Tobago House of Assembly finally paying off contractor debt

Money owed to contractors by the Tobago House of Assembly will be paid by next week, officials claim in a press conference. Vice chairman of the Tobago Division of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Demi John Cruickshank, announced yesterday that contractors with pending payments from the THA will be paid off by next week.

Payments upwards of $300 million in contracts by a previous administration were held up by an audit. Cruickshank states that the new administration has been “fighting tooth and nail to get some sort of payments to the contractors and the suppliers on the island”.

He suggested that the chamber held multiple meetings with the THA, specifically after Chief Secretary of the THA, Farley Chavez Augustine, put together an independent team in 2023 to manage the payment of contractors.

Augustine alleged some worrying signs which were laid out in a preliminary report in the audit of multiple THA programmes. The allegations mostly surrounded corruption, they included complete payments for little to no work, unsigned and unofficial contracts, and significantly inflated costs for road repairs. Augustine suggested the THA needed to thoroughly investigate and do its due diligence before any payments were made.

Cruickshank suggested that the audit had halted a number of businesses on the island and even forced many close to bankruptcy situations. Cruickshank said he can report that as of the first week of February, funds were transferred to the appropriate divisions of work to pay off the contractors, although not all contractors have been paid as of now. Cruickshank urged bankers and other financial institutions to extend the grace period as funds would be dispersed “within a week or so”.

There has been more pressure on the THA to sort out the delay. Earlier this month Chairman of the Tobago Division of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce Curtis Williams said the business community has grown exhausted by the promises and unusual delay of payments to Tobago businessmen.

He said, “We at the chamber will definitely raise concern and we will definitely expose who we need to be exposed with the promises that never materialized.”

It is unclear how much of an influence this political threat had on speeding up the process, but it brought the topic down to public discussion and discourse which doesn’t put the THA in the best light.