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Govt. owes City Hall more than $1 billion in rates and taxes, and the administration is not paying – Mayor Narine
Kaieteur News – Outgoing city Mayor Pandit Ubraj Narine is coming to the defence of the Georgetown Mayor and City Council. Days ahead of the Local Government Elections (LGE), the Mayor released a statement in response to Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo’s claim that the municipality has been avoiding being audited for fear of being exposed for financial irregularities.
Mayor – Pandit Ubraj Narine
In the article published by the state controlled newspaper, Jagdeo said that the current Mayor and City Council (M&CC) is afraid of financial audits. However, the Mayor said nothing could be further from the truth.
According to the Mayor, in January of every single year, since he became Mayor of Georgetown in January 2019, he had written to the Auditor General requesting an audit of the accounts of the Municipality.
“The last such letter was sent by me in January of this year. I have never received a response to my repeated requests. I have copies of the letters in case anyone wants to see them,” the Mayor said.
Contrary to Jagdeo’s claim, Narine said that it is the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) regime has been strangling Georgetown.
He explained that in 2020, the council got zero subventions while budgetary allocation was $10M for that year.
Narine said that in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the subvention would have been $30M (US$150,000).
“How can such a paltry, pitiful sum of money maintain this country’s capital city – a city with a population of some 355,000 residents and visitors, in an area of 70 square kilometers? Furthermore, the PPP controlled central government has not done any property valuations since 1996 – the law requires that the Ministry of Finance do valuations every five years. That willful refusal of the PPP regime to do valuations has resulted in City Hall being starved of rates and taxes. Let me tell you, there are malls – valued at billions of dollars – that pay absolutely no rates and taxes because they were built after 1996, and the PPP regime still refuses to do valuations,” Mayor Narine added
Added to this, the PPP government owes City Hall more than $1B in rates and taxes, and the administration is not paying.
He continued that “the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) owe about $10 billion, and the company is not paying. Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI) and other entities controlled by the PPP regime owe the city large sums of money. The fact is, if the PPP government and the companies it controls simply pay their debts, the M&CC would be able to do much more for the residents of Georgetown.
The Mayor emphasized that the people of Georgetown are not stupid. Georgetown’s residents will absolutely not have their intelligence insulted by a vice president.
“We all know what the PPP officials want – they want unlimited power; they want their corrupt hands in every purse in Guyana. But the people of Georgetown will not give it to them; Georgetown will never be controlled by the PPP.” Narine added.
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