Kay-Marie Fletch­er

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny (MTS) will soon un­der­go an in­de­pen­dent foren­sic au­dit as its board has dis­cov­ered ev­i­dence of sus­pi­cious ad­vanced pay­ments to con­trac­tors with­out proof of work ac­tu­al­ly be­ing done.

Dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) held yes­ter­day, MTS Chair­man Adri­an Bar­ran re­vealed that a foren­sic au­dit in­to the com­pa­ny’s fi­nances will be­gin at the end of Jan­u­ary or ear­ly Feb­ru­ary.

Sen­a­tor Anil Roberts drilled MTS on whether the com­pa­ny paid Ven­ture Cred­it Union monies owed to con­trac­tors for work done by com­pa­nies linked to a PNM sen­a­tor.

Roberts said, “I put it to you that there’s an is­sue that the pop­u­la­tion is aware of, that there were con­tracts of a for­mer PNM gov­ern­ment sen­a­tor that his fam­i­ly’s com­pa­nies did work and MTS, rather than pay­ing the com­pa­ny di­rect­ly as is the norm, paid to Ven­ture Cred­it Union. Does that fol­low fi­nan­cial rules? And if it doesn’t, please ex­plain what are the el­e­ments and mis­chief that oc­curred at that point?”

Bar­ran re­spond­ed, “We did see as a board some ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and from that, this is why we rec­om­mend­ed an in­de­pen­dent, foren­sic au­dit to bring to light the fac­tu­al in­for­ma­tion.”

Bar­ran ad­mit­ted that his anx­i­ety was through the roof when he came up­on in­di­ca­tors of ad­vanced pay­ments that were made to con­trac­tors in some in­stances with­out cor­re­spon­dence to con­tract­ed work, as well as a lack of quan­ti­ty re­ports.

He added that where pub­lic funds were dis­bursed with­out com­men­su­rate val­ue de­liv­ered, the board will pur­sue ap­pro­pri­ate reme­dies, in­clud­ing con­trac­tu­al en­force­ment, fi­nan­cial re­cov­ery and where ev­i­dence sup­ports it, re­fer­ral to the rel­e­vant le­gal and in­ves­tiga­tive au­thor­i­ties.

In re­sponse, Sen­a­tor Anil Roberts said, “So you are go­ing to do a foren­sic au­dit, and it is your be­lief that there may be crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion af­ter and there­fore you do not want to prej­u­dice that, so I will ac­cept that at this time and look for­ward to the foren­sic au­dit and it go­ing to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties. But as chair­man, at what state of anx­i­ety are you now, hav­ing seen what you have seen?”

Bar­ran replied, “Can I say high­er than this build­ing?”

Roberts re­spond­ed, “Well, you see now you just got the whole pop­u­la­tion anx­ious be­cause this is a very crit­i­cal thing and we are see­ing it across the board.”

Guardian Me­dia pre­vi­ous­ly re­port­ed that there was a net­work of com­pa­nies with busi­ness and per­son­al as­so­ci­a­tions to Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Fos­ter Cum­mings, which re­ceived over $100 mil­lion in state con­tracts dur­ing the PNM gov­ern­ment’s ten-year tenure.

It was re­port­ed that large chunks of those con­tract monies al­so found their way in­to Cum­mings’ per­son­al Ven­ture Cred­it Union (VCU) ac­count.

Com­pa­nies as­so­ci­at­ed with Cum­mings and/or his fam­i­ly busi­ness­es re­ceived more than $102 mil­lion in Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Con­tracts (HDC), Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UDE­COTT), and school im­prove­ment con­tracts un­der the PNM gov­ern­ment be­tween 2015 and 2025.

Cum­mings, how­ev­er, has de­nied any sug­ges­tions of wrong­do­ing and main­tains that the awards of con­tracts were above board.

Cum­mings is a mem­ber and was present for part of the JSC yes­ter­day.

He, how­ev­er, did not re­spond to ques­tions sent by Guardian Me­dia on the is­sue.