Auditor General ready to hand over GECOM fraud file to DPP

Aug 26, 2018 News

Auditor General Deodat Sharma has confirmed the completion of a file which will be sent to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) following a probe into allegations of procurement fraud at the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM).
The Auditor General’s decision to pursue the matter comes at a time when the GECOM Secretariat, headed by Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, is preparing for Local Government Elections, which will see billions in expenditure to secure equipment and services.
Sharma said that the report will be turned over to the DPP within days.
The GECOM Secretariat has been accused of deliberately overseeing a system of procurement irregularities involving hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases – from radios, to pliers and batteries, to toners.
Audits were conducted at GECOM following the 2015 General Elections. The Auditor General’s office prepared three reports based on their investigations into the procurement of radios totalling $100M, the purchase of pliers and the procurement of toners.
Following the investigations, Sharma submitted his findings to the seven-member commission with a recommendation that the reports be turned over to the police for further investigations.
Sharma had provided GECOM with a specific time to prepare a response to the reports. This was not well received by the Chairman of GECOM, Justice James Patterson (ret’d) who challenged the Auditor to take the reports to the police himself.
Sharma and his team had descended on the GECOM office to investigate worrisome procurement practices at the entity that overlooks general and local government elections.
One of the activities for the 2015 general elections was the purchase of a number of communication radios. This particular report raised many unanswered questions.
It was found that less than 90 percent of the radios were used, despite the strong reasons advanced by GECOM to the administration for the purchases. Some $100M was spent.
It was found that the radios arrived too late to be deployed for the May 11, 2015 elections.
The report found that on top of that purchase for the radios, which were all outdated, GECOM went ahead and bought 12 satellite phones for use, in case the radios could not be put into operation.
When Local Government Elections were held in 2016, the radios were still not used.
People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP) – nominated GECOM Commissioner, Robeson Benn had expressed the view that the Commission bundled the handling of the audit reports and should have seized the opportunity to turn them over to the police based on the recommendation.
“My recommendation was that GECOM should turn the matter over to the police, because you are not even getting documents. You are getting different stories as to what may have happened in terms of the paper trail for documents,” Benn had told Kaieteur News.
According to Benn, the audits were examined by the Admin and Finance sub-committee of the Commission. However, he noted that there was a decision to ‘more or less move on’.

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