A major public housing initiative launched by Trinidad’s Housing Development Corporation (HDC) has emerged as a subject of political scrutiny, after years of procedural silence from the country’s top procurement oversight body prompted an opposition-led call for investigation. The core of the controversy centers on a 3,000-unit affordable housing development project valued at $3.4 billion, which HDC plans to deliver through a longstanding state agency procurement approach: limited bidding.
Limited bidding is a restricted procurement framework that differs from open, public competitive bidding. Rather than advertising project contracts to all interested firms globally or domestically, government entities using this method only solicit bids from a pre-vetted pool of pre-qualified contractors that meet pre-set eligibility criteria. For this particular project, HDC drew its shortlist of 11 private contractors exclusively from the existing pre-qualified depository maintained by the Office of the Procurement Regulator (OPR), Trinidad’s national procurement oversight agency.
Internal procurement records obtained by the *Sunday Express* detail the step-by-step approval process HDC completed for the project, which was first formalized in December 2025. On December 9 that year, both the National Procurement Officer and Accounting Officer signed off on the project’s board proposal, and the HDC board, led by chairman Feeroz Khan, gave final approval to the full Annual Procurement Plan (APP) via a round robin voting process the same day. The following day, December 10, HDC uploaded the finalized APP schedule to three public platforms: ProcureTT, the OPR’s official website, and HDC’s own corporate website. Records confirm OPR official Hafzah Sooknanan sent an acknowledgment email confirming receipt of the plan, to verify HDC’s compliance with regulatory requirements.
Regulatory rules mandate that state agencies submit their annual procurement plans within six weeks of national budget approval, and HDC’s documentation confirms the agency met this deadline. The project is structured as a public-private partnership (PPP), with the majority of the $3.4 billion in project funding coming from the 11 selected private contractors, rather than public coffers.
The APP breaks the construction timeline into two fiscal periods. For the 2025/2026 fiscal year, $750 million is allocated to single-family and multi-unit construction, with a target of 625 completed units after an initial three-month design phase. During that design period, 23 units including model homes for pre-sale and staging are scheduled to be completed, followed by a production ramp-up that will see 200 to 250 units delivered per month for the remainder of the fiscal year. For the 2026/2027 fiscal period, the APP allocates a further $2.731 billion to complete the full 3,000-unit portfolio across 11 development sites across Trinidad.
Per the project timeline, the formal Request for Proposals (RFP) is scheduled to be released on January 29, 2026, with all model homes across the 11 development sites targeted for completion by September 2026.
A formal signed extract of the HDC board’s unconfirmed decision, dated December 10, 2025 and signed by corporate secretary Viveka Pargass, confirms the board approved the APP by majority vote during the December 9 round robin process.
For months after HDC submitted the plan, the OPR raised no objections to the limited bidding approach or the project structure. That changed in April of this year, after the Opposition submitted a formal request for a full investigation into the procurement process, following HDC’s public announcement of the housing initiative.
In responses to questions from the *Sunday Express*, HDC Chairman Khan defended the agency’s process and pushed back against suggestions of impropriety. He confirmed the plan was submitted to OPR in December 2025, noting that the limited bidding methodology used for the project is the same framework HDC has utilized for past projects as a state enterprise.
Khan emphasized that the shortlist of contractors was not arbitrarily selected: “We didn’t go to all the world and say you are invited to bid for these houses; we went to the OPR depository for persons who are registered with the OPR and who are qualified to build houses, who have experience doing civil works, sewer systems and electrical power systems. We went to the OPR and would have extracted from the OPR depository a list of all of the contractors who met those requirements. We did not just get up one morning and pulled names from a hat.”
Khan also highlighted key benefits of the PPP structure and limited bidding approach, noting that the private-sector led funding model will deliver 3,000+ units at an average cost of just $900,000 per unit, a lower per-unit cost than past public housing projects delivered through alternative procurement methods. He added that HDC is currently providing all additional documentation requested by the OPR as part of the ongoing review.