Over the past three years, the average annual expenditure for the entire government on travel has been $200M, according to Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh who lambasted a claim by the Alliance For Change (AFC) that President Bharrat Jagdeo alone incurred expenses of $1b over two years.
In a GINA statement last evening on growing concerns over the cost of presidential travels, the minister said that Government’s total expenditure on overseas travel is disclosed publicly in the national estimates and the public accounts, both of which are tabled in the National Assembly and are available to all Members of Parliament.
“Even the most cursory examination of these documents would debunk the absurd claims being made by the AFC regarding the cost of Presidential travel, suggesting that the AFC leadership is either not capable of reading the national estimates and the public accounts, or that they wish to deliberately mislead the public”, the GINA statement said.
Singh added that any person who examines the national estimates or the public accounts would know that the cost of overseas travel by all Government officials, including the President, is met from a specific line in the budget that finances attendance at overseas conferences and official visits.
“Over the past three years, the average expenditure incurred by the entire Government in any one year on overseas travel has been $200 million. This amount would have met the cost of travel by the President, all Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, and all Government officials at every level in all Ministries throughout the entire year”, the GINA statement added.
Consequently, to suggest that the President alone spent $1 billion on overseas travel over the past two years indicates either that the AFC leadership has not been paying attention to information that the Government has been tabling in Parliament or its leadership is incapable of reading and interpreting these documents, GINA said.
The question of uncleared advances for travel by government officials came up at a recent sitting of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament and answers are still to be given.