Newsday’s Editorial
Thursday, April 2 2009
It seems that every expert testimony given so far to the Uff Commission of Inquiry has revealed mismanagement, technical incompetence and, perhaps, deep-rooted corruption.
The testimony given by engineer Arun Buch last Tuesday on the Tarouba Stadium project was especially damning. “I have never seen anything like this,” said Buch, who has more than 30 years experience in the construction industry. But he placed blame for the myriad faults at the feet of Turner Alpha Limited, who were responsible for the stadium’s design. Udecott, said Buch, was not culpable, since the corporation was not required to know about design issues.
Continue reading Corruption poster child
Let us forget for a moment the “spring cleaning” exercise the Government has undertaken in preparation for the Fifth Summit of the Americas. True, we all tend to put our best faces forward when we invite visitors to our homes. But one cannot live in an unholy dump year-round and clean up only for Christmas or for visitors-it’s stupid. Trinidadians, more so than Tobagonians, have descended into a kind of nastiness that is difficult to understand.
There is clearly a link between the findings contained in the February 20 report presented by Gerry McCaffrey, construction expert hired by the Uff Commission of Inquiry that the structural steel work at the Brian Lara Stadium project “is effectively condemned” and the cancelling of his return flight to Trinidad on February 27 by the Office of the Prime Minister.
During the RIC hearings that subsequently resulted in the current electricity rate hike I made it abundantly clear that the net effect of the proposed unit rate increase from 15 cents to 35 cents per unit would result in a 45% hike in electricity bills. T&TEC and the RIC under Professor Dennis Pantin used every statistical trick in the book to deny and discredit this percentage increase.
FOR too many years we have haggled over what the minimum wage should be in this country: should we pay the poor buggers $9 an hour, or $10? That would amount to less than $2,000 a month, but it’s worth fighting over. For those trapped in this gloomy underworld-not so hidden, since we shop at groceries and stores where they labour every day-it could mean being able to afford an extra “doubles” for lunch, or buying their children the toys they so covet. As far as I am concerned, what we call a minimum wage is in fact starvation wage, a kind of semi-slavery endured only by those who have no other options, except perhaps to turn to crime.
It is patently clear to me that had not CL Financial magnate Lawrence Duprey made his pre-emptive approach to Government in mid-January to mobilize State injection of liquidity into his cash-strapped investment bank, CIB, CMMB and insurance giants CLICO and British American it would have been business as usual to date.