Voon (front row, second right) and other sub-contractors pose after the press conference.
MIRI (Sept 5): Curtin University Malaysia Campus has clarified that it put on hold payment to one of its contractors after they failed to fully deliver a project.
The project, which involved the construction of a cafeteria and a laboratory, was supposed to be completed in December 2019 before the pandemic and before the first Movement Control Order (MCO) was even enforced.
Yesterday morning, a group of sub-contractors for the project called a press conference claiming that they have not been paid for almost a year by the main contractor as they said the main contractor have not received payment from the university.
The university’s chief operation officer Pieter Pottas, when contacted yesterday afternoon, however clarified that the payment was not made as the main contractor breached their contract by not completing the work as promised.
“We don’t work with sub-contractor. Our agreement is with the main contractor.
“In the agreement, of course there’s a clause – if you overrun your project you pay certain penalties per day. So the contractor already overrun the project before pandemic even started.
“They were already in penalty, but they can still claim some money (from the project) if they could catch the project up,” he said adding that their penalty has gone up to slightly over RM1 million.
But to help the contractor, he added, the university did not claim the penalty from the contractor after they failed to deliver a completed project in December 2019.
“When the pandemic came, I said stop the penalty because nobody can work. It was unfair to continue with the penalties.
“We gave them six month off as per the government recommendation during the Movement Control Order (MCO).
“So after the six months, when they can start work again, I asked them to give us a time when they can complete the project and they said in another three months. That was in 2020,” he said adding that the main contractor promised to complete the whole project by December 2020.
However, until today, Pieter said the project was still not fully completed with one building at 90 per cent completion while another was at 70 per cent completion.
“It’s not that we don’t pay our contractor. For Curtin, if we owe money, we will pay immediately. But the contractor breached the contract. We cannot pay the contractor for a work that’s not done,” he said.
He explained that the university had been paying the contractor accordingly all this while and only started holding payments after they went past the promised completion date.
“From Curtin side, we never refuse to pay people who have done work for us. This is a contractual issue between the main contractor that had not finish the project. They were supposed to complete by December 2019. The project started in November 2018. It’s been over a year outstanding,” he pointed out further.
During yesterday’s press conference a spokesperson for the sub-contractors Voon Chin Fatt said payments were supposed to be made in stages according to work done, but the last time they received payment for the project was in October last year.
He disclosed that more than 10 sub-contractors were involved in the project and all of them have not been paid for the project for almost a year. Due to this they were unable to pay their workers as well as their suppliers.