Government to get ferry today

GOVERNMENT will today take delivery of the new US$17.4 million catamaran Galleons Passage. Finance Minister Colm Imbert made this disclosure on Twitter. “Vessel is scheduled to set sail for TT on February 9, 2018,” he said.

Imbert posted photos of final work being done at the Nansha Shipyard in Guangzhou, China, including workers painting the name of the vessel on its sides. At a post-Cabinet news conference at the Diplomatic Centre on January 18, Imbert said the Galleons Passage would leave China this month and should arrive in TT in April.

He said several rigorous checks were done to ensure the new catamaran met all the requirements to operate on the domestic seabridge. These included inspections by Lloyd’s Register of Hong Kong, Schulte Marine of Australia and experts from the University of TT’s Maritime Campus. Legal checks on the vessel were done by British law firm Haynes and Boone.

Imbert also said US firm Dun and Bradstreet was engaged to do “a financial and forensic check on everybody involved.”

The vessel is owned by Sea Transport Corporation of Australia. Imbert dismissed claims from some people about the vessel’s procurement being questionable, that the vessel was not new and that it was stuck in China.

He explained that the first stage of shipbuilding is steel-cutting and the last stage is sea trials. “The steel for the new inter-island ferry was cut by the Nansha Shipyard in Guandong, China on March 4, 2015,” Imbert said, and the final sea trials for the vessel took place in December. “The ferry is brand new,” Imbert reiterated.

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