Nutrition Products Ltd to resume operations April
Published:Wednesday | February 2, 2022 | 12:12 AM
Nutrition Products Limited (NPL), with its mandate to supply meals to students as part of the National School Feeding Programme, is to restart production in April after ceasing operations almost two years ago.
Face-to-face learning was halted after COVID-19 was detected in mid-March 2020.
Despite the cessation of production, the company’s total annual costs, including salaries and overheads, amount to $600 million. Of that sum, $327 million represents salaries paid to 231 employees.
Since the onset of COVID, the Government decided not to lay off public-sector workers as a result of the pandemic.
The Government has again restated its plans to divest NPL.
Talks to divest NPL’s operations have been ongoing since 2011.
Acting permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education and Youth, Maureen Dwyer, divulged on Tuesday that a divestment team from the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ) has already started work on the exercise.
She told members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that Education Minister Fayval Williams had a recent meeting with the DBJ team.
“The team has been engaged and will begin to conduct the work almost immediately based on the response I got from them. We accepted the proposals that they gave to us and they are about to commence their work so that they can advise us on the best way forward for the entity,” Dwyer told committee members.
NPL appeared before the PAC on Tuesday following a litany of breaches uncovered in the Auditor General’s Department’s September 2021 Performance Audit of the entity.
In the assessment spanning 2015 to 2021, the auditor general reported that NPL paid $143 million to companies and individuals connected to board members and management staff to provide transportation, repairs and maintenance, sanitation, and other services.
It was reported that the NPL paid a distribution company $69.6 million, between November 2010 and January 2021, to provide transportation and haulage services.
“Our investigation revealed that the registered owner of three trucks used by the distribution company was an investment company, of which the former board chairman is a director and shareholder,” the auditor general had disclosed.
In a written response to concerns raised by the auditor general, the leadership of NPL and the Ministry of Education said that at future board meetings, an agenda item will be for members to disclose interest in, connection to, or association with businesses providing goods and services to the entity.
According to NPL, this approach will enable assessment of potential conflicts of interest.
However, committee member Dr Morais Guy described NPL’s response to the issue as “mind-boggling” and “puerile”.
“I would think that any director who has been appointed to any government board ought to know that even before they accept that appointment,” Guy said.
In her remarks, committee member Juliet Holness made a suggestion that she said should form part of the committee’s recommendations.
“Every single board member should take it upon themselves, and every permanent secretary to say, ‘All businesses that do any business at all with the entity, even if it is one dollar, you must have disclosed that you have an entity that is doing business with the organisation,’” said Holness.
The NPL also responded to the auditor general’s finding that it ignored the procurement rules of fairness, transparency, accountability, and competition, bypassing the process altogether.
The entity accepted the findings of the auditor general, noting that the concerns raised did not represent the “normal practice of the entity”.
“The bulk of the transactions that were identified by the auditor general are aged transactions and the entity had improved measures to ensure adherence to the procurement practices,” the NPL said.