Dear Editor,
On Friday, Febuary 11, I was asked by the PNCR to read part of a press release on its behalf. The release registered the party’s concerns about transparency in transactions and the accountability of the government. The PNCR indicated that once again the government, and the President in particular, seemed involved in a transaction that was so opaque that each question posed about it had elicited a different answer from himself and his colleagues every time they responded. It was embarrassing, and one had been forced to ask whether this was another in a long list of corrupt transactions. The President has yet to answer the questions raised about the $1B One Laptop Per Family project but reacted by launching a personal attack on me based on half truths and crudely fabricated events.
The position of the PNCR remains the same whether or not I was a good Minister of Finance. What Mr Jagdeo thinks of me as a Minister of Finance is not the issue. At issue is the rapacious behaviour of the administration involving acts of theft and the waste of national resources. As a consequence of this the government has been widely branded as hopelessly corrupt.
The National Accounts are audited in order to ensure that failure to adhere to the regulations and laws are exposed and prosecuted, and this is intended to discourage corruption. The audit is not an end in itself. While the National Accounts have been routinely audited during the tenure of the PPP, corrupt transactions have abounded in spite of it. This has occurred because the reports and recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee which looks at the audits have been ignored by the government. When the outcry and complaints by officials become too embarrassing, the latter are forced out of office. Each year we have more of the same – rampant corruption and the firing of more officials, including the much quoted Mr Goolsarran who left at the end of a process which amounted to constructive dismissal.
No amount of personal abuse can remove that fact. While the PPP has been in office the international community has classified Guyana as the most corrupt country in the region and one of the most corrupt in the world. What is more, each year it gets worse.
In a similar case Mr Jagdeo reacted to questions of abuse of the law by showering Mr Yesu Persaud with abuse and accusing him of being ill informed, if not ignorant. It turned out that the ignorant party was Mr Jagdeo. To save himself further embarrassment, the law was changed to make what was illegal, legal. The stone scam which took place on Mr Jagdeo’s watch at the Ministry of Finance was the first of many – re-migrants and imported beer for example – for which the ministry became infamous after 1992.
Has appropriate action ever been taken by the Jagdeo government when these scams and illegal acts have been uncovered? No, but they did get rid of the Auditor General. Well he actually resigned but there is more than one way to skin a cat. This one seems to be a hallmark of Mr Jagdeo’s administration both as a Minister of Finance and as President.
On this occasion Mr Jagdeo miscalculated, however. First, everyone now understands the plot and the opposition is not shy about bringing the matter to light. As usual, President Jagdeo’s story has changed so many times that no one is listening.
Yes, we were told, the PPP had our interest at heart and has acquired computers for all households.
No, the price of $295,000.00 quoted by the Minister was a mistake; in any case the computers have not been purchased. That was only a price on an invoice
…
So what was the figure quoted by the Minister?
…Well, yes some computers have been paid for and received.
Has there been tender for these computers?
No, we did not tender but will do so in future!
And so it goes on.
It is now being suggested among those who know such things that the price quoted by the Minister was correct. That was the invoiced price and not what was to be finally paid to the supplier.
It is certainly familiar – strange story questions, fabrication, exposure, denial and abuse of questioners and firing of innocent staff. It also happens outside of finance – recall the Queen’s College case. Only this week an importer of pharmaceuticals accused the Minister of Health of lying about tenders for drugs.
Let us turn to the audits.
Was it true that as Minister of Finance I never submitted one? The answer is no. That story is of course entirely born of Mr Jagdeo’s imagination. When the PPP was making up this story and the Hansards of the Hoyte period were seemingly destroyed, they forgot one little fact. I was not first appointed by Mr Hoyte. I was actually a Minister of Finance, Planning and Trade under LFS Burnham and first appointed in 1983. President Jagdeo has acknowledged that audits were completed for the years 1983, 1984 and 1985. So his claim that Greenidge was the worst Minister of Finance, he never had the national accounts audited, is patently untrue. I would not be proud of only having audits completed for three years, however. In fact, when I was appointed in 1983 the audits for 1975 were still incomplete. The then Auditor General, Mr Pat Farnum, was concerned to bring that situation to an end as soon as possible. The problem had been caused by two factors, the hitches and delays experienced in the computerization of the Ministry of Finance’s records and missing statements of expenditure from accounting officers, especially those in the regions and those responsible for the gold accounts at the sub-accounting unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As a result of slow reconciliation of the accounts of the earlier years Mr Farnum and I, together with the Accountant General, Mr Hereman Persaud (and subsequently Mr Eddy Layne), agreed that I would establish a task force to work on accelerating the preparation of those accounts. Mr Goolsarran joined that exercise when Mr Farnum retired in 1990. The work
programme of the task force, although delayed by unnecessary quarrels, scheduled the audit reports for completion in early 1993. Those for the period 1986 to 1991 were almost ready.
