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Ramson details coalition’s ‘squandermania,’ ‘corruption’
Budget 2021…
By Kiana Wilburg
Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Charles Ramson Jnr.
Kaieteur News – Along with its unprincipled efforts to rig the 2015 General and Regional Elections, the era of the APNU+AFC will be forever remembered for its unbelievable levels of squandermania and corruption, according to Minister of Culture, Youth, and Sport, Charles Ramson Jnr. during the recently concluded 2021 budget debates.
During his contribution, Ramson lambasted the former coalition administration for its high levels of spending as he noted that it had found a surplus of $10B in 2015 in the Central Bank and upon demitting office, left it with an overdraft of $92B. He said too that the coalition had found gold reserves to be at $290B but its poor management saw that dwindling to $500M, while adding that the current account deficit had ballooned to a whopping $1.8B. In total, the Minister noted that the coalition spent $1.4 trillion of taxpayers’ money but the transformative development which was promised was never felt.
Instead, the Minister said what the citizens got was a slew of broken promises and projects for which millions of dollars cannot be accounted for. In this regard, Ramson reminded of the controversial D’Urban Park Project, which was flagged by Auditor General, Deodat Sharma, in his annual report. Kaieteur News would have reported that since 2017, Sharma did not receive the relevant documentation to account for $500M, which was paid to Homestretch Development Inc. (HDI), the private company that was created to implement the Project. This was paid over to the company so that it could meet its obligation to its creditors. Sharma had found too that there was no documentation attached to the Payment Vouchers to indicate the works done or that supervisory checks were carried out. He had highlighted as well that Payment Vouchers to support the expenditure of $107.119M were never produced for audit examination.
In addition to the foregoing, Ramson also reminded of the former government’s failure to disclose the receipt of the US$18M signing bonus from ExxonMobil. Even when it was faced with questions from the media about the said sum, he reminded that the coalition was still less than forthcoming.
Further to the lack of accountability that overshadowed several projects embarked upon by the coalition, Ramson reminded of the coalition’s failed promise to provide jobs for Guyana’s youths. Instead, the politician noted that the citizenry witnessed the loss of over 30,000 jobs, the majority of which were linked to the sugar industry.
Ramson articulated, “…Even the small man got pressured with Value Added Tax (VAT) on telephone, electricity, data and water.”
Taking the foregoing into consideration, Ramson said the people were essentially neglected while almost every member of the former regime was “on some kind of hustle.” And to make matters worse, he stated, they were shamelessly consumed by an unconscionable desire to retain power at any cost. The Minister noted that this well-known track record of the political opposition would surely keep its clutches far away from the reins of office for perhaps, another 30 years.
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