Jack writes Kamla on PURE: Newsday report

By MIRANDA DE LA ROSE Tuesday, January 17 2012 (reproduced from NEWSDAY)

WORKS and Infrastructure Minister Jack Warner yesterday revealed that he has written to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Finance Minister Winston Dookeran regarding the systems audit by Dookeran’s ministry of the Programme for Upgrading Road Efficiency (PURE).

“The audit did not make sense and I have written the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance on this,” Warner said as he spoke to Newsday yesterday at WASA’s head office in St Joseph for the State utility’s second National Secondary Schools Quiz competition

On November 30, Persad-Bissessar announced the audit, following allegations of irregularities. She promised to await the findings of the audit before taking any steps. The unit’s work has been at a standstill since then and some engineers have even left PURE. 


Warner said he received a copy of the findings and recommendations as contained in an Interim Report of the Central Audit Committee last week. 


“I wait to see what next developments there are. In the meantime PURE is at a standstill and so is the country,” Warner said. Warner also said one of the recommendations, was for contracts to be given out on a more geographical basis, nonsense. “Contracts should be given based on competence and performance,” he said.

He said another recommendation, that the PURE Unit or pre-qualified contractors should not be given contracts above $10 million, was also nonsense. “That too is nonsense. Contracts must be given to people who are good and the contracts must be evaluated.”

Warner said that in his letter to the PM and Finance Minister, “I made the point that PURE does not give out contracts, the ministry (of Works) does not give out contracts. Contracts are given out by NIPDEC (National Insurance Property Development Company Limited) based on evaluation. All they had to do was to ask me.”

He said that he found it “passing strange” that an audit was done with no one speaking to the line minister with responsibility for the audited unit. The auditors made some recommendations which Warner said, he implemented even before the audit began. He did not elaborate on these recommendations.

He questioned the reason for the audit for the period 2002 to 2010 when he was not the Works Minister. Warner said he would not have had a problem with an audit of PURE for the past 18 months.

Almost 95 per cent of the work, done over the past 18 months, he said were in Siparia, Penal, Oropouche and Barrackpore. “If these guys have some agenda, tell me. I have no problem with that. Don’t hold the country to ransom based on some audit. That, I say, is spurious. I make no apologies for saying this,” Warner said.