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$30B not $348B received from EU- PPP insists
Leader of the Opposition, Bharrat Jagdeo, has denied that the European Union (EU) has remitted
Leader of the Opposition, Bharrat Jagdeo
$348B to Guyana from 2006 as part of the assistance to help the sugar industry recover from a 36 percent price cut.
In a statement, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) said that it rejects as a total falsehood, the contention being peddled in the media.
”In fact, the total sum paid to Guyana is approximately $30B. Indeed, the final installment of $5.4B was paid to the Coalition Government in October last year. The sum of G$348.5B is over ten times the sum actually received by Guyana.”
The statement insisted that more than $30B was spent by the PPP/C administration on the Skeldon factory alone.
The Leader of the Opposition, who is overseas, said he will address this issue more expansively upon his return to Guyana later this week
On Friday, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon said that the PPP, which ran the country continuously from 1992 until 2015 when it lost the general elections, should come out and explain to sugar workers what it did with more than $348B.
The amount of money disbursed by the European Union was announced last week by EU ambassador, Jernej Videtic, who also said it is unlikely at this time that the bloc would consider more support for the troubled industry.
Minister of State, Joseph Harmon
The money was supposed to have been plugged into projects that would make the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) more competitive as well as be able to explore diversification.
However, the industry is in dire straits. Its fortunes have steadily declined over the last two decades with cost of production now said to be three times the world market price.
Wales estate was closed by the administration last December and two more – Rose Hall and Enmore – are likely to face the same fate.
The administration has made it clear that the 17,000-strong worker industry is placing a massive strain on the rest of the economy.
On Friday, asked what his administration would have done with $348B in EU grants, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon said that it is clear that if the money was spent in the sugar industry, Guyana would not be facing the situation of having to bail out GuySuCo to the tune of billions of dollars annually.
Harmon said, “You will find the bulk of the money never went where it was supposed to. And so when the PPP and some of their friends are going to sugar workers and crying out ‘we sorry for you, we sorry for you,’ and so on, they should explain what it is that they did with all this money.”
Specifically, Harmon said, the PPP should be made to answer why it is that the state-owned industry is producing sugar higher than the world market price.
“This is not something that could have happened overnight. It did not start in 2015 (when we entered office). These were noted trends that happened along the way.
EU officials last week said that the disbursements were never based on how much sugar was produced, but rather, on indicators measuring reforms, which Guyana passed.
Guyana was among more than 18 countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and St. Kitts and Nevis, that benefitted from the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP) to support a number of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries that were adjusting to the 2006 reform of the EU’s sugar regime.
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