The most im­me­di­ate ob­ser­va­tion about the de­ci­sion of the Gov­ern­ment to send the de­fault of Con­stru­to­ra OAS con­tract on the Point Fortin-San Fer­nan­do High­way to a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) of the Par­lia­ment, is a ques­tion of why it has tak­en so long. This is es­pe­cial­ly so in the con­text of a pre­vi­ous Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to land ac­qui­si­tion for the project hav­ing been stalled since 2019.

The tech­ni­cal de­tails apart, the bot­tom line is that the OAS team failed to achieve the con­tract­ed task of com­plet­ing the high­way. And this is notwith­stand­ing a num­ber of ad­just­ments to the orig­i­nal agree­ment made to free OAS from as­pects of con­tract­ed work, and with­out a down­ward ad­just­ment to the orig­i­nal $5.2 bil­lion sum, said to be the largest ever sin­gle con­tract award­ed by a T&T gov­ern­ment.

The re­port­ed cir­cum­stances of the fail­ure were prompt­ed by the Brazil­ian-based com­pa­ny go­ing bank­rupt with sig­nif­i­cant parts of the work out­stand­ing. To add to the con­ster­na­tion, then prime min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her gov­ern­ment are re­port­ed to have re­moved claus­es of the con­tract which al­lowed for the con­tract’s ter­mi­na­tion on the ba­sis of the OAS bank­rupt­cy.

“This cu­ri­ous ac­tion paved the way for the gov­ern­ment to stand to lose over $900 mil­lion in bonds that se­cured the State’s in­ter­est, in the event of the bank­rupt­cy of the con­trac­tor,” stat­ed Prime Min­is­ter Dr Row­ley in a sit­ting Par­lia­ment this week.

All of this was said to have been done against the ad­vice of NID­CO’s con­sul­tants, and on the eve of the 2015 Gen­er­al Elec­tion.

Now, the even more cu­ri­ous el­e­ment of this sto­ry is that there is noth­ing new in the Prime Min­is­ter’s re­cent state­ment in re­fer­ring the mat­ter to the JSC of the Par­lia­ment. The re­al­i­ty is that all of the con­tentions in one form or the oth­er have been pre­vi­ous­ly placed in the pub­lic do­main.

Why, there­fore, has it tak­en so long for the claims of the present Gov­ern­ment to move from “ole talk” in po­lit­i­cal cam­paign­ing to the kind of ac­tion now be­ing tak­en? In­deed, the pre­lim­i­nary in­ves­ti­ga­tions should have been done in the im­me­di­ate post-2015 elec­tion, when Dr Row­ley and his par­ty came in­to of­fice and had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­am­ine the in­for­ma­tion left be­hind.

These ob­ser­va­tions and ques­tions are made and asked against the re­al­i­ty that a pas­sage of time has elapsed and made the trail of events a bit more dif­fi­cult to be ac­cu­rate­ly fol­lowed. To add to that de­lay, is the fact that it will un­der­stand­ably take an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od in­to the fu­ture be­fore a par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee can con­clude, and even more time for a po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion to be de­fin­i­tive­ly con­clud­ed.

If the con­clu­sion then is to charge sup­posed wrong­do­ers, court mat­ters will re­quire an even longer pe­ri­od.

In the cir­cum­stances, the in­evitable ques­tion and sus­pi­cion arise: has the tim­ing of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion been de­ter­mined to tie-up the UNC in pre-elec­tion cor­rup­tion pro­pa­gan­da lead­ing to the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly ap­point­ed gen­er­al elec­tion?

Notwith­stand­ing such de­gree of cyn­i­cism, al­though based on past ex­pe­ri­ences of cit­i­zens, it must be stat­ed that the coun­try needs firm de­ci­sions on at least one of the many al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion which drag on from ad­min­is­tra­tion to ad­min­is­tra­tion with­out con­clu­sion.