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SARA finds State properties left in wills for officials’ children
One key function of the State Asset Recovery Agency (SARA) is the prevention of corruption. In keeping with this mandate, the agency visited the offices of the administrative regions in the past few months to ensure that the assets of the State are being properly monitored and in
SARA Special Assistant, Eric Phillips
ventoried.
But the subsequent findings were just “startling”, says SARA Special Assistant, Eric Phillips.
During an interview with Kaieteur News, Phillips said that properties belonging to the State were willed to the children of officials. While he declined to provide names, Phillips said that this was found in several instances in almost all the regions.
Phillips said, “So this is what took place under the previous regime…We found that a lot of the appointees were appointed for particular reasons. But we have been able to correct this through inventories and working with the regions to say what is your asset base?
“Who is managing these properties and what is the status of it? By bringing order to this, we were able to find properties which the State didn’t even know belonged to it because there are instances where people renovated them and were living in them like it is their own.”
Philips said that SARA found cases where an agency would buy equipment which ended up in the hands of another entity and then it was being leased to the original purchaser. He said that this occurred with the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo).
The official said that the State’s assets were essentially in “total disarray.”
Phillips said, “It was confusion and so we spent a long time in the regions correcting this and it saved us millions of dollars. We lost a lot of vehicles and equipment in the past because they were bought and not being inventoried. Vehicles and equipment were all over the place with different owners.”
The SARA official said that proper systems for transparency and accountability are now in place. (BY KIANA WILBURG)
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