After nearly two decades of unresolved disagreement over a major Tobago road construction project, a Trinidad and Tobago High Court judge has delivered a definitive ruling, throwing out a contractor’s $90 million-plus damages claim against the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) and ordering the firm to cover the public body’s legal costs.
The claim was brought by Raghunath Singh and Company Ltd, which was awarded the contract for the L’Anse Fourmi-Charlotteville Road Project back in May 2002 through the Central Tenders Board. The original corrected contract value was set at $34.7 million, excluding value-added tax, with an 18-month timeline for completion. What was meant to be a year-and-a-half project stretched out significantly due to multiple reported delays, and the contractor ultimately fully exited the construction site in March 2007.
That August, the project’s supervising firm Lee Young & Partners issued a Certificate of Provisional Acceptance and certified a final closing payment of just over $1 million. For eight years after this step, the contractor took no formal legal action, only submitting a self-described final account and claim to the THA in May 2015. It then waited another seven and a half years before launching formal court proceedings in November 2022.
In its claim, the contractor argued that the extended delays were not its fault. It pinned responsibility on last-minute design changes ordered by authorities, severe weather events including 2004’s Hurricane Ivan and Tropical Storm Earl, unanticipated escalation in construction materials and labor costs, and additional compliance mandates imposed by the Environmental Management Authority. It demanded more than $27 million in special damages, over $53 million in accumulated interest, pushing the total claimed amount to over $90 million when VAT was included.
Delivering his judgment this week, High Court Justice Frank Seepersad left no room for ambiguity, dismissing the entire claim and ordering Raghunath Singh and Company Ltd to pay $636,590.07 in legal fees to the THA.
Justice Seepersad’s core finding was that the claim was statutorily barred under Trinidad and Tobago’s Limitation of Certain Actions Act, which requires all contractual dispute claims to be filed within a four-year window. He rejected the contractor’s argument that the THA’s failure to issue a formal Final Completion Certificate kept the claim legally active, noting that the law prioritizes timely, diligent action over inaction.
“Contractual mechanisms requiring timely certification and the prompt resolution of disputes exist not merely for administrative convenience but because justice itself is best served when claims are advanced while the underlying facts remain capable of objective verification,” Justice Seepersad wrote in his ruling.
Beyond the statutory limitation, the judge found that the contractor had failed to comply with multiple core procedural requirements laid out in the original construction contract. These included mandates to submit a draft final account statement shortly after project completion and to initiate binding arbitration when disputes first emerged during construction. He stressed that procedural requirements in large construction contracts are not meaningless technicalities, but foundational elements that ensure commercial certainty for all parties.
“Commercial certainty is an indispensable feature of construction contracts,” he said. “Such contracts invariably contain carefully calibrated provisions governing certification, claims, variations, extensions of time and dispute resolution. Those mechanisms are not mere technicalities.”
Justice Seepersad further noted that courts lack the authority to rewrite contractual agreements years after the original work was completed, or to override the terms that commercial parties freely agreed to when entering a contract. “Courts are not at liberty to reconstruct contractual relationships many years after the relevant events have occurred or to substitute broad notions of fairness for the bargain freely entered into by commercial parties. The judicial function is to enforce contracts according to their terms and not to relieve parties from the consequences of failing to invoke the procedures to which they agreed,” he added.
The judge also highlighted that the agreement was a fixed-price contract with no clauses allowing for adjustments due to cost fluctuations, meaning the risk of any unexpected cost increases was explicitly borne by the contractor from the start. He added that the 15-year gap between the project’s completion and the filing of the claim makes a fair, reliable judicial review impossible: over time, witness memories fade, key project documents are lost or misplaced, and the original context of on-site decisions becomes impossible to accurately reconstruct.
Representing the contracting firm were attorneys Peter Taylor, Egon Embrack and Nehanda Samuel, while the THA was represented by a legal team led by Senior Counsel Russell Martineau, with support from Dominique Martineau and Avionne Thomas.