From the Diaspora…TAXPAYERS MONEY IS NOT THE PROPERTY OF PPP

May 13, 2012 News

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By Ralph Seeram

 

Judging from the recent pronouncements from top PPP officials, it would seem that funds collected on behalf of the Guyanese people do not really belong to them. Proceeds from the sale of public assets do not have to go into the bank account of the Guyanese people. The people do not even have the right to know how much money they own, according to the PPP Government.
The PPP still doesn’t get it. It still apparently has not realized why the Guyanese voters reduced it to a minority government. If it did it would not be giving the Guyanese some of the nonsensical explanations about the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL).
Enough has been written in this newspaper about the Legal and Constitutional aspects of the use and disposal of taxpayers’ funds accrued by NICIL, so I would not even dwell on all the technicalities which incidentally are what the President Donald Ramotar and other Government officials are hiding behind. One does not have to be a legal scholar to determine what public money is and where it should go. Commonsense dictates that.
The PPP Government is treating the Guyanese public as if they are stupid, as if they cannot see through the bulls**t (to use the American term) they have been telling them with regards to the NICIL funds. Imagine the PPP government sold public assets such as Sanata Textiles Limited, Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation, the Duke Street property, the bauxite property, Guyana Stockfeeds just to name a few entities involving billions of dollars, and the PPP Government has the nerve to tell the Guyanese owners of these assets that they do not have a right to their money.
For the last nine years or so, even to the present there is no accountability of how much money was collected, spent or may have been misappropriated.
President Ramotar jumped into the fray by saying the Government is not doing anything illegal. The President is either confused, or following the line by the Jagdeo administration of blocking, stonewalling and paying total disregard to the people’s concerns for their money.
“We are not doing anything illegal” is what the President is quoted as saying. The President needs to go into any Guyanese ”rum shop” and ask the “rum shop drinkers” if he is doing anything illegal with regards to the NICIL funds. I think the President knows the answer.
President Ramotar came to office with some goodwill and people expect him to move away from policies of Bharrat Jagdeo regime to a more transparent administration. True, he has made some changes, but defending the actions in the NICIL debacle is definitely wasting the little goodwill he has left.
Does the President really believe the Guyanese public buys that nonsense about not doing anything illegally? Public assets have been sold for billions of dollars yet no one knows how much money has been collected, spent or unaccounted for. For that the President says the Government is not doing anything illegal.
Now I want to look at this issue from a layman’s point of view because I am no legal scholar or accounting expert. So the Government sells asset A for $10B. Expenses involved $2B, leaving a net of $8B which sits in the NICIL account. It then sells asset B for $15B, with expenses say $3B leaving a net of $12B, so we now have $20B sitting in an NICIL account.
It then sells asset C for $20B with expenses of say $4B leaving net of $16B. We now have $36B of taxpayers’ dollars sitting in an account not being used to the benefit of Guyanese, see where we are going with this. So my humble question is how long must the $36B sitting in the NICIL account be there before it is turned over to the taxpayers?
Does it stay there in perpetuity? One gets the impression that the Guyanese people have to beg the PPP Government for their own money, they have to beg for an accountability for their asset, and it’s at the Government’s pleasure to respond.
If the PPP Government feels that the Guyanese voters are so stupid to accept their foolish explanations let them call snap elections, they will find out that they may even lose the Presidency.
The time will come when some of the rascality that took place in the NICIL will come to surface and many may be wearing prison stripes. Some time ago when the Government released documents on the Marriott Hotel deal, it showed Winston Brassington dealing on both sides of the fence, negotiating for NICIL while being one of the principals on the Marriott side of the deal.
It turned out that the Marriott will lease an acre of land per month for money that I cannot rent a parking space for here in Orlando for a month. These conflicts of interest and lack of Fiduciary responsibilities, in some jurisdiction would have Mr.Brassington rear end in prison, and who knows “when mouth open and story jump out” later there will be many who will have to do prison time that is if they have not yet flee the jurisdiction with their ill gotten gains.
Ralph Seeram can be reached at email: [email protected]

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