Cuts and the PPP scam

Tuesday December 03, 2002 10:14

by Simon Basketter - SWP

The Government are using the publice sector cuts to push through Public Private Partnership and hand over public services to some dodgy companies

Despite many a Fianna Fail Td making personal guarantees to get schools renovated some 400 hundred substandard schools are to be left to rot as part of Charlie McCreveey’s cutbacks.
Meanwhile, the first Public Private Partnership school in ireland opened in in Tubbercurry, on December 2nd.
Hidden among the crowing from the Minister of Education was the admission was that the PPP cost more than building the school publicly.

The school is to be run by a private company Jarvis for 25 years at a profit.
Other schools: Ballincollig (1,000), Clones (500), Dunmanway (700) and Shannon (600), and a new building for the Cork School of Music have also been farmed out to Jarvis. All will be run at a profit on 25 year contracts.
And yet more schools are in line for the PPP scam.
According to the Department of Education the following primary schools are being considered for PPP: Scoil Chriost Ri, Ennis; Ennis National School and Ennis Educate Together National School. New Ross CBS in county Wexford is being considered as part of a major urban area PPP.
The government is hoping that teachers and parents will accept PPP and creeping privatisation out of desperation to get decent facilities.

Jarvis plc, the company that was awarded the contract for building the five secondary schools, is heavily involved in PPPs in the education, health and transport sectors in Britain and its record is appalling.
It recently hit the headlines when it was revealed, following the horrific Potters Bar rail crash in England, that shoddy maintenance was at fault. Jarvis was the company charged with providing the rail maintenance on this line.
Furthermore, in the area of education Jarvis plc, rather than saving the taxpayers’ money as PPP proponents claim, has actually ripped off the British taxpayer. In one example, an initial estimate of stg£12 million for building a school in Dorset rose to stg£15.2 million and ultimately ended up costing stg£22 million.
In another they employed 6th form pupils on low wages to clean a school.The chairman of Jarvis PLC, Colin Skellett, is also chairman and chief executive of Wessex Water , he received £1milliion bribe during the sale of Wessex Water to YTL, a Malaysian company.
Wessex Water was owned by the crooked company Enron but when they went bust it was sold to YTL. Skellet received a £1 million “consultancy fee”. He arrested by the fraud squad in England. Skellett should feel right at home with Fianna Fail -- he has a home in the Cayman Islands.

It isn’t just in education that dodgy companies are after our public services, French multinational Vivendi, not satisfied at getting the contract for the LUAS system is intending to try and take over Dublin Bus routes.
Vivendi’s record isn’t much better than Jarvis, as Connex they have been up to their eyes in the chaos of rail privatization in Britain. But at home in France is perhaps indicative, in Angoulème, a former mayor and one-time minister was jailed for two years for taking bribes from companies bidding in public tenders, including Générale des Eaux (now Vivendi). Executives of Générale des Eaux were also convicted of bribing the mayor of St-Denis (Ile de Réunion) to obtain the town's water concession.

Vivendi and other companies ran a cartel over building work for schools in the Ile-de-France region around Paris between 1989 and 1996. Contracts worth about US$500 million were shared out. A levy of two per cent on all contracts was paid to finance all the major political parties in the region. Jacques Durand, commercial director of the Vivendi construction company was later indicted for corruption and bribery.
They should fit right in.

http://www.transnationale.org/anglais/fiches/898366848.htm
http://www.transnationale.org/anglais/fiches/53940125.htm
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2002/1203/2923928898HM1SCHOOLS.html
http://www.swp.ie