made for any price in­creas­es, the cur­rent so­cio-eco­nom­ic cli­mate will play a de­ter­min­ing fac­tor.

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