Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

The remedial planning process is where NBI, under the contract, has to notify us if it is aware of a delay. It clearly was both last year and the year before, when Covid hit it hard, so it notified us of the delay. It might say whether it is delayed by three months, six months or, in the current instance, about 12 months. If Covid had not been a factor, a significant penalty would probably apply for missed milestones this year, but Covid has been pretty prevalent. That has been a unique situation for all of us and the contract allows for that.

To return to why we have so many advisers, engineers and whatnot, we have to make a determination independently of NBI, given it will naturally push for the maximum relief possible under the contract in respect of Covid. Our job is to scrutinise that, get the engineers on the patch and say whether it was NBI's or Covid's fault it was delayed. It is a difficult determination to make because Covid impacts on everything, from top to bottom of a project, and wreaked havoc in the early parts of last year and this year. We are turning over every rock to see whether there is a systemic problem within NBI that explains the delay. If we determine the delay of, say, one, two or three months was down to NBI's project management because it got the plans wrong, we will apply penalties beginning in February this year for every milestone it misses. In the case of any milestones that have been achieved up to now, no penalties have been applied because they did not apply for the first two years.

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