SECRET “MANAGEMENT RESERVE” FOR MUSKRAT UNCOVERED

If there are still surprises hidden deep within Nalcor’s crumbling walls, recent information obtained by this blogger under ATIPPA has brought at least one more of them into the light. (Another is that the once-limp Muskrat Falls Oversight Committee is exhibiting serious signs of life!)

Documents obtained from the Oversight Committee suggest that Nalcor may have maintained a secret “Management Reserve” budget for a category of risk known as “Strategic Risk”. The Reserve was kept out of the estimates for the project and placed under the control of the “Gatekeeper”, presumably the former Nalcor CEO, Ed Martin.

Nalcor evidently understood that such an allocation had important budgetary implications for the project - and for their ability to sell the scheme. But its importance was too great to let the public know anything about it.

The fund was not revealed to the PUB during examination of the DG-2 estimates — or later. 
But, in addition, Nalcor also did not disclose any allowance for Strategic Risk in their DG-2 estimates, DG-3 estimates, or any estimates provided to the public prior to 2016.

Why would any category of project costs have been kept secret, or excluded?

DON'T EXPECT NEW OVERSIGHT MEMBERS TO BE WALLFLOWERS

The Ball Administration recently made four new appointments to the Muskrat Falls Oversight Committee. Two — professional engineer Jason Muise and Memorial Economics Professor Dr. Jim Feehan — are longstanding anti-Muskrateers, “naysayers” in the idiom of the Wiliams/Dunderdale era.

Now the Committee has three who tried their best to warn successive Tory administrations of Muskrat folly, including Bern Coffey — the Clerk of the Executive Council, who is the Chair.

While those appointments seem a step in the right direction, for the present I am inclined to counsel caution that they actually represent a shift in the way oversight is performed.

Two others — an accountant and a former bureaucrat — were appointed along with Muise and Feehan.

The four joined the Deputy Ministers who have inhabited the Committee from the very beginning. Of course, the latter should only be ex-officio, available solely to give support to the independent members of the Committee.