By SEAN DOUGLAS Wednesday, November 4 2009

click on pic to zoom in

MINISTER: Emily Gaynor Dick-Forde, Minister of Planning, Housing and the Environment....

MINISTER of Planning, Emily Dick-Forde, said the cost of the Ministry of Education tower being built by the Shanghai Construction Group (SCG), hired by controversial Udecott, has risen from an initial $367.8 million to a revised sum of $460 million as of July. She was however, mum on claims that SCG owes $50 million in late penalty costs, calculated at a cost of $118,000 per day over 17 months.

Replying to a question on the adjournment of the Senate posed by Opposition Senator Wade Mark, she blamed this rise in the building’s cost on consultancy fees, architectural fees, civil works fees and fees for the project manager which had been changed during the construction.

“I want to advise, Mr President, that the original contract cost of the Ministry of Education Tower was $367.8 million.

“In July of 2007, the Cabinet approved a revised budget for $460 million...It moved from $367.8 (million) to $460 million because the original contract costs did not include architectural fees, consultants’ fees and civil works fees, as well as there is an additional project management fee as the project managers were changed”.

However, a Budget document, the Supplementary Public Sector Investment Programme (SPSIP) laid in Parliament on September 7, said the Ministry of Education Tower actually costs $611 million.

At page 126, this document states, “The estimated cost of the project is $611.1 million. The Building commenced in 2005 and is scheduled for completion in 2009”.

On page 59, the document says, “To date the sum of $355.6 million was expended on the project. For fiscal 2009, expenditure totalled $96.4 million”.

Interestingly, Newsday on March 12, reported Dick-Forde telling the Senate the tower costs $368 million, even as Mark reported last year’s SPSIP document also stating the cost as $611 million, with the difference never beingdenied by Dick-Forde.

Yesterday, Dick-Forde was unable to give a figure in reply to Mark’s query about the cost to outfit or furnish the building, saying there was just an estimate. “The final fit-out information has not been provided to Udecott as well.” She claimed, “So there is no escalation in the cost of the construction of the project, as Senator Mark is advancing, and he’s wrong again”.

Newsday later asked her the size of this estimate, but she said she didn’t know.

Newsday also asked her whether the outfitting of the building would be done by Shanghai as part of a build-design package ,or would be tendered, but she said she did not know. She said,“I don’t know. We have to wait until Udecott has reached that point...I do not know. When Udecott reaches that point, then we will find out. I’m not sure that they are there as yet”.

Udecott faced an outcry for awarding a non-tendered $300 million contract to outfit the $368 million Ministry of Legal Affairs (MLA) tower to the firm that built it, CH/Sunway Caribbean, which the Uff Commission of Inquiry heard has allegedly got two directors who are allegedly relatives of Udecott head, Calder Hart.

Regarding Mark’s allegation that SCG is liable to pay $50 million in late penalty costs, she told the Senate, “I do not have that information, because the motion did not suggest that that is where he (Mark) was going. I can provide it to the Senate when I get it”.

Earlier, Mark said former project manager, Lockwood Green, and architects, Gillespie and Steel, had both warned Udecott that SCG was compromising the safety in erecting glass curtain panels, but that SCG had allegedly ignored a Udecott instruction to cease this installation. However Dick-Forde complained that Mark had previously asked a question about the safety of the glass “curtain” panels on the building, as she read out her previous Hansard reply.

“The issue of the tower is being raised again in what I see as an attempt to panic the public unduly, because the issue has been carefully addressed by both the contractor, by Udecott and me in this honourable House on 22 July, 2008 in detail.”