Dear Editor,
Ms Gail Teixeira, Presidential Advisor on Governance is quoted in Kaieteur News of Thursday, December 30 as saying that the failure by the government to bring into force the Amerindian Act, 2006 four years after its passage was “a mistake, but the only such mistake by the Government in their eighteen years in office.”
For someone who has been part of the PPP/C administration during those eighteen years, Ms Teixeira is at best badly informed or is deliberately casual with facts. Let me point out some other mistakes solely in relation to financial issues. First, unlike Ms Teixeira, many would consider the failure by the government to set aside 20% of the royalties from Amerindian lands into a fund for their benefit not only a further mistake, but akin to an act of deception. She may think that that is part of the same mistake.
Second, Ms Teixeira works in the Office of the President and ought to know about the mistake by her President and Dr Ashni Singh, Minister of Finance in granting tax concessions to the Ramroop group that were, even to the average observer, blatantly outside of the laws. She should know that it was only after this was drawn to the government’s attention that they legalised their “mistake” by passing the Fiscal Enactment Amendment Act No.13 of 2008.
But I want to point out an even bigger “mistake” by this government, one that amounts to a fraud on every consumer of this country: that is the VAT rate. Even after the government discovered that the rate should have been much less than 16%, it persisted with the higher rate, cheating the populace to the tune of $12 billion annually in excess taxes. That “mistake” has been repeated daily for four years.
Next, Ms Teixeira may not even consider it a mistake with the truth that a government minister would mislead the National Assembly over a $4 billion payment to GuySuCo in 2009 for land purchased at Diamond, EBD. Nothing that was publicised in 2010 suggests that all the paperwork for that transaction has been completed, but we now have the possibility of a mistake of accounting and or double payment when the government pays some time around now a further two billion dollars to GuySuCo for land in the same area. And let us hope there is not a mistake of another sort – much of “GuySuCo’s lands” are leased at a peppercorn rent from the government. Taxpayers would like to ask whether the government is “buying” its own property to disguise its continuing subsidies to the state company.
Finally, with the same Minister of Housing speaking of sale of land for millions of dollars to up-market individuals, we have to be careful that there is no mistake where the proceeds of the sales should go – straight into the Consolidated Fund. As Ms Teixeira knows there have been fifteen years of mistakes when it comes to certain payments into that fund. Maybe Ms Teixeira will consider that one mistake fifteen times, ie, the number of years the Lottery has been running.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
