Gov’t peeved with Peeping Tom

Nov 01, 2009 News

The Ministry of Finance yesterday admitted that taxpayer’s money sometimes meet the travel expenses of the spouses of Ministers when they travel.

The Ministry of Finance declared that the Government of Guyana does not “routinely” meet the travel expenses of spouses or children of Ministers.

However, the Ministry cited “very isolated occasions on which a Minister has been accompanied on official travel by their spouse at government expense, and this is subject to approval by the Cabinet.”

The Ministry’s statement came in a press release expressing concern about the Peeping Tom column carried in Friday’s edition of Kaieteur News. The Ministry said that the government is well known for its prudence in incurring travel expenditure.

“Unlike other Heads of Governments who are typically accompanied by several ministers, advisers, and security personnel, the President of Guyana is always accompanied by very small official delegations,” the Ministry stated. It also said that it is not unusual for the President to be accompanied by only his aide-de-camp.

In addition, the Government said it is always careful to ensure that its accommodation arrangements for Presidential delegations are modest, “of course without undermining the dignity of the Presidential office.”

Furthermore, it is invariably the case that the benefits that arise from the overseas engagements of the President and his Ministers invariably outweigh, by many times over, the costs of those engagements.

The Ministry of Finance stated that any suggestion of extravagance in overseas travel expenses by the government “is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.”