Abandoned stadium project in Cameroon | Magil Strikes Back

The company defends itself in a letter sent to the Prime Minister of the African country

The Montreal entrepreneur Magil Construction describes as “slanderous” the comments of the Minister of Sports of Cameroon about his withdrawal from the Olembé Sports Complex project. The firm denies having wanted to “spoil” the country and maintains that it refused to pay certain civil servants, in a letter sent to the Prime Minister of Cameroon, which was obtained The Press.

Magil assures that he had no other choice than to withdraw from the vast construction site in his missive. The source of the document is well aware of the file, but does not have the authorization to speak about it. The entrepreneur continues to refuse any interview to discuss the case.

Olembé’s project, stopped for a year, has become a real national scandal in Cameroon. January 9, The Press reported the harsh criticism leveled at Magil by the country’s sports minister, Narcisse Mouelle Kombi, in a letter to his head of government. He criticizes the contractor for having received more than 90 million dollars, while having only carried out 1.3% of the planned work.

In his own letter to the prime minister, Magil’s senior vice-president responsible for international projects, Franck Mathière, does not respond directly to this allegation. However, he denounces what he describes as “slanderous remarks unworthy of a high representative of the State” and accuses the minister of “media sabotage”.

According to him, the minister ignores the main cause of Magil’s withdrawal: the Ministry of Sports has no longer paid the contractor and his subcontractors “since July 2021”.

Franck Mathière affirms that Magil has sent “50 correspondence” for a year to settle his differences with the minister, letters “that the latter took care to ignore”.

Requests for payment of civil servants

According to the vice-president of the Montreal firm, representatives of the Ministry of Sports of Cameroon were “conspicuous by their absence” during meetings on the accounts paid for the Olembé project. According to him, they omitted to attend because “Magil has always refused to allocate, at the request of these representatives, attendance allowances or any other benefit, among which we can mention requests for the acquisition of vehicles “.

The Press contacted Magil again to try to get him to clarify these allegations: did Cameroonian officials ask him for bribes to approve the invoices? The company still hasn’t responded to our questions, as it has since we first reported on its struggles there on January 9.

When the firm took control of the site, the Ministry reportedly informed it of the presence on site of “stocks and equipment left by Piccini”, the Italian firm ousted from the site in December 2019, which it replaced without a call for tenders. But an inventory that the government had drawn up would rather have revealed “damaged, outdated or unusable containers as well as many missing materials and equipment”, according to Franck Mathière’s letter.

According to Magil, the Ministry itself orchestrated the resale for scrap metal of “more than a hundred tons” of site equipment and materials.

An adviser to the Minister of Sports contacted by The Press has not commented on these allegations.

In a Piccini lawsuit filed in Quebec and settled out of court last fall, the Italian group claimed instead that Magil had appropriated equipment belonging to it on the site, worth a total of 28.8 million euros. euros (42 million CAN).

According to the Montreal entrepreneur, Piccini never submitted the plans for the execution of the Olembé project to the Ministry of Sports after leaving the site.

Minister’s Contractors

The vice-president of Magil also denounces the “multiple attempts” of Minister Narcisse Mouelle Kombi “to impose certain contractors even though the offers proposed by the latter were of a much higher cost (even prohibitive) than those of other subcontractors. “.

He adds that several cost overruns at Olembé are due to “additional demands against Magil’s advice”. He cites as an example “the urgent air transport from Turkey of the screens of the stadium”, while “the supports of the structures were not ready to receive these screens”.

Magil claims that the Ministry took this decision “to impress the Confederation of African Football”, which held the African Cup of Nations in Cameroon in early 2022.

The response of the Minister of Sports, that The Press obtained from his firm, did not delay. In a letter sent Wednesday to Franck Mathière, he reiterates that he will not pay the bills until Magil justifies the expenses he has already made in the context of the work.

“It is clear that you are in a situation of budgetary drift which threatens the financial equilibrium of the project, writes Narcisse Mouelle Kombi. The distortion between the budget consumption rate and the work progress rate is intolerable. »

However, it does not respond to the allegations made by Magil on the demands for payment from civil servants and the resale of equipment on the site.