Monday, November 18, 2013

Balfour Beatty must be a very scary place to work at.

No matter how soft-a-tone I take on to address my fellow ex-colleagues with, (second removed) from the large Balfour Beatty family and ask for some information that could hardly be considered confidential or even provocative – a deep silence is all I get.
For a while I thought I had a direct-line into the ‘brotherhood’, an official person, ready to be spoken to through the language of reason.
Today he cut off this perceived life-line :
“Please treat this email as bringing a close to our correspondence.”  wrote Andrew Hayward to me in an email as a response to another message sent to someone else within his company
(Andrew Hayward: Balfour Beatty plc: Head of Ethics, Risk and Assurance;)

I don’t know if Kafka, Kundera or even George Orwell’s writings had ever featured in Mr Hayward’s education but I personally can’t help but see his ‘remarkable arrogance for an appointed judge and jury’ worthy of some of these writers’ protagonists, when he notes in the same message to me:
“I also refer to my earlier email, explaining that, in my opinion, Gammon has acted in accordance with its contractual rights and that no breach of Gammon’s or Balfour Beatty’s Code of Conduct has been credibly alleged. As such, no further investigation is warranted under our whistle-blowing policy or otherwise.”

Of course, we are still quibbling over the Gammon affair. Or I am.
He dismisses the allegation with no interest in the evidence.
Or my side of the evidence, anyway.

This statement of his also nonchalantly draws a ‘fat black line’ over my professional credibility as the person making those allegations – something that I continue to find hard to tolerate.
It would be easier to swallow this idea of being a deceptive tell-tale if I had the assurance of Mr Hayward that those professionals that hired me in the first place (such a lowlife) at a significant expense to the company had been put through the wringer for negligent behaviour themselves and will never place the company into the risk of a person of my ‘calibre’ being appointed, let alone supported aggressively into such un-unfitting position as I had been.

As for one of my allegations, that the mismanagement of a group of directors of one of the projects the subsidiary is involved in has put the parent company under undue risk and will potentially cause high loss of revenue in the future, that according to Mr Hayward ‘has no credibility’, I have written another post on my other blog;
Not as much to ‘clear my name’ but to reignite some dialog on how mandated BIM on mega sized rail projects works (or does not as in this case), partially because the Qatar Metro development is presently getting kicked into action and other large global-BIM projects are scrambling for advice on how to handle some pretty ambitious BIM specs.
This story is definitely about how not to do it…
Check it out:

picture from here

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