Dart-led consortium not properly checked: Cayman News Service

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(CNS): Recently, Collapse One of the issues that loomed during government negotiations with a Dart-led consortium to build a waste-to-energy facility and waste management system at the Georgetown dumpsite is that the parties involved in the public-private partnership may not be fully qualified to do the job. Condemnation Report Regarding the project, called ReGen, Auditor General Sue Winspear expressed concern that the consortium of contractors chosen had not been properly checked.

The report states that the Auditor General’s Office has not received any evidence that the government conducted any due diligence on the contractors or members of the contractor consortium.

The attorney general’s office said the parties involved in the project changed throughout the process, other than the actual bidders. It also found that the consortium’s contractors had “changed significantly” since the government selected them in September 2017.

steinmuller gmbh Auditors noted that the company had replaced BWSC Volund Ltd as the technology provider for the energy recovery facility.

In September 2019, two years after winning the bid, the fund manager Iona Capital joined the consortium as an equity partner. Prior to this, DECCO, a company owned by Dart that had originally bid, was the sole owner, but the change left Iona and DECCO each with a 50% interest in the contractor, the report said.

BWSC Volund, the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) subcontractor and operations and maintenance provider, was originally a general contracting specialist and the most important party in the consortium. However, during their work, the auditors learned that the company intended to exit the waste management EPC market.

In her report, Winspear said the Department of Health failed to conduct due diligence on either the original or replacement members of the consortium, exposing the government to greater financial and reputational risk as a result.

When the Attorney General’s Office found that initial calculations of the amount of waste generated in the Cayman Islands were mere guesswork and turned out to be wrong, there was no evidence that government had ever checked Dart’s proposed price increases.

When the Department of Environmental Health began weighing and properly measuring the waste it handled, and government informed Dart of the cost increase, the organization received a response that the construction cost had increased significantly, to approximately CI$76 million.

However, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, then led by Dwayne Seymour, who was a member of the PPM government at the time, did not verify whether the claim was true. The plant processed 15% more waste than originally expected, but the contractor claimed that the construction cost had risen by 58%, which officials seemed to have accepted without verification.

The blunders occurred during the 2017 negotiations even though the government spent millions hiring consultants to help them. The auditor general, who has previously warned the PPM that the government was spending too much on consultants and that the public purse was not getting value for money, revealed in her report that her previous suggestion It seems that it is not taken seriously.

In negotiating the waste management project, the government hired external consultants as financial, legal, technical and environmental advisors at a cost of $6.5 million, most of which far exceeded the projected costs. The Attorney General’s Office said the contracts were not actually included in the budget and the contracts awarded to the legal consultants were not completed through a transparent or competitive process required by the Public Administration and Finance Act.

Worse still, the audit found that, shockingly, financial advisers did not actually carry out value for money analysis, which appears to be a fundamental point in employing them and a basic requirement of government policy, procedure and law.