I cannot say what exactly happened after October 1992 but have established that the auditing and reconciliation exercise was prematurely stopped. Since the task force had been established by a Minister, that decision would have had to be taken on the instruction of the administration, the Minister of Finance or the President. In spite of that, there have been several statements attributed to government spokesmen and the Auditor General’s Office commending the Auditor General for bringing the national accounts up to date after “28 years of PNC misrule.” I only discovered this deception last June, when I went searching for those audits. In other words, the instruction to stop the audits was taken while Mr Jagdeo was still at the Ministry of Finance so he should have been aware of that fact.
If the PPP stopped the audit why would the President say that Greenidge had not ensured that any audit had been done? The answer is political. PNC failure to audit is a more politically explosive propaganda story than a headline saying the ‘PPP brings audit reports up to date after the PNC started it.’
It also explains why the Hansard reports which are a unique record of the parliamentary debates seem to have been destroyed. Each country in the Commonwealth maintains such records, which are an important part of our heritage and constitutional history. Those for the entire Hoyte period have been removed from the Parliament, presumably either destroyed or hidden. The success of that period is an embarrassment for the PPP. They have been claiming that other governments are incapable of governing and that the PPP established the track record which enabled us to access HIPC, etc. With the disappearance of those records they still cannot wipe out our contribution to the development of this country. The debates documenting the positions of the PPP and the achievements of the Hoyte era may have been destroyed and are not available to the citizens of this country but the essentials are known to others.
The PPP’s efforts have been in vain. I presented accounts for the years 1975-7 in 1984, 1978-81 in 1987 and those for 1982-5 were completed and laid in 1991. If not submitting audits for any years qualifies a Minister for being the worst in the country’s history, completing 10 reports in just under 10 years should qualify as exceptionally good! It is the fabrication and misrepresentation of our history which led me to say that no one cares what Mr Jagdeo thinks of me or my performance as Minister of Finance. He has a penchant for making up stories and figures although he loves to boast of being a Russian–trained economist. It is not a very good advertisement for Russia.
The Speaker’s office is supposed to be the guardian of such matters (records of bills laid and the Hansards) and I invite the Speaker, with the assistance of his predecessor, if necessary, to explain to the country what has become of these records and how they could have been lost without any announcement, enquiry or comment from the Speaker’s office.
OK you may ask, what is the story about Minister Greenidge writing to Mr Goolsarran, the Auditor General, instructing him not to audit the privatization proceeds? It is another fabrication!
I can recall no exchange on privatisation proceeds. I do recall, however, receiving a letter from Guystac complaining that in spite of informing the Auditor General that the statutes and articles of Guystac and the independent corporations such as Guymine and Guysuco provide for their accounts to be audited separately from those of the commercial agencies of the government, they had been receiving threatening letters from the Goolsarran’s office. I consulted with the relevant legal authority and sent Mr Goolsarran a letter cleared by that authority advising him to consult with the government’s legal adviser, the Attorney General’s Chambers, before writing further to the Guystac Corporations and the press. In that memo of March 9, 1992 also I wrote about the auditing of the latter’s accounts.
Funnily enough, this letter to the AG was the subject of the last conversation I had with the late Mr Winston Murray, who in his response to a jibe in Parliament forgot the genesis of the entire episode regarding Mr Goolsarran. I would be quite happy if the Government would make available for the public that correspondence.
After all of this what is the situation with the One Laptop project?
Yours faithfully,
Carl Greenidge
