Mr. John Crawley:

I will not comment on my particular procurement, but will speak about the other two in order to provide the committee with a full account. The Deputy referred to three tenders in his question. One of the other two tenders related to VAT consulting services. When we commenced the asset disposal programme in mid 2012, we reverted to the previous tax advisors who advised us, on the basis of the authority's records, when we acquired those assets. In other words, the assets had been acquired over a period of time and we reverted to the previous tax advisors as we did not have in-house VAT experience. When we went to the tax advisors we had previously procured, we discovered that a key person involved in the advice who had the particular corporate knowledge had left the organisation and set up her own business.

We followed the trail to her business. At the time, we took the view that there were good technical reasons as to why we would operate that contract to a single economic operator. We acknowledge that best practice was not followed by not putting it out to open tender. However, we felt there was critical knowledge available and given the short timeframe we had available to sell the assets, we engaged the services of that person. That person has been engaged to see out the remaining work. There are no further instructions to be given to that person at this time. In the event something new arises that is not particular to the past, we have now accessed the DCC tender panel where we can procure VAT services.

We had a second contract in regard to ducting networks which had been installed in the authority over the period 2000 to 2008. A firm was procured for that piece of work. In or around the time of the economic collapse, the authority put all expenditure on hold, including expenditure on the ducting network. Unfortunately, the ducting network fell into some financial and operational disrepair as a result. When I came on board, we took up that issue and reverted to the people who had been running the contract previously and asked them to finish out a piece of work. We did not put that out to tender at that point because we felt they had the specific corporate knowledge. Frankly, we did not have the records ourselves to be able to do the work. Subsequently, when we got it under control, we put it out to tender and it is currently on a short-term tender, pending a strategic decision in conjunction with the SDZ as to what we want to do with ducting networking in the future.

In summary, we accept we did not follow best practice, but we were in a particular set of circumstances.