Fides Limited

F IDES L IMI TED cost of materials worldwide, some of the state agencies involved in these restoration projects have taken the position that they would assist the contractors and negotiate prices to reflect the true state of prices of the materials in the current market.” Fides Limited currently employs a full-time team of 45, along with 100 to 200 subcontractors. The Guyana outfit is a totally different setup; kept separate from Fides Limited Trinidad. “Fides Guyana will be manned by mostly local labor – skilled and unskilled – and where we don’t have the ability to execute the job, we have some specialists (civil engineers) coming in to oversee as experts in that field,” says Sagar. The company does inhouse training for their employees because Trinidad workers are not very knowledgeable when it comes to the materials and techniques involved in restoration. Sagar shares, “Yeimer Suarez, who is the Chief Operations Officer of Fides, was very up. So there is a challenge in the construction industry with respect to maintaining the prices we would have submitted at the time of tender, compared to the prices today.” Doing restorations means incorporating materials that are historically accurate, or of the period. For a Grade One restoration, it is recommended that the material is as close to, or the same, as what was originally used on the building. That has created another challenge for Fides Limited because most of these materials are not manufactured in the Caribbean. They have to import them from different countries like India and Colombia, and what used to take six to eight weeks is now taking up to three to four months. The cost of those specialized materials has gone up as well. Sagar admits, “It’s not in the hands of our Government, it’s rather an issue for the suppliers. But what the Government has done, having acknowledged the significant increase in the