the times | Friday August 28 2020 2GM 17News
says there are 358. Dfid has been
looking at 1,277.
The company has negotiated a bank
loan holiday and an overdraft and
expects to make a claim on its
professional insurance.
This entirely predictable vulnerabili-
ty of the company in the face of its
dispute with Dfid makes it all the more
surprising that the department has
agreed to extend IMC’s contracts on
long-running projects whose viability
might be threatened if the business
goes under.
“Despite the difficulties with this
[Pakistan] programme, IMC has since
secured several multimillion-pound
contracts or contract extensions with
the donor [Dfid],” the accounts state.
The extensions include a transport
project for poor countries worth
£14 million plus £2 million in fees, a
£10 million water programme in Sierra
Leone, and a £5 million investment
scheme in Nepal. On top of those is an
African investment contract worth
£7.5 million.
Mr English told The Times: “IMC is a
going concern supported by our bank
and is not going out of business.”Timeline
April 2015 DfID signs contract with
IMC Worldwide to implement the
£184 million Pakistan schools
building programmeSeptember 2015 Construction work
beginsOctober 2016 Civil engineering firm
hired by DfID to provide
independent verification of the
building work raises safety concernsNovember 2016 Boris Johnson
visits Kinnaird girls school in Lahore
to unveil a plaque marking UK aid’s
fundingJanuary 2017 DfID’s Pakistan head
office alerted to safety issuesFebruary 2017 Another expert
warns DfID that schools should not
be used. DfID continues to pay IMC
to build schools, giving the
company time to provide evidence
that the designs are safeJune 2018 A further expert confirms
buildings could collapseJune 2019 A review by experts at
University College London confirms
problems with designs. Ministers are
alerted for the first time that there is
a problem. They order a halt to
construction work and tell the
Pakistani authorities to evacuate the
childrenAugust 2020 The Times visits the
Lahore school where the plaque was
unveiled. Cracks have appeared in
the walls of new buildings and the
girls face being crammed together
in old buildings for lessonsmoney, has been evacuated.
Officials were warned as early
as 2016 that some of these
schools, below, may be unsafe.
Nearly 3,000 classrooms have
been built since thenIt supervised the worst foreign aid
fiasco in memory but IMC Worldwide
is holding its head high.
The business continues to boast of its
awards. It remains on the elite “gold”
list of suppliers at the Department for
International Development (Dfid),
which Boris Johnson is scrapping in
September.
Accounts show that the company
made gross profits of nearly £17 million
in the first four years of its Pakistan
schools building programme.
The British aid industry loves getting
dressed up for a black-tie awards
ceremony and IMC appears to be no
exception.
There were two awards from the
Association for Consultancy and
Engineering in 2019, and a gong at the
British Expertise International awards
presented by the Duke of Gloucester in
the same year.
IMC still refers to an award for
Monica Inkpen as young consultant of
the year 2018 after, it said, she “distin-
guished herself” as operations manager
for the Pakistan schools project. An
insider said that she was seen as the
team leader’s right-hand woman for
operations.
“Monica saw the programme all the
way through the business cycle, from
the early bidding stages to implementa-
tion,” IMC’s website states. “She was re-
sponsible for setting up IMC as a com-
pany in Pakistan and worked closely
with the team leader to get [the pro-
gramme] set up and started. Moreover,
she managed the day-to-day opera-
tions during the implementation phase
of this complex and large programme.”
IMC paid its shareholders dividends
of £1.7 million in the three years from
2015, when the Pakistan schools
contract was signed.
The business is owned by a holding
company, a third of whose shares
belong to Gavin English, 59. Mr English
led a management buyout from a
Canadian multinational in 2011. It now
has 165 employees.
Mr English is foreign aid aristocracy.
He serves as a board member of CoST,
the infrastructure transparency initia-
tive, and a board director of Fidic, the
International Federation of Consulting
Engineers based in Geneva.
