The Cheddi Jagan International Airport Corporation (CJIAC) has recorded a loss of $230M for the year 2011.
This is according to its 2011 annual report which was tabled in the National Assembly earlier this month.
The return for 2011 brings its accumulated losses to $2.8b, the report said. Departure fees, the main source of its income was $321.7m in 2011 compared to $309m in 2010. Administrative expenses rose from $144.8m in 2010 to $192m in 2011. Operational expenditure also rose from $190m in 2010 to $204m in 2011.
The report said that all revenue earned and collected from aeronautical services is transferred to the Ministry of Public Works. It added that CJIAC is financed by 37.5% of every departure. This particular issue was negatively commented on by former Business Page analyst Christopher Ram earlier this year in the Sunday Stabroek.
He had said: “While allowing for the poor and nonsensical choice of words, we cannot ignore the fact that the auditor of this corporation is the state Auditor who knows the constitution. He would or should know the requirements of the Public Corporations Act. Section 4 makes it pellucid that a public corporation established under the Act is a body corporate: it owns it has an independent existence. The Act gives no role to a ministry in the operation of any corporation except under section 23 which empowers the concerned minister “to give to a corporation directions of a general character as to the policy to be followed by the corporation in the exercise and performance of its functions.”
The Act requires a corporation to set up a general reserve fund into which its profits, or such part of these as are specified by the concerned Minister, are to be placed. Where only a part of its profits are placed in the reserve fund, the corporation is required to pay the other part into the Consolidated Fund. The Auditor General must surely know that the payment of some 62.5% of the revenue of the CJIA is a breach of the Act as well as the constitution. His opinion should have been qualified and he should have drawn this to the attention of the Ministry of Finance.
“Someone, probably from the National Assembly/Public Accounts Committee needs to ask the Auditor General and the Minister of Public Works to account for the sums paid to it by the CJIA. Based on the 37.5% which the note states is used to finance the corporation, it means that in 2010, the amount paid over to the ministry was $514,758,000. There is no indication in the National Estimates that that money was paid into the Consolidated Fund.”
The financial state of the CJIAC has also raised questions about the wisdom of the proposed expansion of the Timehri airport under financing from China and the debt that will be incurred as a result.
