The honest financiers

Jul 26, 2019 Editorial

Somebody has to be kidding around; jokes like these should not be made. Only this is not a joke: CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, did just that: no to more stock. He is entitled to the millions. He is due. Though he has honestly earned the underlying monetary reward, this corporate leader sets an unprecedented example of lacking in acquisitive greed, of saying no to more.
The prayer is for this country to be so blessed. That it would attract a certain caliber of people, who would bring to the public, service that is so drearily lacking, so expansively missing because of their unending greed, that overpowering lust to rip the treasury apart and walk away flush with cash. Unearned cash. Unofficial cash. Unaccounted for cash.
It is the life, a beautiful one here for the local plunderers.
Financial gorging and bureaucratic self-enrichment, a badge of achievement and a reference of political prosperity –it is easy to spot those who feast on the public money. Offshore arrangements, inland mining partnerships and many dealings smell overpoweringly.
There are these developments about oil blocks and who arranged matters in a certain personally beneficial way. Whether land or oil or housing certain associations and accumulations have a hard, reproachable taint about them.
That is, it is not clean; nor that any such related practices–secret and shady and suspect–are about the altruistic and aboveboard. The same goes for management: political management, materials management, and money management –which are mostly interrelated.
There is a constancy of Guyanese men and women paying themselves on the side and through many self-serving measures: parcels, properties, pickings.
Rather defensively, the critics say that it means nothing, since Sundar Pichai already has so much. First, he is due more; yet denies himself. Now, try telling that to thieving, gouging, desecrating Guyanese scoundrels pretending at patriotic servanthood.
Foreign public service world: men from Wall Street give up tens of millions of dollars per year to serve for tenths of a million in Washington. George Washington set the example differently a couple of centuries ago when he assumed the presidency. He attached the words, “So help me God” at the end of the oath of office, and had an open-door policy for all citizens.
He looked with scorn upon titles such as “His Excellency” which the Congress wisely discarded. Why not so, Guyanese political magnates?
A BBC article dated June 30, had the astonishing caption, “Young, mega rich -and demanding to pay more tax.” It is real. And from all appearances, the eighteen superrich individuals, who signed an open letter cum public declaration to that effect mean business.
In the forefront is Ms. Liesel Pritzker Simmons (of the Hyatt hotel group), who is quoted as saying, “It’s time for us who are blessed with unusual financial success or luck to contribute more to our common good and common future.”
That will not win many friends in rare altitudes of the superrich. She went on, “The best way that we in this fortunate bubble can contribute is that we want to be taxed more.” Local tax defaulters: stop cheating!
The BBC coverage noted that a tax of 2 cents per dollar on assets after a US$50 million exemption, and one cent on assets in excess of US$1 billion could yield some US$3 trillion in collections in ten years. The names in the open letter include the well-known billionaires George Soros (Soros Fund Management), Chris Hughes (Facebook cofounder) and the heiress to the Disney fortune, Abigail Disney, among other financial notables.
In Guyana, tax cheats, corporate pilferers, and political and public service rogues continuously search for opportunities to get more. On every occasion it is believed that malefactors have been identified and loopholes closed, more of them surface.