ONE month after announcing the National Housing Corporation’s inability to pay its debts and reeling in a state of bankruptcy, Chairman Timothy Mangal is today painting a healthier financial picture of the company.
This is not to say that the Corporation’s financial position is still no longer dreadful, a month of cost cutting measures and taking certain decisions resulted in the healthy financial picture Mangal paints.
“We have done some very serious cuts in expenditure. We have been saving the Corporation close to $50,000 on its recurrent expenditure based on cuts and policy decisions the new Board has taken,” Mangal said.
He maintains that this year the Corporation will be looking to expedite various construction programmes and receive maximum productivity from its staff.
“By doing so I would figure out that by the end of this term of this Board, the Corporation would be moving out of its woes when it comes to its recurrent expenditure,” he said.
The Board is appointed for a three-year term.
Mangal early last month blamed the previous administration for the Corporation’s insolvency claiming this happened as a result of bad house and land deals made with foreign companies.
The Chairman, at the time, bluntly said that the Corporation was broke, bankrupt and unable to honour its debts.
The Corporation’s debt is in the millions emanating from bad deals and court cases. All of this is outside the $48 million it owes the National Insurance Corporation for construction of the newer CDC buildings.
The rosier financial picture he portrayed has to do with the Corporation’s recurrent expenditure which he said was more than 50 percent at the time he took over as Chairman, a situation that had to be financed by the sale of lands.
“Now we have taken it down to about 25 – 30 percent. We are heading in the right direction,” Mangal said.
No member of staff was sent home as the Corporation tightened its belt to improve its financial position. Two vacancies were filled by other staff members. Mangal made a point of stating that the vacancies were not filled by persons coming from the outside, therefore there were no added salaries to pay.
A casualty of the Corporation’s new fiscal measures was its Vieux Fort office.
“We have no projects going on in Vieux Fort yet still we had an office with one staff member gaining a salary. In there we had to pay janitors, cleaners, maintenance staff, etc. That office had a PBX system with four extensions,” Mangal said.
He said the sole staff member retired on the last day of last year resulting in the decision to close the office for good saving the Corporation some $12,000 to $15,000 monthly.
“We are not abandoning Vieux Fort. We have the intention to go down to Vieux Fort and have some housing projects. In order to maximize efficiency, instead of having a separate office sitting there, we will have an office within the project itself when we undertake projects in Vieux Fort,” Mangal said.
The Corporation was also able to save some money by getting the maintenance unit of the CDC buildings to undertake work that were usually contracted to outsiders. Such work involved repairs and renovations of the CDC buildings.