Company records show that IMC’s
highest-paid director in 2011 received a
package of £135,000 rising in 2018 to
£229,000 including £67,000 in bonuses,
allowances and benefits. In line with
accounting rules, the highest-paid
director for each year is not named.
Another tenth of the shares in the
holding company are owned by Suraj
Rana, programme director for the
Pakistan schools reconstruction and
rehabilitation project since 2014.
Latest accounts accept that the com-
pany may go out of business because of
losses from the Pakistani programme.
The company has prepared for the
£5 million cost of investigating and
retrofitting school buildings.
IMC disagrees with, and believes it
cannot afford, the number of schools
which Dfid says may need work. IMCBoris Johnson visited Kinnaird
Girls’ School in Lahore four
years ago, saying as foreign
secretary that it had a
“beautiful new building” and
“everything it needs to besuccessful” thanks to aid for
Pakistani education. Efforts to
make it resilient, above, were
not enough to stop cracks
appearing in the walls and the
school, one of many to receivestudents from the 23 classrooms in
November 2019. We have a strength of
4,000 female students and we need
more space,” a senior staff member said.
“We are using 77 old rooms and addi-
tionally using labs as classrooms. They
are overcrowded with students exceed-
ing the space limit in the room and next
month the schools are reopening after
the Covid-19 pandemic and adjusting
them in limited space will create more
problems ahead”.
The Times visited the Government
Kinnaird Girls’ High School in Lahore
this month and saw Mr Johnson’s
plaque. Punjabi education officials did
not allow photographs to be taken in
case they harmed relations between
the countries.
The Times was shown one classroom
with a huge crack on a wall, causing
concern that the building might col-
lapse. The remaining 22 rooms were
not shown, leaving fears that there may
be a more dangerous situation there.
The cracks began to appear in October.
Qaiser Rashid, additional secretary
from the provincial education depart-
ment, said: “In Punjab there are 536
classrooms identified with cracksunder this Dfid [Department for Inter-
national Development] school con-
struction project and we have instruct-
ed the school administration to not
teach students in those classrooms.
“They need retrofitting and are not
fixed yet and in this situation we will
only allow children after the safety ap-
proval of those classrooms to be used.
“We have formed a committee at
every district with communications
and works department engineers who
will approve the buildings and decide
whether they are fit for use or not after
the retrofitting process”.
The school-building programme was
at the centre of a British drive for better
education in Pakistan. IMC Worldwide,
an aid company based in Redhill, Sur-
rey, won the £184 million construction
contract from Dfid to build 30,
classrooms. This was changed to 16,
classrooms, then fewer than 8,000.
An engineer who worked on the pro-
gramme said: “I am still not sure how
they couldn’t get some people to get this
relatively simple job done. These are
simple structures.”
IMC Worldwide told The Times that
a plan to use modular designs had to bedropped because of changes to the
scope of the scheme. Dfid also wanted
to use building techniques which would
reduce carbon emissions.
A former senior employee of IMC
Worldwide said: “This was an overam-
bitious project and things were not
done well on the ground.” The initial
tender notices were too low to engage
construction companies. When the
number of classrooms to be built was
halved, much higher rates were offered.
A former senior engineer at IMC
Worldwide blamed poor management
for “disaster in this crucial project”. He
said: “This excessively funded project
should have brought revolution in the
education sector of Pakistan and this
could have changed the infrastructure
of education but we regret the way
money was wasted. Minor earthquakes
could damage the buildings.”
Gavin English, managing director of
IMC Worldwide, said its analysis,
which was being reviewed by Dfid, indi-
cated that 1,031 schools were safe and
358 needed retrofitting. “Works will
commence as soon as Dfid signs off,” he
said. He expects work to begin in the
next few weeks and conclude in April.Dominic Kennedy, George GryllsNews
CAREN FIROUZ/REUTERSon building ‘unsafe’ classrooms
Company boasts
about awards and
lucrative contracts