Deputy Premier condemns ‘deceitful power-seeking strategy’

Deputy Premier Dr Natalio Wheatley has condemned what he termed the deceitful power-seeking strategies being used by some persons in the political arena.

“There is a strategy to seek power through misinformation and in some instances outright deception,” Dr Wheatley said while appearing on the governing Virgin Islands Party’s Let’s Talk radio show recently.

Dr Wheatley was at the time speaking on the issue of efforts made at branding the Multi-purpose Sports Complex air conditioning (AC) contract as ‘corrupt’.

“I have noticed [the deception]. I’ve seen it in many different areas. I’ve listened to radio shows, I’ve seen Facebook posts and we as Virgin Islanders have to have our heads on because sometimes persons are not exposed to the information so they cannot differentiate truth from lies,” warned Dr Wheatley who ministry oversaw the contract in question.

“So, it’s our job to come to the public and to explain to the public the facts, but the technique of seeking power through misinformation and outright deceit is not one that we can allow to stand,” he asserted.

How the AC contract was awarded

The Education Minister, who also has responsibility for sports, said the challenges of not having air-conditioning at the Multi-purpose Sports Complex were well known.

Dr Wheatley explained the AC unit was damaged by the hurricanes of 2017 and was basically made non-functional.

“As we all know, it caused a big challenge because that’s a national facility and when you don’t have [the AC] in use, people are in there sweating bullets and it’s very uncomfortable,” he related.

“We started a tender process and the tender process had some challenges so we had to do another tender process,” the Education Minister said.

Dr Wheatley further explained that two companies bid for the new tender process, but only one was ultimately successful after the process was recommended to be redone.

“When this tender came to Cabinet — and it was done through the tender committee [with] no interference from any elected person whatsoever — one of the contractors who tendered was eliminated by the tender committee because of something that was not done correctly in the tender process,” Dr Wheatley explained. “So, when [the bid] came to Cabinet, Cabinet only had one choice to make.”

He continued: “It’s very clear that the public understands that the tender committee made a recommendation, but by the time it came to Cabinet there was only one company that could be chosen.”

“It’s also important to note; when the Leader of the Opposition speaks – making it seem as though we made a choice between two different prices and we decided to go with the higher price – no, we only had one choice of a company to make in Cabinet,” the Deputy Premier continued.

According to Dr Wheatley, it should also be noted that the ‘higher-priced bid’ of $700,000 that the Opposition Leader spoke about was to completely replace a system – which that contractor recommended was the right thing to do – while the ‘lower-priced bid’ was to refurbish a system.

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