Barbuda Equipment Issue Explained

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Thursday, 21 June 2012 02:30

By Everton Barnes

Antigua St. John’s - The issue raised this week by opposition Barbuda Councilman, Senator Arthur Nibbs, and detailed in a caribarena.com report, has elicited a reaction from the Chief Executive Officer of the business at the centre of the controversy.

While the article did not name the business concerned, CPR Equipment and Services CEO, Peter Rippon, said he has received several phone calls from people accusing the company of unsavory behaviour.

Rippon said his company has had a long working relationship with the Barbuda Council and would at no time seek to take an unfair advantage of the Council or the people of Barbuda.

He said much of the problem relating to the Council may be due to the fact it was difficult to get to meet the council sometimes- such as recently with no flights available.

He said there is no mystery concerning the whereabouts of the bulldozer that was sent back to Antigua by the Council. He said the equipment has been, in fact, sold to a company in the USA but shipped via St Thomas, due to its size and weight on the sand barge, by arrangement with the Council.

“We got a request from the Council to assist them with shipping the bulldozer to a company in the USA. It was placed on a sand barge and shipped. There’s no mystery. What happens among council members is another matter entirely,” Rippon stated.

He said recognising the Council’s reputation for recordkeeping, his company engaged the services of an independent auditor to peruse the books in Barbuda to ascertain the extent of his company’s indebtedness to the Council as well as to determine what monies were owed to CPR Equipment and Services.

Caribarena.com has learnt that shipments of sand were still being sent to Antigua under the arrangement with CPR apparently without the company’s knowledge. It has been suggested that this is what accounts for the over-payment reported in the earlier article.

It appears that the Council’s notoriously poor record keeping is primarily responsible for this.

When contacted with the information from CPR Equipment, Nibbs said he never suggested that the company had done anything wrong, but he felt that the Council was a poor custodian of the affairs of the people of Barbuda.

Repeated attempts to speak with Council Chairman Kelvin Punter and head of Finance Committee Fabian Jones on this matter have been unsuccessful.

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