THE Health Department had to agree to withdraw the R. G. Falla contract on the clinical block or risk placing the States in disrepute. Expert advice from the Law Officers has revealed that the department acted correctly in allowing it to pull out.

If it had not, it would have left two sections of the States fighting each other.

And it could not legally allow Falla’s offer to defer the contract for a year to stand, because Charles Le Quesne, which took the job at an extra cost of £2.4m., could have sued.

Health minister Peter Roffey yesterday produced the evidence in an attempt to clear his department from blame over Fallagate.

As his colleagues followed his lead and quit the Policy Council, Deputy Roffey published letters and documents which, he said, showed the department had ‘no practical course of action open to it other than to accept R. G. Falla’s decision to withdraw their tender’.

Solicitor Martin Thornton, from the Law Officers’ Chambers, said in a note to Her Majesty’s Procureur last month that the department did have to consent to the withdrawal of the offer.

He said it would have been ‘extremely difficult, if not impossible’ for the board to have done anything but to allow the company to pull out.

‘The pressure for withdrawal was coming from the States of Guernsey. To refuse to accept the withdrawal would have resulted in one arm of government pressing R. G. Falla to withdraw, and another refusing them to do so.

‘It might well be thought that such a stance would have brought the States into disrepute. In my view, the department had little option but to accept the withdrawal.’

It has been suggested by some critics that Health was premature in agreeing to pull the contract offer and so was liable for the waste of £2.4m. as the States accepted a more expensive tender.

The department’s advisers, Bristol-based construction consultant Gleeds, told Health that, under the code of practice for the tendering exercise on the clinical block, once R. G. Falla had withdrawn, it should defer to the next favourable tender, Le Quesne.

The offer to defer the contract, made by R. G. Falla chairman Andy Hall, could not be accepted, Gleeds said.

‘Such a proposal is non-compliant with the original tender conditions. Contractually HSSD would be at risk from potential legal action by Charles Le Quesne for moving the goalposts in favour of a specific tenderer.’

The company also said that if conditions for the construction industry changed in the intervening 12 to 18 months, it might not be in the department’s interests to be locked into such a major contract.

It advised the department that it had only two options – to award the contract to Le Quesne’s or to withdraw the project and re-tender.