Finance Minister escapes Parliamentary sanctions

Feb 09, 2015 News

– complaints raised against him in 10th Parliament cannot be heard in the 11th – Speaker

Speaker of the National Assembly, Raphael Trotman has stated that it would be difficult to blame one person or several, for the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh escaping sanctions which were expected to follow from referrals to the Privileges Committee for contempt of proceedings in the National Assembly.
Dr. Singh will not have to face the committee since the Parliament has been prorogued and the President has announced a date for General Elections, which will mean that the National Assembly will be dissolved soon.
The Speaker explained that once Parliament is prorogued and then dissolved, matters of the Tenth Parliament cannot be heard in the Eleventh Parliament. Therefore, those complaints which were against the Minister in the Committee cannot be raised again.

Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh

In an interview with this newspaper, Trotman who was Chairman of the Privileges Committee was asked to say whether he is disappointed or unhappy that Dr. Singh had escaped sanctions from that parliamentary body.
The House Speaker said that on two occasions, he found that there was a “prima facie” basis to refer the actions of the Finance Minister for review by the Committee of Privileges and for that Committee to examine and make findings and recommendations if the complaints were proven.
He said that it should be noted that a referral to the Committee was not a finding of guilt and so one can’t be happy or disappointed at the outcome because the Committee never got to hear the complaint in full.
As Chairman of that Committee, Trotman said that he had no power to vote and so his interest was to convene the meetings. On several occasions, the politician said that the Committee was unable to get a quorum and the meetings could not proceed.
He said that he made sure that those instances were documented for review by anyone who is interested in this matter.
Trotman said, too, that it is not possible for him to blame anyone for what played out as he believes that the introduction of the Alliance For Change’s (AFC) No-Confidence Motion interrupted the opposition parties’ plan to have the matters heard before the Committee of Privileges.

House Speaker, Raphael Trotman

A Partnership for National Unity (APNU)’s Shadow Minister of Finance, Carl Greenidge in giving his take on the matter said that, obviously, a situation in which a Minister flouts the rules of the National Assembly in such a cynical and unparalleled manner is undesirable. He added that it is both unprofessional and personally unacceptable.
Greenidge opined that the prorogation of the Assembly was intended to spare Dr. Singh the embarrassment of facing sanctions.
This he posited is the Finance Minister’s second escape from a run-in with the Assembly and contempt proceedings.
The first time Dr. Singh escaped sanctions was when Greenidge had brought a motion to the Tenth Parliament arguing that he failed to comply with a parliamentary resolution that required him to provide reports on extra-budgetary agencies and to pay all monies being held by such agencies into the Consolidated Fund.
The second was when the APNU Shadow Finance Minister, called for the House to have Dr. Singh be sent to the Committee for spending $4.5 billion without Parliamentary approval.
However, the former Finance Minister said that he is not worried. He asserted that drug traffickers almost invariably come to a sticky end because greed means that they do not know when to stop and thank their lucky stars.
“Dr. Singh may feel that he is untouchable but we know that moon a run till day catch um,” he concluded.