The government recently announced the imminent passage of the SARA (State Asset Recovery Agency) Bill through Parliament. The Bill was developed in consonance with the United Nations Convention against Corruption, and was drafted with the assistance of the World Bank and British expert, Brian Horne.
The draft Bill provides for the integration of the State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) with SARA; the establishment of the Recovery of State Assets Fund; civil recovery and preservation of state property obtained through unlawful conduct; investigations, disclosure of information, restraint orders, search and seizure warrants, account monitoring orders and international cooperation. The hundred and twenty-five odd pages in the draft Bill are very comprehensive and look to cover all bases.
The Bill seeks “to ensure that persons who have filched the taxpayers’ money from this country, state assets, are not given heads up so that they can flee the country, and we can tell you billions of dollars are out there and that’s why we are on board [with] SARA in Parliament,” Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Basil Williams was quoted in a GINA release from a press conference last Thursday as saying.
Earlier in January, SARU had announced that they are in the process of conducting an inventory of high-rise buildings throughout Guyana. “We want to know who owns these buildings; how they got the money to finance them and if they paying taxes,” Dr Clive Thomas, Head of SARU stated.
Chief Executive Officer of SARU, Aubrey Heath-Retmeyer noted that this mapping exercise is experiencing difficulties connecting properties to owners. He lamented the fact that a government entity, the Deeds Registry in some instances has been unable to provide any relevant documentation indicating in whose name(s) the land and the business(es) were registered.
This seemingly minor problem of verifying ownership is just the beginning of an insight into what has become a very complex and well-developed underground parallel economy, which has grown in leaps and bounds with the complicity of corrupt officials. In poker parlance, the current government has been dealt a very weak starting hand in this game.
Participants in these activities have been quite shrewd in placing the assets in the names of their offspring and their relatives. Ill-gotten gains have also been placed overseas for years and this capital flight has only been slowed (not curbed in its entirety) by the passing of international money laundering laws. They have avoided for as long as possible having their names added to the tax database. It should be noted that this problem is not of recent origin, but dates back to pre-independence days. For instance, the development of a large agricultural scheme at an enormous cost to the then colonial government, failed to pay for itself because of the refusal to pay taxes by the beneficiaries of the land development.
SARA’s initial task of compiling information and documentation in this environment will be an onerous one. The cost of hiring investigators and forensic accountants will not be cheap, but it can be worth the while in the long run, if the government can get the operation up and running. The recovery of state assets is projected to be self-funding eventually, with twenty-five per cent of funds going to SARA to cover the cost of its functions, and the other seventy-five added to the Consolidated Fund.
The obvious question begging to be asked is, will this be just another scenario like the audits conducted in 2015, ordered by the new government in office, where the public is still waiting for some form of action to be taken? The answer is of a catch-22 nature since that expected action is tied to the passing of the SARA Bill. The problem becomes one of translating the findings into appropriate action.
The Bill is a civil remedy and civil recovery one. Thus, proceedings will have to take their normal course through the courts, which with their current backlog and slothful pace of functioning, mean it could take years for cases to come to trial.
It is hoped that the government will have in place a system to expedite the findings of SARA, so the misappropriation of the assets of this country as a consequence of the avarice of some individuals will have consequences.
