The irregularities cited in the AG’s 2006 report are only part of a bigger cancer

Jun 11, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Dr. Prem Misir’s letter, “Improved accountability and transparency via the Auditor-General’s Office,” (June 9), let me say that though the Finance Minister did put out a statement that the Auditor General’s Report for 2006 did not show both sides of the story for issues raised, omitting explanations proffered by various Government Ministries and Departments, the truth is, the Auditor General (AG) did make mention of these omissions and cited the reason as being the failure of the accounting officers to provide timely responses.
Besides, the AG was supposed to submit the report to Parliament in September 2007; he finally did in July 2008, and by then he either didn’t get all the explanations he sought or was waiting for follow-ups, so was he to wait forever for explanations or explanations that did not gel with the facts?

Mr. Editor, I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude for your Sunday, June 7 lead news article, “Problems still abound despite AG recommendations,” which went into greater detail than my own letter, “Government is not the only source of information,” for while my letter barely touched on instances of irregularities and concerns, your article spent more time focusing on specific figures and areas where the AG’s 2006 report raised major red flags.
Ironically, the spin doctor completely ignored your well-informed article, but we all should know why.
What we may never know is how some men of seemingly good academic standing and, therefore, intelligence, can compromise their academic standing and intelligence in such a reckless manner before an observing public.

I can see with a slip up or two, since as humans we are apt to fail and fall, but to make the slipping up, failing and falling a way of life is deeply troubling because it makes redemption difficult if not impossible.
While I rest my case on the issue of Government’s financial irregularities and failure to comply with the AG, the AG’s report was only one area I chose to highlight, because there were other instances, such as the multi-million-dollar dolphin scandal which saw the documents pertaining to the scandal floating away in the 2005 flood; the millions of dollars several Office of the President employees stole from a President’s Christmas Fund for Underprivileged Children, and the millions of dollars from OP that ended up in a private account at Bank of Baroda that the President found troubling.

I strongly doubt whether any OP employee could have done these things during the Forbes Burnham, Desmond Hoyte or Cheddi Jagan administrations, and its says a lot about the type of environment created by the current leaders in OP for employees to even think, let alone carry out such criminal acts.
The spin doctor then digressed to bring up the abuse of press freedom the Government faces every day, whereby issues are exaggerated and sensationalized, without appropriate verification to substantiate queries.

Quit the whining and complaining, spin doctor; you have ready access to Chronicle, a radio station and a TV station to refute anything put out by private media houses that your Government feels is being sensationalized or exaggerated.
The problem with the Government is that its complaints and whining reflect a failure to effectively refute what the private media are reporting, and this has been happening since Robert Persaud was attached to GINA. The private media are doing a better job than Government reaching the people, who tend to believe the private media over the Government media, and that bothers the Government!
On the CLICO matter, I will continue to sound like a broken record that annoys the heck out of all Government apologists until there is an independent forensic audit of CLICO (Guyana) the same way Fidelity was audited by the Auditor-General.
The spin doctor would have us believe it is inappropriate for the Government to intervene at this time, since the matter is sub judice, but it was not sub judice when the Government used its parliamentary majority to place the Insurance Commissioner’s Office under Bank of Guyana supervision.
Why didn’t the Government wait until after the Judicial Manager submitted her report to the Court before rushing to Parliament on the matter?

By the way, the spin doctor’s repeated claim that the CLICO Guyana issue was ventilated at the highest forum of this country, Parliament, and so Parliament was privy to all the aspects of the issue.
Let him preach that to the choir members who belong to the PPP and its Government; not the discerning and intelligent public. Parliament is made up party list members whose first priority is to serve the interests of the party they represent, not the people. What Parliament did was, using its PPP majority, rubber stamped the President’s position on the issue without there being a really thorough investigation, aired on radio and TV, in which a parliamentary committee should have deposed Ms. van Beek, Ms. Singh-Knight, Dr. Ashni Singh and any other player who could be potentially related to the matter.

We’re talking about US$34 million that went down the drain and no one knows how the system worked that caused this massive loss, and even though the President promised depositors that their claims will be honoured and offered to dip into public funds for the US$34 million, which he said will be repaid in 10 years, it is the attempted execution of the Mrs. van Beek, followed by Parliament’s rush to put her office and CLICO (Guyana) under Bank of Guyana supervision that undermined public confidence the truth will ever be known.
Beyond that, unless the President seeks re-election he is likely to leave his successor to deal with a messy situation trying to find ways to recover that US$34 million if he goes ahead and takes that money from public funds to cover claims.

With that kind of huge loss in a poor country like Guyana, how can there not be a thorough public investigation, seeing that members of the public have suffered loss and emotional and psychological distress? How can there not be an independent forensic audit to bring clarity to this complicated meltdown?
Finally, I am going to type this very slowly so the spin doctor can try and read and understand, because he is appearing to be a slow person. Repeating for the final time, I never said that remittances were or are wrong.
Look, the guy himself wrote, “Mr. Mervin states that his allusion to foreign remittances to Guyana was intended only to show that I boast of progress and development in Guyana, but remittances were actually a major factor in helping Guyanese survive,” which is self explanatory, so why should I be trying to help the spin doctor understand my take on the role of remittances in helping Guyanese survive despite the spin doctor hyping the Government’s so-called progress and development.

Take away the almost US$1 billion in remittances from the Guyana economy for 2007 and 2008 and we could have been witnessing either riots or protest demonstrations against the Jagdeo regime or a higher number of Guyanese fleeing the land.
At this juncture, I am beginning to think Dr. Misir either grows a brain or rents a clue, because he is so detached from reality it is troubling that he is actually being paid taxpayers’ money to mislead them and misrepresent their interests.
Emile Mervin

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