Latest update June 16th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 21, 2024 News
Kaieteur News – The Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo continues to defend Booker Tate’s involvement in all aspects of the Skeldon Sugar Factory.
On Thursday, at his weekly press conference at the Office of the President, the VP explained why the company was involved in the design, management, and evaluation of the bid and the oversight of construction.
Citing this as an apparent conflict of interest, this publication asked him whether it was not a conflict of interest to have Booker Tate involved in the design of the Skeldon Sugar Factory, the evaluation of the bids, and then also be the Project Manager of the very project that it designed and helped pick the contractor.
Jagdeo disagreed that it was a conflict of interest. “Booker Tate was managing and therefore management had a role in the evaluation of the bids. So now that we’ve established that they were hired to do the feasibility study, to design the factory that they helped assess the bids, and then a separate Booker Tate team, not the management team, was selected to oversee the design, the construction,” he said.
He said because Booker Tate designed / participated in the design of the building, “I think it was thought at the board level because this is a decision of the board that it would be best to have them oversee the construction of the building.”
He explained that the decision and selection was done by “the best technical people with no political involvement.”
Jagdeo said the government, “established now that they were sued by this government, the PPP government for not fulfilling their role to ensure that the Chinese contractor see that they fulfilled the requirements of the contract.”
“In fact, they reviewed a design and approved elements of the design that failed, like the punt dumper etc… the conflict of interest is not the question here it is the professional services that they should have offered.”
The controversial Skeldon Sugar Factory has been riddled with problems ever since into begun operation in 2009. It has been a under the microscope from its construction under Jagdeo’s tenure as President, to its opening and the millions poured into it to keep it afloat. Over the years, a substantial number of concerned citizens have written to various publications in Guyana calling it an ‘industrial white elephant,’ a ‘dead duck’ and the death of sugar, amongst others.
This publication reported in October 2008 that Booker-Tate would not hold the responsibility for managing the implementation of the agricultural component of the Skeldon Sugar Modernisation Project, familiarly called the new Skeldon Factory at the time.
Booker-Tate was called in to manage the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) in 1990. The management team was scheduled to stay on board at the corporation for six months following the commissioning of the new Skeldon Sugar Factory, after which an international tender for management services was expected to be advertised.
Fast forward to December 2010, Kaieteur News reported that Booker -Tate sued the state-owned entity, in excess of £664,000 (G$208M) for unpaid fees. According to court documents filed by attorney Nigel Hughes, local lawyer for the UK-based sugar consultant, two separate actions were filed against GuySuCo.
In 2014, the tables turned when on July 15th this publication reported that because of the problems with the multi-billion-dollar Skeldon sugar factory has ended up in the courts with GuySuCo suing its former European manager for US$30M.
Then Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Raj Singh, while testifying before the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services, admitted that GuySuCo did not get what it asked for. As a matter of fact, the Skeldon Factory was built with design flaws, that almost five years after its commissioning, which led the facility to underperform.
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