Legal action planned against KARES Engineering over Kato Secondary- Granger

Last Updated on Friday, 12 August 2016, 8:10 by Denis Chabrol

President David Granger says legal action will be taken against KARES Engineering to recoup monies that will be spent on fixing the defective Kato Secondary School.

Granger also ruled out that company being granted any further contracts to build large scale contracts.

“It’s a burden that we will have to place to bear. We will see what legal measures will be taken to recover the excess expenditures from the contractors but he is certainly is not going to be given any more contracts to do that kind of work,” he said on his weekly programme, Public Interest.

With the impending establishment of the Public Procurement Commission (PPC), the government would have little or no role in objecting to the award of multi-million dollar contracts. While the Procurement Act does not provide for the blacklisting of companies, the evaluating personnel could mark down a company on future bids if it was ever taken to court.

Rodrigues Architects Limited has estimated that it would cost GYD$140 million to repair the school that cost GYD$781 million to build. The company has said that was paid GYD$662 million and there is an outstanding payment of GYD$66 million.

The President reasoned that the previous People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) administration had been in a “rush” just before the May 11, 2015 elections to finish projects “at any cost in order to demonstrate that the previous administration was doing so well.”

Granger said that from all accounts the work done on the Kato Secondary School was “unsafe, an example of contractors believing that shoddy work could be hidden in the interior.

He said steps would be taken to rectify the massive faults to ensure that the classrooms and dormitories are safe. “We will do whatever is necessary to rectify the faults and as far as possible we will try to recover the cost from the contractor,” he said.

The company has already said that it had never been told of the defects within the liability period. KARES Engineering’s offer to share half of the cost to conduct additional pressure and integrity tests on the building have been rejected by Public Infrastructure Minister, David Patterson. He has also dumped an offer by the company to discuss what role it could play in repairing the building.