PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher

@guardian.co.tt

A fraud in­ves­ti­ga­tion is be­ing con­duct­ed in­to a let­ter pur­port­ed­ly signed by a se­nior ex­ec­u­tive of the Point Lisas De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (Plipde­co), which has been cir­cu­lat­ing on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms and so­cial me­dia.

The is­sue was raised by Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan at the com­mis­sion­ing of cus­toms and ex­cise mo­bile scan­ners, as well as the com­mis­sion­ing of the Plipde­co Train­ing Sim­u­la­tor at the in­dus­tri­al es­tate.

He said the let­ter was be­ing used to push a po­lit­i­cal agen­da.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we have heard on the po­lit­i­cal plat­form and we have seen on so­cial me­dia some neg­a­tives thrown at your com­pa­ny. That is un­for­tu­nate to me be­cause I sus­pect it is com­ing from play­ers with­in the com­pa­ny who have their own agen­da,” said Sinanan dur­ing his speech at the event.

“There is a doc­u­ment float­ing around which is a fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment, nev­er pro­duced by the com­pa­ny but bears the sig­na­ture of the chair­man. That is the ex­tent to which some peo­ple will go to cov­er up their wrong­do­ing.”

The min­is­ter said the ac­tion was meant to un­der­mine the good work at the com­pa­ny, which had re­cent­ly an­nounced an over 300 per cent in­crease in prof­its in its re­cent fi­nan­cial state­ments.

The min­is­ter lat­er con­firm that the mat­ter was be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed by the po­lice in an in­ter­view with the me­dia af­ter a tour of the new train­ing fa­cil­i­ty and rib­bon-cut­ting for the new scan­ners.

“It’s a let­ter well put to­geth­er by some­one who has a hid­den agen­da. And what is strange is that it was, you know, cir­cu­lat­ed on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms, be­ing read out by peo­ple who are al­so can­di­dates in a gen­er­al elec­tion. So, all in­di­ca­tions are that it’s po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed and a fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment. It was re­port­ed to the fraud squad, and the fraud squad are car­ry­ing out an in­ves­ti­ga­tion on that,” said Sinanan.

Com­mis­sion­ing of two scan­ners at Point Lisas

The com­mis­sion­ing of the two scan­ners at Point Lisas fol­lowed a sim­i­lar com­mis­sion­ing of the two port scan­ners at the Port of Port-of-Spain in Feb­ru­ary. Sinanan said the four scan­ners were pur­chased by the Min­istry of Fi­nance for $87 mil­lion.

He, how­ev­er, stressed that there was sig­nif­i­cant po­ten­tial for the train­ing sim­u­la­tor at Point Lisas, as he sug­gest­ed that there could be col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween both ports to save train­ing costs at the Port of Port-of-Spain.

Dur­ing his speech, Sinanan al­so called for col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the ports to use the train­ing fa­cil­i­ty in a bid to re­duce costs.

“There is no need for the Port of Port-of-Spain now to in­vest in a sim­u­la­tor, so I would ex­pect that there will be col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the two ports. Now we can vir­tu­al­ly save the Port of Port-of-Spain some mon­ey, which can be trans­ferred to the em­ploy­ees. Right, Mr An­nisette?” said Sinanan, re­fer­ring to Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers Trade Union pres­i­dent Michael An­nisette, who al­so ad­dressed the cer­e­mo­ny.

An­nisette was al­so op­ti­mistic about the train­ing fa­cil­i­ty but called on the gov­ern­ment to bring eq­ui­ty to the salaries of work­ers at both ports.

“I’m hop­ing, like I promised to Point Lisas work­ers when they were be­hind us, that we would catch up with the Point Lisas work­ers be­cause we can­not have a sys­tem and a port that are both run by the Gov­ern­ment and have our work­ers work­ing for as much as a 34 per cent dif­fer­ence in salaries for do­ing the same job,” said An­nisette.