With Alastair Paterson’s revelation during the Chamber of Commerce Forum last Friday (23) that the final agreement with China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) was negotiated in secret and he had deliberately kept the discussion “below the radar”, I have to ask the question “Was it right?”.

Mr. Paterson is a quantity surveyor I have known for most of the 31 years I have lived here. We have even worked together on a number of building projects and we have, I believe, a mutual respect for one another.

The Cayman Islands Government employed Paterson as a consultant five months ago to spearhead the negotiations with CHEC for the George Town cruise ships berthing facility. He said he “believed the deal should not be negotiated in the press or on the radio”.

If it hadn’t been for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) scuppering the deal a few weeks ago, because it did not conform to the Framework for Fiscal Responsibility (FFR) law, Paterson revealed that the contract was in fact completed and about to be signed.

I know absolutely nothing about the CHEC deal except what has been disclosed in the press and that has been very little.

The so called “transparency” that the United Democratic Party campaigned on, especially by then talk-host Ellio Solomon who was elected as an MLA and was put in charge of the cruise ships berthing project, did not apply here. We were told the project was imminent and CHEC would start work in weeks that dragged on to become months and more months with much public discontent with the whole matter. Nothing happened and as soon as Ellio was replaced by Paterson silence reigned. In fact Ellio’s ousting has never officially been announced.

The good thing is that Paterson is well qualified to lead the negotiations and someone of his qualifications and experience should have been there from the very beginning.

However his secrecy statement has raised a few eyebrows. I suspect, because of the gradual rise in the public’s opinion against CHEC with the adverse publicity surrounding the company with not only shoddy workmanship but corruption, Paterson, as an employee of the government, really didn’t have much choice. I believe any professional would have advised the same. Government wanted the deal done and it was his job to get the best terms for his employer and thereby for the Cayman Islands.

Quite frankly, announcing the terms of the deal to the public, before its signing, would have been displeasing to a lot of people and probably would have resulted in demonstrations and marches. He was right when he said “whilst everyone was still arguing about the details, nothing would ever have been done.”

I am not saying, however, it was right for government to keep everything secret. I am saying only that Paterson was right as he was acting in accordance with his directive from his employer.

I am somewhat mystified, though, at his statement that while CHEC had failed to qualify as a potential bidder following the invitation for expressions of interest in 2009, by 2011 they were “qualified”. So what happened between those two years?

Most contracts are secret, especially private ones. Government ones, however, are more transparent to alleviate any suggestion of fraud. Most are, therefore, competitive. The negotiator collects information about alternative choices (competing firms), assesses each alternative on the basis of specified criteria (evaluation factors), and then compares each alternative to the others on the basis of those assessments in order to rank them and determine which is best.

It is generally not too difficult to process complete proposal information received from two to five competitors, depending on the amount of information solicited, and this approach saves time by having complete proposals ready at hand for the negotiator/evaluators at the outset of the competition and avoiding the need to pause while awaiting successive submissions.

Contract documents are then sent out to the selected firms and tenders sought for the work. Everyone bids on the same criteria and parameters set.

This did not happen with CHEC. Whilst the forgoing process was happening, the premier was doing his own negotiations. In fact a contractor was selected from this process. But CHEC were awarded the contract, subject to final talks, by the premier, and they were not part of the original tendering. The public was never informed about the full details of the bid and terms. Nor have we discovered why the premier was doing his ‘own thing’ without informing the very people he had put in place to do the original negotiations.

All we know is that the CHEC deal was the best for the country and it wasn’t going to cost us anything. Then little by little we learn how much is being given to CHEC to finance the project and over how many years this partnership will take place. We know absolutely nothing of how CHEC’s proposals differ from the parameters set down in the original tender documents that went out for competitive bids.

There lies the problem and that is why the UK government didn’t like the deal. That is why most of us didn’t like it either.

That is why Alastair Paterson had to go along with all the secrecy.