Cost Overruns Were Not Incompetence: They Were Theft
My friends, for the past 14 years we have seen one major government project after another double, triple or quadruple in cost with no accounting ever given. Whatever the BLP government touched seemed to go bad – think GEMS Hotels, the office at Warrens, giving out millions of dollars of weed-trimmers (purportedly to “help” young men start “businesses” trimming rich folks’ lawns like their grandfathers before them), Greenland dump (50 million spent so far and not a piece of garbage can be put there until another 20 million is spent), Kensington Oval (150 million and still no lights so Barbados was embarrassed before the world) and so many other failed government projects.
Recently we’ve seen the debacle over the new jail built by the corrupt VECO Corporation and the ABC Highway and Flyover project being built by the 3S Structural Steel Solutions bunch of crooks who are facing fraud charges over kickbacks on a previous bridge project in Jamaica.
Why Do Our Government Projects Cost So Much?
Gather round, children – and Uncle Marcus will tell you the story of how your Prime Minister, his Cabinet and other BLP supporters arrange government projects so as to siphon your tax dollars from the projects into their secret offshore bank accounts in Europe, the USA and Africa.
The Prime Minister and his gang have created a method of stealing money that is so slick you’ll have to think about it for a while even if we describe it fully.
The ABC Highway project is only one example of many – but it is a good one.
How Prime Minister Arthur Used The ABC-Flyover Project To Put Your Money In His Offshore Bank Accounts
Step 1 – Choose A Foreign Contractor Who Will Cooperate In Providing Kickbacks To Politicians
Firstly, Owen Arthur and the gang chose a foreign company to be the prime contractor. That company, 3S Structural Steel Solutions, had never built anything when chosen by the Prime Minister in a behind-closed-doors meeting.
There are two reasons for choosing a foreign contractor:
1/ The contractor is based in a foreign country so payments from the government are made to bank accounts outside of Barbados. This is important because the Prime Minister’s gang doesn’t want the kickback payments to the politicians to be made within Barbados – for obvious reasons.
2/ The foreign contractor must be willing to take a portion of the monies received from the Barbados Government and divert the monies into a channel that eventually ends up in the offshore bank accounts of Barbados politicians.
Obviously, 3S Steel Solutions met both criteria. Its President, Jonathan Danos, is corrupt and recently even admitted it! In a sworn affidavit before a UK court, Mr. Danos explains how he paid huge bribes to politicians’ middlemen so that the governments of Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Panama would award the contracts to his employer at the time: Mabey and Johnson Limited.
So Jonathan Danos would say yes to providing kickbacks to Prime Minister Owen Arthur and others in exchange for the ABC Flyover project.
The second part of the plan was realized when 3S Structural Steel Solutions was created in 2005 as a new company working out of a single room in the USA.
Think about that folks – the company chosen by Prime Minister Arthur to build a project costing hundreds of millions of dollars had never built anything before, and had its office in a single rented room in the USA. Hundreds of millions of your tax dollars going through a company that is essentially a table, a chair and a phone in a rented room.
Step 2 – Have A Relative Or Friend Set-up A Consulting Company In The USA, UK, Caribbean, Asia or Africa
Here’s where the fun starts. You see, the politicians don’t want 3S and Jonathan Danos to write them a cheque directly – even if it is coming from the 3S in the USA to the politician’s account in, say, the Channel Islands off the UK.
What the politicians do is to have a front person incorporate a company for them in some offshore banking haven. The front man’s name appears on the company records, but the Prime Minister’s name doesn’t appear anywhere.
Do You See How It All Works?
1. Government awards a large project to a crooked offshore contractor.
2. Crooked offshore contractor hires Bajan firms to do the real work because the offshore contractor isn’t a real company with the resources to handle the project themselves.
3. Government pays the offshore contractor. Let’s say 100 million dollars as an example. The offshore contractor pays the Bajan firms that did the real work perhaps 50 million dollars. That leaves 50 million left.
4. Offshore contractor pays an offshore “consulting company” owned by the Prime Minister say, 25 million dollars for “engineering consulting and reports”. The Prime Minister’s name isn’t attached to the “consulting company”, but perhaps his wife owns most of the shares.
5. After losing the election, Owen Arthur lives abroad where the “consulting company” pays him big money for, well, consulting!
6. Even if the new DLP government is suspicious, the trail from tax money to the Prime Minister’s pocket is long and daunting. Danos and 3S probably have many legitimate “consultants” working on the flyover project, so sorting it all out would be extremely difficult.
There you go folks, the perfect theft of millions of tax dollars by the Prime Minister.
If you think that scenario is unlikely, you are living in some fairy tale land.
Read the following…
The Nation News: ABC Shame
