Petcom chairperson Barbara Clarke is challenging Contractor-General Greg Christie to show conflict of interest in her dealings with the state-run company and to provide factual evidence that she exerted undue influence in the award of a contract to her private firm.

Clarke also rubbished Christie’s statement that she was interviewed during his office’s probe into the procurement practices of Petcom, saying that while she met the contractor-general’s investigator, she was not questioned by him.

“I was never interviewed. I walked in on an interview with Mr (Desmond) Thomas,” Clarke told the Observer in an interview late last month.

Clarke said that she had gone to see Thomas, the Petcom general manager, when she met the contractor-general’s investigator, who was sitting in Thomas’ office asking questions.

Thomas, she said, introduced her to the investigator and asked her to sit in on the interview.

“He was asking Mr Thomas questions and at one point he leaned forward and I noticed on one of the papers he had, the name Elegant Traders,” said Clarke.

“I said to him, ‘excuse me, are you doing a Petcom investigation or an Elegant Traders investigation? because I see there the name Elegant Traders and that is my company’.”

The investigator, she said, did not answer, so she took out one of her business cards, offered it to him and told him that any questions he had about her company could be directed to her and she would be willing to answer.

Again, she said, the investigator did not answer, so she left the room. She was never contacted by the investigator, she said.

“I was never given a chance to speak about my company,” Clarke added.

Christie, in his report tabled in Parliament on January 16, had said that both Clarke and Thomas were interviewed by his office. He repeated the claim in a news release on January 18 in which he described as “baseless, obfuscatory and misleading” challenges to his report made by Clarke, Thomas and Petcom.

Christie, in his report, had said that the Petcom board awarded 18 contracts worth just under $5 million, for training Petcom staff and promoting the company’s products, to Elegant Traders over the last 3 1/2 years.

“The investigation also concluded that Ms Clarke was, at all material times, the majority shareholder, principal and managing director of Elegant Traders Limited, and that a conflict of interest existed wherein Ms Clarke, in her position as chairperson of Petcom, had the capacity to influence and, from all appearances, may have influenced the award of contracts to her business interest, Elegant Traders Ltd,” Christie’s report said.

However, Clarke, in her response, said that the contractor-general’s report was erroneous and pointed to the fact that she had declared her interest at the first board meeting she attended, in May 2005, after her appointment and had, in June 2006, withdrawn from any supply opportunity to Petcom.

Clarke had also released letters sent to Christie by her lawyers, Mitchell Hanson and Company, in which they asked him to amend his report before tabling it in Parliament as, they said, it contained errors and misleading statements.

“Our client’s reputation and standing will suffer irreparable harm if the erroneous and misleading statements made in your report are not amended,” the lawyers told Christie in a letter dated January 8, 2007.

Clarke, in the Observer interview, also reiterated that Petcom had awarded her firm the contract by tender in 1998 and insisted that Christie’s assertion of 18 contracts was wrong.

“I got one contract,” said Clarke, who explained that the 18 contracts referred to by the contractor-general were really invoices for services provided at different times under the single contract.

According to Clarke, after she won the contract in July 1998, no other tender was subsequently offered as her company’s services were requested on several other occasions.

“I have not received a contract from Petcom since I became chairperson,” said Clarke. “The contractor-general needs to tell me if conflict of interest can be retroactive. “I challenge him to prove conflict of interest. For the benefit of the public and the people who take up these jobs, he needs to say what his standard is.”