“We were ready, we have all of our technology in place, all of our infrastructure in place, we had our processes worked though, and we’ve recruited most of the staff that we’ll need on 10 November … we won’t be able to put that investment to use,” chief corporate and public affairs officer John Keefe told a U.K. parliamentary committee.
Keefe told the House of Lords justice and home affairs committee that Getlink had been “looking forward to starting to recover that cost from Nov. 10” but now would not be able to.
“We’ll be sitting with £70 million spent to develop the technology, to build the infrastructure, to do the modeling using AI, to install all the kiosks that we had specially built to operate in the vehicle environment. All of that will have to be put into hibernation … that’s a cost that we’ll have to carry because of this delay.”
‘Not acceptable’
Asked about the possibility that Getlink could turn to litigation to recover the costs from the European Commission, Keefe added: “On the question of cost recovery: yes of course we’re considering that.
“We have followed the project to the letter, we have been ready to go live and we’ve put €80 million worth of investment into making sure that it would not only be ready but it would also be efficient, so we would continue with the levels of traffic flow that we’ve managed today.
“To see that cost just sitting there is not an acceptable solution for a publicly quoted company.”