Dili, April 9^th, 2021 – His Excellency the Prime Minister, Taur Matan Ruak, considered that the retaining walls of the largest streams in the country have very low quality, comparing them to a boneless person. For this reason, in the rainy season, when the stream flows to increase and hit the retaining walls, they fall very easily and end up destroyed and washed away into the sea.

Given this situation, the Chief of the Government took the initiative to ask Japan to help Timor-Leste with quality engineers to redesign the protection walls of the country’s main streams, in order to prevent this problem from recurring every year, and the Government has to spend money every year to rebuild the walls.

The streams in Timor-Leste have very strong flows in the rainy season, so walls built only of stone are no good because they do not have the capacity to resist these strong currents, as happened once again now.

The Head of Government also asked the Vice-Prime Minister to quickly present a Law Proposal to penalize the companies that execute projects without quality, so that they can be held responsible, both administratively and criminally, because until now there is no law that regulates these aspects, and so the companies play with the State and execute the works as they wish.

The Head of the Government also gave guidelines so that, from now on, in the next projects, there will always be a project manager, who will constantly monitor the projects during their implementation, thus avoiding that companies manipulate the execution on the ground. END/M-PMO