The Housing Development Corporation (HDC) submitted its Annual Procurement Plan (APP) map to the Office of the Procurement Regulator (OPR) in December 2025, indicating it would be using limited bidding to award contracts.In the APP document, the HDC outlined its plan for the construction of more than 3,000 housing units across Trinidad at a cost of $3.4 billion, to be funded primarily by 11 private contractors under the limited bidding arrangement which has been historically utilised by the State enterprise.Limited bidding is a procurement method where a government agency or State body invites only a selected group of pre-qualified contractors or suppliers to submit bids for a project, instead of opening the process to the general public.Under this system, the organisation does not publicly advertise for every company to apply. Instead, it shortlists contractors who meet certain requirements and in the case of the HDC it selected companies from within the OPR depository.There was no objection from the OPR regarding the plan until the Opposition submitted a request for an investigation in April this year—and after the HDC announced the initiative.Internal procurement documents obtained by the Sunday Express show that the HDC board, led by chairman Feeroz Khan, approved the multibillion-dollar public-private housing programme through a round robin process in December 2025.The documents relating to the plan were subsequently submitted to the OPR. One document entitled “Annual Procurement Plan Map -DBF- Portfolio 1 currently under review by the OPR” stated that the procurement process was in compliance with the requirement that an APP be submitted six weeks after national budget approval.According to the document, the National Procurement Officer (NPO) and the Accounting Officer (AO) approved the Board Note on December 9, 2025, while the HDC board approved the Annual Procurement Plan via round robin on the same day.It further stated that on December 10, 2025, the APP schedule was uploaded to ProcureTT, the OPR website and the HDC website, and that an acknowledgement e-mail was received from OPR official Hafzah Sooknanan, “to ensure compliance”.The procurement schedule under the public-private partnership arrangement highlighted an allocation of $750 million “to facilitate single family dwelling construction service and multiple units dwelling construction services”.The document stated that for fiscal 2025/2026, the APP carried a value of $750 million and projected an estimated yield of 625 housing units following an initial design phase.It noted that during the first three months of the design phase, 23 units were expected to be produced, including model units for staging and pre-sale purposes.The document further projected that after the three-month design period, between 200 and 250 housing units per month were expected to be produced until the end of the fiscal period.For fiscal 2026/2027, the APP projected a proposed value of $2.731 billion, with “over 3000 units” expected to be completed as DBF Portfolio 1 continued.The timeline attached to the procurement plan stated that the Request for Proposals (RFP) was proposed for January 2026, while the actual RFP issue date was listed as January 29, 2026.The document also projected the targeted completion of model homes across all 11 sites under DBF Portfolio 1 by September 2026.The procurement method was listed as limited bidding.Another document titled “Extract of the Unconfirmed Decision of the Board of the Trinidad and Tobago Housing Development Corporation in Response to the Annual Procurement Plan 2025-2026 Submitted for Approval via Round Robin on Tuesday 9th December 2025” confirmed that the board “agreed by majority via round robin” to approve the note titled “Request to Review and Approve the 2025-2026 Annual Procurement Plan (APP) and Schedule of Planned Activities”.The extract was signed by corporate secretary Viveka Pargass and dated December 10, 2025.HDC chairman Khan, in response to questions from the Sunday Express, confirmed the plan had been submitted to the OPR since December last year.“In December 2025 we would have indicated to the OPR, because we are required to publish our annual procurement plan, that we are going to build houses utilising the same limited bidding methodology that was used before,” he said.Khan also noted that the HDC, through this process, selected contractors within the OPR depository.“We didn’t go to all the world and say you are invited to bid for these houses; we went to the OPR depository for persons who are registered with the OPR and who are qualified to build houses, who have experience doing civil works, sewer systems and electrical power systems. We went to the OPR and would have extracted from the OPR depository a list of all of the contractors who met those requirements. We did not just get up one morning and pulled names from a hat,” he said.Khan noted that the majority of the $3.4 billion is to be injected by the contractors and would result in more than 3,000 housing units being built at 11 sites across Trinidad at a cheaper rate than before, with a projected cost of $900,000 per unit.He said the HDC is providing all further requested information to the OPR.