Contractor ordered to repair generators within 48 hours

The Ministry of Education yesterday directed Jepak Holdings Sdn Bhd the contractor for supplying diesel to 185 schools to run generator sets and maintain them to repair 215 of the generators which are faulty within 48 hours.

However, when contacted, Jepak Holdings spokesman Gabriel Walter claimed that maintenance of the generators had been taken over by the State Education Department nine months ago.

However, he said Jepak Holdings still holds the contract to maintain the sets until it expires in December 2019, despite the Ministry’s directive to hand over the work to the department nine months ago.

“We will work closely with the Ministry of Education to overcome this serious problem.

The existing situation also goes to show that we should not simply hand over responsibility to anyone who does not have the experience in maintaining the generator sets,” Gabriel said through a press satement.

It was reported that the Malaysian Anti Corruption Commission (MACC) was probing an allegation against a lawyer and one of Jepak’s managing directors for allegedly misappropriating funds from the project to supply solar hybrid sets to 369 schools last year.

Subsequently, the responsibility to maintain the generator sets at the affected schools was passed to the state Education department.

When pressed further, Gabriel said only 233 of 369 schools would be installed with solar hybrid generators because the remaining schools were either linked to the main electricity grid or not in the list of schools to be covered.

He said the government has yet to pay them for the months of January to May 2018 for the generator set maintenance before the contract was taken over by state Education department in June 2018.

“Jepak Holdings does not need green light from the Ministry of Education to proceed (with the solar hybrid work).

However, we would like the State Education Department to put clear and witten instructions to school headmasters not to interfere with our solar installation work.

One of such intervention had resulted in us lodging a police report against SMK Bario headmaster for stopping our workers from entering the site,” he said.

He added that all they needed was least 10 days per school to install the sets.

The State Education Department has not replied to a request for response on the issue at press time.