Commentary: Somebody must pay for Scarborough hospital cost overruns

The key issue is surely, that "overruns" on this scale are not overruns at all.

It would be impossible anywhere, ever, to justify increases from the initially calculated prices by this kind of percentage, for any valid, honest reason.

And no-one makes well intentioned mistakes on this scale either. Even if it were only one person doing the calculations. And if he or she had only the brains of a cow.

And it clearly, clearly could not have been just one person.

As in so many, many incidents, known or now coming to light, all so very typical of this country's track record of large scale corruption, it will have always inevitably been the same select crew of criminals, time and again meeting "around the back" to divide up their ill gotten spoils.

And even IF it could have been solely contractors or bureaucrats, (and I'm convinced otherwise), then that could not have happened, not even once without the specific complicity of government leaders.

And when you consider the social impact on the Tobago people of the lack of this facility, promised, well needed and overdue for so long, added to the financial cost to the taxpayers generally, then these bastards absolutely MUST, in the name of social justice, be caught, tried and damn well jailed for a long, long time. Every one of them. Whoever they are.

Abuse of positions of trust warrants severe punishment, very severe, and every time. When the person that steals from you is trusted and has responsibility for your property it is more heinous a crime by far that a common thief taking the same thing.

You were not trusting and paying that common thief as you do those in positions of trust.

It needs to be made absolutely clear that such blatant corruption will categorically NOT be tolerated. They have time and again been raping this nation. Knowingly and quite deliberately.

And insofar as the actual money is concerned, being oil and gas money, (really the only substantial source of income the country has ever had, so far), "when it's gone, it's gone".

T&T cannot "make over" the revenue from that specific oil or gas sale. So let's not minimize the severity of the loss to current and future generations.

John Lindsay, UK