Dear Editor,
On reading your news story, ‘Fraudulent Gecom $25M contract creates uproar at PAC,’ (November 10), I couldn’t help getting the impression that there may be a concerted effort to push back the 2011 elections.
Mind you, I am not against any investigation of financial irregularity in Gecom, because Gecom is funded by taxpayers’ money and should conduct its business in accordance with the operational guidelines laid down, as well as in a transparent manner. However, we are talking here about an alleged fraud that was committed in the run-up to the 2006 elections and which was mentioned more than once by the President in his scolding of the entity for paying for ghost products from a ghost company.
We are also talking here about an alleged fraud that even the Auditor General picked up in his 2007 report, but which allegation has been sitting untouched by the government and parliamentary opposition ever since. So, why the sudden interest in probing Gecom now about an alleged irregularity in 2006?
If the government was truly concerned about the 2006 irregularity why did it, in January 2008, release $100M to Gecom for its ‘scrutineering exercise’? We all remember the big political brouhaha that emerged from the so-called discretionary allocation of the funds by government. The government decided to allocate money for Gecom’s ‘scrutineering exercise’, and Gecom gave the PNC $50M towards the exercise (the PPP supposedly got $50M). But the AFC and GAP-ROAR apparently did not get any money so they wound up taking Gecom to court demanding it split the portion of money allocated for parliamentary opposition parties.
Justice Jainarayan Singh, in his ruling, sided with the AFC and GAP-ROAR, ordering Gecom to allocate the funds equitably to the parties concerned. To our shock and awe, the President got irate with the court’s decision, asking pointedly, “How could the court tell Gecom to spend money that Ashni Singh provides on a discretionary basis, or who to give to?” (‘President questions high court order’ SN, January 6, 2008).
Up until this point, though the President presumably knew of Gecom’s alleged fraud committed in 2006, he did not use that as a reason to deny Gecom the $100M. Interestingly, however, on May 10, 2008, SN carried another news story, ‘PNCR dismisses government’s $100M allegation.’ That allegation, contained in a Gina press release, reported that Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon was concerned that the $100 million, which government said the PNCR received (I thought it was $50M) as a result of Gecom’s registration exercise to pay ‘scrutineers’ had not been accounted for. According to Gina, Dr Luncheon also said that there was information available to government that the opposition ‘scrutineers’ were being used to agitate against the government to protest. When Stabroek News contacted Opposition Leader Robert Corbin about the government’s allegations, he dismissed them as government’s intention to divert attention from the real issues which were related to the rising cost of living in the country.
I rehashed all of that to show that the same government and PNC, which never probed Gecom’s alleged fraud before the allocation of ‘scrutineering’ funds, are suddenly in cahoots questioning Gecom almost a year away from the 2011 elections. When I use actual situations, like this one, to question whether the President and the PNCR Leader have a deal in the pipeline to share power, some people attack me in the letter columns, but despite all the surface level differences between the government and the PNC, their teaming up on any issue is reason enough to start asking questions.
I repeat for emphasis, Editor, that I am in favour of the Gecom probe, but I refuse to be hoodwinked by politicians who are silent on hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for in government ministries and agencies or in overpayments to government contractors for consecutive years, as per the Auditor General’s annual reports, but are making lots of noise over Gecom’s $25M alleged one-time fraud over four years ago. How can this sudden noise not raise questions among political observers that there is something afoot, like an election delay? And while I can understand the political game Ms Volda Lawrence (PNC-MP) and Ms Bibi Shadick (PPP-MP) played with their comments – Shadick said, “If Gecom cannot be transparent, I don’t know how they could hold transparent elections,” and Lawrence said, “I now see why the government [doesn’t] want to give ya’ll money. I now see why…” – it was AFC MP, Mr David Patterson who shocked me with his political naïveté when he reportedly said he now understands the reasons behind the current impasse between the government and the commission.
Oh, really? Is he sure he understands the reasons behind the current impasse between the government and the commission?
Mr Patterson should know by now that whenever the PPP and the PNC are on the same page – as they were in passing legislation blocking members from sitting in Parliament after resigning from their parliamentary parties, or postponing local government elections until reforms are done, or refusing to issue radio licences until broadcast legislation is passed – that’s the time to don a political perspicacity cap.
By the way, is Mr Patterson aware of the government’s ill-advised directive to Gecom to advertise its procurement needs on the government website in the name of ensuring transparency, yet the same government has a transparency and accountability crisis the size of Mount Everest?
In most democracies, governments allocate funds in their annual budgets for election bodies and do not engage in discretionary funding or issuing directives to give assurances of transparency. If there’s fraud, the police and DPP get involved. In Guyana, the govermment seems to supersede the police and the DPP for purely political reasons.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
