Deputies receive Fallagate minutes

STATES members today received their copy of Policy Council minutes detailing the political events that led to the PEH clinical block costing an extra £2.4m. The notes, released following pressure from deputies and the Guernsey Press, confirm the sequence of events published by the newspaper last week. Those events cost every adult £50 in unnecessary States expenditure.

States members are particularly interested in the section highlighting Treasury and Resources minister Lyndon Trott's concerns about R. G. Falla Ltd potentially winning two large public-sector contracts and the support he received from ministers Bernard Flouquet, Dave Jones and Mary Lowe.

In particular, they are looking to see whether the official record indicates

the four were acting on previously unobtainable information or on some other basis.

The minutes also provide details of a subsequent conversation between Chief Minister Laurie Morgan and R. G. Falla Ltd shareholder Deputy Stuart Falla concerning the firm's workloads and his involvement with it.

Deputy Barry Brehaut, whose intervention led to the record being released, wants to know whether that conversation prompted the withdrawal of the tender and whether it could have been avoided.

Guernsey Press enquiries yesterday established that the process which allowed R. G. Falla successfully to bid had been endorsed by Treasury and Resources. T&R also allowed Health and Social Services to go to tender, although R. G. Falla was at that stage the preferred contractor for Les Nicolles schools.

Although the concerns about that were understood, T&R took the view that a £2.4m. saving outweighed the principle of not having too many eggs in one basket.

In addition, that surprisingly cheap bid was scrutinised over a period of weeks, including by professional, independent advisers as well as T&R's own central property unit, and given a clean bill of health.

The minutes indicate that and will reinforce deputies' demands to know why such a competitive price from a well-respected island firm was lost at the expense of the taxpayer.