THE GOVERNMENT is contesting the multibillion-dollar arbitration award made earlier this month to the Ezroy Millwood-led National Transport Co-operative Society (NTCS).
On Monday, the Attorney-General filed an application in the Supreme Court seeking several orders, one of which is that the award which was handed down on October 2 was clearly excessive.
The claimant contends in the documents filed in court that the arbitrators' award contains a number of errors of law and a fundamental misapplication of the evidence.
Lawyers for the NTCS said the award with interest will amount to about $8.5 billion.
THE ORIGINAL PLAN
The NTCS was responsible for providing public transportation within the Northern and Portmore franchises between 1995 and 2000. However, the Government took over the public transportation system in the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region (KMTR) in 2001 with nearly five years still left on a 10-year agreement it had with three independent franchise holders, including the NTCS.
FARE TABLE AT ROOT OF CONFLICT
It will be argued that the arbitrators failed to hold that, as a matter of law, an agreement entered into between the Government and the NTCS in February, 1996, postponed the implementation of a new fare table until certain specified improvements in the quality of service provided to the public by NTCS had taken place.
The Government said it was the alleged failure to implement the fare table which formed the basis of the complaint by the NTCS. "If the arbitrators had properly construed the effect of the February 1996 agreement, then the basis of that complaint would have disappeared," the Attorney-General said.
The Government is contending that the arbitrators misconstrued the effect of the Public Passenger Transport Act and therefore failed to appreciate that the grant of an exclusive licence to the Jamaica Urban Transit Company Ltd., (JUTC) in September 1998 must have resulted in the termination of the NTCS' licence.
