Curtin University denies project payment claim

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Voon (first row, second from right) and other contractors pose after the press conference.

MIRI (September 5): The Curtin University campus in Malaysia said it suspended payment to one of its subcontractors after failing to fully deliver a project.

The project, which involved the construction of a cafeteria and a laboratory, was due to be completed in December 2019 before the pandemic and even before the first movement control order (MCO) was applied.

Yesterday morning, a group of project subcontractors called a press conference claiming that they had not been paid for nearly a year by the prime contractor because they said the prime contractor had failed. no payment received from the university.

The university’s director of operations, Pieter Pottas, contacted yesterday afternoon, however clarified that the payment had not been made because the main contractor had broken his contract by not completing the work as promised.

We do not work with subcontractors. Our agreement is with the main contractor.

In the agreement, of course, there is a clause – if you exceed your draft, you pay certain penalties per day. The entrepreneur has therefore already exceeded the project even before the start of the pandemic.

They were already on penalty, but they can still claim money (from the project) if they could catch up with the project, he said, adding that their penalty has increased to just over RM1 million. .

But to help the contractor, he added, the university did not claim the penalty from the contractor after failing to deliver a project that was completed in December 2019.

When the pandemic arrived, I said to stop the sanction because no one can work. It was unfair to continue with the sanctions.

We gave them six months leave in accordance with the recommendation of the government during the movement control order (MCO).

So after the six months, when they can start working again, I asked them to give us a time when they could finish the project and they said in three months. It was in 2020, he said, adding that the main contractor had promised to complete the entire project by December 2020.

However, until today, Pieter said the project is still not fully completed with one building 90% complete while another is 70% complete.

It’s not that we don’t pay our contractor. For Curtin, if we owe money, we’ll pay it right away. But the entrepreneur broke the contract. We cannot pay the contractor for a job that is not done, he said.

He explained that the university paid the contractor accordingly throughout this time and only started withholding payments after they passed the promised completion date.

On Curtin’s side, we never refuse to pay the people who have done work for us. This is a contractual issue between the prime contractor who had not completed the project. They were to be completed by December 2019. The project began in November 2018. It has been more than a year in abeyance, he added.

At yesterday’s press conference, a spokesperson for the contractors, Voon Chin Fatt, said payments were supposed to be made in stages based on the work done, but the last time they received a payment for the project was in October of last year.

He revealed that more than 10 subcontractors were involved in the project and not all of them have been paid for the project for almost a year. Because of this, they were not able to pay their workers as well as their suppliers.

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