The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Government will spend a combined $6.75m in the upcoming 2024-2025 fiscal year on two maritime contracts that are central to a whistleblower’s lawsuit and have drawn Opposition scrutiny.

Data released with last week’s Budget presentation reveals that the Davis administration is allocating $3.15m to complete the “online portal to enhance revenue collection at the Port Department” plus $3.6m, the first in a series of ongoing annual payments involving the same sum, for “maintenance and upkeep of navigation aids for the Port Department”.

Both contract awards, said to have been made in early 2023, are seemingly only being financed to a large extent for the first time in the 2024-2025 Budget - more than an entire fiscal year later. The online portal contract, which was awarded to DigieSoft Technologies, is given a project start date of March 1, 2024, and was forecast to cost $3.355m.

However, the Budget details released last week show some $590,000 in “cumulative expenditure” as having been incurred. This is understood to be the anticipated outlay, or spend, on the online portal contract during the final three months of the present 2023-2034 Budget year, which would take the total spend to $3.74m and imply a slight cost overrun as no funding has been allocated beyond 2024-2025.

Meanwhile, the contract for the maintenance of navigational aids in Nassau and other harbours, which was awarded to Adolpha Maritime Group, is shown as having a start date of January 23, 2023, although there is no indication that any funding has been provided for this to-date. The $3.6m annual allocation is in line with the previously cited $3.57m price tag.

Antoinette Thompson, the former top civil servant in the then-Ministry of Transport and Housing, cited both contracts for procedural irregularities in her lawsuit filed against the Government last year. They have also been the subject of controversy since last year’s Budget debate when Michael Pintard, the Opposition’s leader, challenged whether the awards breached public procurement laws then in existence.

Both Prime Minister Philip Davis KC and Jobeth Coleby-Davis, minister of energy and transport, have vehemently rejected Mr Pintard’s assertions and strenuously defended both the DigieSoft Technologies and Adolpha Maritime Group contract awards.

However, Mr Pintard yesterday told Tribune Business that the Opposition has subsequently gained “useful information” that will enable it to “cross-check” the Government’s statements on both companies. He also questioned whether it was appropriate for the Government to proceed with executing both contracts given that they featured heavily in, and are central to, Ms Thompson’s legal action.

“Since our last discussion about the two companies you have asked about...., the Opposition has been able to obtain useful information that would enable us to ask crucial questions, relative to both companies, and to cross-check claims made by minister Jobeth Colby-Davis and the Prime Minister in the House of Assembly when addressing this issue,” Mr Pintard said via e-mail reply.

Later contacted by Tribune Business, Mr Pintard said the DigieSoft and Adolpha contract awards were “a critical issue to have publicly aired to the extent that the law permits given the fact these are matters that are” the subject of Ms Thompson’s lawsuit and therefore “sub judice”.

Asked why he thought the Government had now moved to fund these contracts, the Opposition leader replied: “I have no idea what motivated them at this time. For me, the more important question is, why not do it previously, which would be one, and secondly, is it appropriate to do so given the odium that surrounds this matter and that it’s a matter which is being litigated.”

The Bahamian marina industry has constantly complained that forcing the closure of its own online portal, which was set up to collect due government fees and taxes from visiting boaters and expedite their clearance into The Bahamas, has hurt the sector for almost two years given that the DigieSoft replacement has yet to emerge.

Mr Pintard said: “I think the conclusion has been that the alternative the Government has promised, and the benefits from the alternative, have not emerged and what motivated them to change if they were not willing or able to execute.”

Peter Maury, who headed the Association of Bahamas Marinas (ABM) when it was asked to pull its own SeaZ Pass portal, again yesterday lamented why Bahamian taxpayers are having to spend possibly $3.74m on the DigieSoft portal when the private sector had previously supplied exactly the same solution for fee.

The Ministry of Finance mandated that the SeaZ Pass portal be shut down in October 2022 amid a dispute over whether the portal’s payment provider, Omni Financial Services, had remitted the full $5m sum collected to the Public Treasury. Mr Maury said he had yet to be notified that any funds were not passed on, and said the portal’s loss had sent the ease of entering this nation for visiting boaters backwards.

“It’s terrible. I had a 160-foot yacht’s captain complaining about it last week,” he told Tribune Business. “It’s ridiculous. It’s insane what’s happening. They are spending $3.355m to do something we did for free. It cost them nothing. They were supposed to use some of the money we collected to put back into navigational aids [the Adolpha contract].

“They were supposed to relaunch the portal and they haven’t. They haven’t attempted anything. I don’t know that it even matters now. They didn’t do anything for so long. Our occupancies have gone down and the market is changing.”

Besides paying the 4 percent Port Department levy, Mr Maury said the SeaZ Pass portal allowed visiting boaters to pay their charter fee and obtain the associated licence, as well as clear Customs and Immigration online and enter The Bahamas.

“Now you have to send an e-mail to the Port Department, they e-mail you back a bill and you have to connect with a payment provider. We’re back to the same old junk we had before,” he added. “Everybody who wants a charter licence has to wait. It’s so ridiculous.

“The charter licence is like $2,500, but the money on the actual charter is worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions in some cases. They get overly bureaucratic so that it slows the whole process down. Everyone suffers, but mainly the Bahamian people.”