Attorney General Basil Williams said on Friday that the government has given the PPP/C sufficient chances to sort out the controversial Red House lease agreement and as such the appropriate action can be taken at any time.
Williams who was updating the media on the agreement said that there has been no fresh discussion on the issue.
Minister of State Joseph Harmon last August disclosed that the PPP/C administration had granted a 99-year lease of Red House to the Cheddi Jagan Research Inc, a private company closely associated with the PPP/C, at a rate of $1,000 per month. Red House holds documents pertaining to the late President Cheddi Jagan. The government had labelled the deal “criminal” and had signalled its intention to investigate it.
After indicating that the Red House situation “remains the same”, Williams was asked when some sort of movement could be expected since it has been months since the issue was made public. In response he questioned what is expected to happen.
“We are saying that all nine presidents should be housed in that building”, he said. When told that the lease agreement is still in place despite government’s public position on it, Williams said that it will be addressed in “the same manner that many other things have been addressed”.
He said too that government has given the PPP/C “ample opportunity to address us on the issue and so let the record show…that we have bent over backwards.
The president has spoken at length on this matter and we have not had any shift in their positions and so we reserve the right to act”.
The controversial lease agreement was finalised sometime in 2012 after the then PPP/C government had spent millions to renovate Red House. It was only after the APNU+AFC government took office that the lease arrangement was discovered.
The property is reportedly being used by the Cheddi Jagan Research Inc for the purposes intended; that is a research centre containing material on the late president and PPP founder Dr Cheddi Jagan.
Based on what is coming from government officials it would appear that the proper protocol involving a public advertisement was not followed.
Within two months of the revelation which raised eyebrows, it was revealed by Harmon that if necessary, the government was prepared to take legal action to ensure that the lease was rescinded. There has since been no word on this.
Among those who have criticized the deal is former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran who has called for its revocation. “Considering that this building was completely refurbished at enormous costs to the state, the shock was even greater to learn that the property was leased since 2012 to this company for a nominal sum of $1,000 per month for a period of 99 years. To add salt to injury, the staff of the centre continued to be paid by the treasury,” he wrote in his Stabroek News column on accountability.
“The agreement should therefore be rescinded, and those responsible should be held personally responsible for this abuse/misuse of public resources, which by definition constitutes an act of corruption,” he wrote.
It had been revealed that government was pursuing a civil settlement as opposed to criminal proceedings. At the beginning government had said that the arrangement in its present form was criminal as it was nothing more than a “sweetheart deal.”
“When you are dealing with persons who, in the face of an open and a blatant wrong, actually feel that that wrong is a right, you are actually dealing with a group of persons who, in my view…, have a very twisted logic or a very twisted perception of morality or what is right or what is wrong.
Because there is nowhere I can see, in any part of the world, where something that belongs to the state can be transferred in that manner to a small group of persons and you can still consider that to be right,” Harmon had said during an interview with Stabroek News.
