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How long will contracts be under review? Natalio Wheatley asks
“People have been meeting me in the streets and asking about the Biwater Water Purchase Agreement and saying that it has been more than three months since Government took office and promised to review the agreement. People are saying that it is time we hear something and they are on my case because they are saying that this is my Government and I am not saying anything about it,” Cromwell Smith said on the radio programme Umoja last evening March 1, 2012.
Smith noted that for the three months that the new Government has been in office there should have at least been an interim report since there are a few things that could be immediately known “because these are things sitting right there in offices and you don’t have to go anywhere to get these things unless the previous administration hid the documents or shredded them I don’t know but we should have at least known by now if all the procedures that could have made the contract effective were properly followed”.
Information that Smith believes should have been available and disclosed to the public are the terms of the financing of the project and if Government approved the terms; If the raw water extraction rights have been transferred to the company, if Biwater has found a source of raw water; if the plant’s design criteria and technical specifications have been agreed to by Government and if the lifecycle works have been agreed to.
“So we could know these things and know whether the proper procedures were followed. If we know that all the procedures were followed in order for the contract to become effective that would tell us that to get out of the contract would be next to impossible. And if we can’t get out of the contract then just say well listen we can’t get out of the contract, we got stuck and we just have to upload over 200 million dollars from the BVI to the UK on a regular basis. Just let us know so that we could just bring some closure to the whole situation.”
Co-host of the show, Natalio Wheatley, said the ruling party made a lot of promises, one of which was that they were going to try to get out of the contract. “We expect to have some type of information. The answer that was given to me was that all contracts are under review. How long will the contracts be under review and how long would the situation be under review before we learn what’s happening?” Wheatley asked.
“And the danger is that the work is going forward at a break neck speed and more and more investments Biwater makes, if you can in fact get out of the contract, the more liability you will have and therefore the more difficult it would be to come up with that money in order to buy out of the contract,” Smith added.
On February 18, 2010, Biwater signed a Build, Own, Operate, Transfer (BOOT) contract with the Virgin Islands Party Government for a sea-water desalination plant. The plant will produce 2.3 million imperial gallons of potable water per day, and a subsequent 16 year operation and maintenance period. In addition, the contract includes the design and build of two new sewage treatment plants to provide full sewerage treatment for Road Town and the East End territories to World Health Organisation standards.
The contract also includes the provision and installation of a water distribution leakage reduction programme complete with a tariff billing system, data logging of all storage reservoirs on Tortola to a central control station in Water and Sewerage Department to monitor the water supply 24/7.
The cost of water in Tortola is also expected to be substantially reduced when the desalination works come into full operation.
Meanwhile, the project had come under fierce attack from the then opposition now the ruling National Democratic Party, who had said it presented a contingent liability to the country and even questioned whether there was an exit clause.
The previous administration of the Virgin Islands Party government, as was recommended by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had used an independent firm to ascertain whether the Biwater contract, could in fact become a contingent liability to Government.
At August 30, 2011 House of Assembly sitting, former Premier Ralph T. O’Neal OBE, had laid the document on the table from Baker Tiley, an independent accounting firm, which found that the Biwater contract was not a contingent liability.
Currently, it is among one of the water and sewerage contracts that the Government said it is currently reviewing. This was revealed by Minister for Communications and Works Hon. Mark Vanterpool on Monday January 16, 2012 during the NDP Radio programme.
The Minister had said that he was unable to make any further statements but that the public would be updated after the review process.
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