Review reveals Tini faced difficulties

The Judicial Review into the unfair manner in which the beleaguered CEO of CIIC has been treated by despite his department having done such a great job against all odds has shown some interesting details. Documents produced to the High Court brought by John Tini against the Finance and PERC Minister shows that the PERC carried out a preliminary enquiry by consultant, Michael Innes-Jones in February 2009.
PERC said on top of tight schedules, the CEO also had to contend with political infighting by the various Ministries and organsations for a bigger share of the pie ($13million Chinese loan). The PERC findings were that the infighting added to complexity of the administration process. For instance, Education had a wish list whereby their building would have cost double their allocation which was making it difficult to proceed to tender because of the uncertainties of costs.
PERC noted the difficulties facing the CEO to attend to all the tasks expected of him plus being expected to have a watching brief over the main stadium construction and loan disbursement. Nevertheless, PERC expressed their full confidence in his capability to carry out his responsibilities but noted that Government expectations were perhaps too high in the circumstances.
In May 2009, the Audit Office wrote to the Minister of Finance and PERCA with an executive summary into an audit review into the purchase of building materials from NZ by the CIIC. Audit had received a complaint on 26 November 2008 from a supplier which alleged that CIIC had purchased materials without a tender process.
In their review, Audit found that on 10 November 2008, CIIC had in fact written to the Financial Secretary seeking a waiver of the tender process citing time constraints, cost effectiveness and unavailability of sufficient material for the upgrade of school rooms to be carried out during the Christmas school holidays (December 2008-January 2009) and the waiver was granted under the circumstances.
Audit Office questioned the granting of the waiver and asked Crown Law for an opinion which said the exemption could be viewed as a proper exercise of the discretion vested in the FinSec under the MFEM Act and reasonable under the circumstances.
Audit then carried out their own comparisons of local prices and NZ prices and requested quotes from CITC Building Supplies, Fare Supplies and Timberland. They used a list of items provided by CIIC property manager, Anne Taoro with the local suppliers asked to provide quotes as November 2008 (to directly compare with the NZ purchases made in the same month).
CITC and Timberland could only provide quotes for a selected number of materials (but not all) with CITC the biggest supplier only able to provide 60% of the total stock and Fare Supplies unable to quote for any materials listed. The inability of local suppliers to provide all the materials and the need to keep to a very strict timetable with the CIIC having promised the Education Department that all works on the school rooms would be during the holiday period are said to have swayed the CIIC to purchase the materials from offshore.
Audit acknowledged their comparative analysis did not give a true indication as it did not compare all the materials needed for the upgrades. However, despite providing reasonable answers to all the queries, the CEO is being pursued in an unfair manner which is why he brought on the application for Judicial Review. Justice Grice has directed the Crown to provide the applicant with all the information that he is seeking within 10 days.

Headlines : Times 290 02 March 2009
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