Foreign Affairs Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett says it’s now up to Caricom Secretary General Irwin La Rocque to dig for details about an alleged conflict of interest by Dr Naresh Singh, the man appointed to be his deputy, while in a press release issued late yesterday Dr Singh refuted the conflict of interest allegations.
“The SG [Secretary General] has to do his work. Now in the light of this new revelation he will have to advise us. The government did not nominate Dr Singh, it was the SG who did. It’s a different thing, so we will wait to hear what he says,” Rodrigues-Birkett told this newspaper prior to boarding a flight en route to the 24th Intersessional Meeting of the Heads of Government of Caricom, which begins tomorrow in Port-au-Prince Haiti.
It is at this meeting of the 15-nation Caribbean Commu-nity that the announcement of a replacement for former deputy SG Ambassador Lolita Applewhaite who recently ended her tenure would be made.
The Foreign Affairs Minis-ter explained that it was the Secretary General who proposed Singh to be his deputy and had been consulting with member states to ascertain whether they had any objections. Guyana has already given its no-objection to Singh being deputy.
The Guyanese-born Singh, who is sometimes based in Canada and is a former top-ranking official of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), was referred to Canada’s public sector integrity commission by International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino on Thursday over a possible conflict of interest.
On Monday last, Singh resigned from his new position as director of the Caribbean Local Economic Development (CARILED) a Cdn$23.2 million Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) programme funded by CIDA which was headquartered in Trinidad and was executing projects in Guyana and other Caribbean countries.
The project has since been suspended until further notice.
In his statement yesterday Singh referred to his dismay at the “unproven allegations” in the media, and said he left CIDA to continue his work in international development in the Caribbean, under the auspices of the FCM. He expressed himself mystified by the suggestion that he may have been in a conflict of interest situation while at FCM.
He went on to say, “The short consulting contracts in international development with the United Nations undertaken during my private time while employed at CIDA were permitted by CIDA rules at the time, as long as I received advance clearance.” However, he said he failed to obtain clearance for two or three consultancies lasting two or three days, for which he accepted responsibility.
He continued: “In execution of my consultancies I received a very small number of isolated emails and conference calls during business hours which were inappropriate. At no time did I intentionally break the rules or attempt to enrich myself at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer.”
He also denied that he left the CARILED Programme on account of media inquiries, saying his departure followed his acceptance of an appointment as Deputy Secretary General of Caricom. He said that his superiors were aware of his Caricom application, and had supported him through the almost five months of the hiring process.
Canada’s public integrity commissioner Mario Dion said the investigation in relation to Singh began after a complaint filed in 2010 accused him of using office resources such as fax machines and a government email address to conduct private business. He was also accused of recruiting administrative staff to assist in the job, which essentially was consulting to the private sector on the same subject matter the individual worked on for government.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News, a French newspaper on Thursday alleged that Singh was the person at the centre of a recent whistleblower watchdog report on CIDA and went on to work on a CIDA-funded project after he left the agency. It was this allegation that led Fantino to act.
“It has come to my attention that a former CIDA employee may have been in a conflict of interest,” Fantino said in the press release on Thursday.
The CBC further stated that the FCM would not say whether Singh was the former CIDA executive singled out in last week’s report by the public sector integrity commissioner, but in an email to CBC News confirmed that Singh resigned from the FCM.
“Naresh Singh resigned earlier this week as director of the Caribbean Local Econo-mic Development (CARILED) program, to pursue other employment opportunities,” said Mouktar Abdillahi, a media relations advisor for the FCM.
“I am deeply concerned about this issue, which is why I am immediately referring this matter to the public sector integrity commissioner for review,” said Fantino in the release.
Another report in the Gazette said that FCM knew nothing last year when they received his candidacy as project manager of CARILED, a microfinance initiative for the Caribbean.
“We were not aware of the investigation…” explained Sébastien Hamel yesterday, head of international affairs of the FCM in the report.
According to the report Singh with his impressive CV was chosen for the position of Director of CARILED with a salary of CD$100,000 per year, plus significant travel allowances. It came into operation on 1 February 2012 and he began a series of at least eight trips to the countries covered by the project.
Sources close to the project here told this newspaper that Singh was in Guyana recently to find a replacement, as he had indicated he was confident he would be chosen as the Caricom Deputy Secretary General.
Local Government Minister Ganga Persaud told this newspaper that government has not received any official word that the project has been suspended. “We have not received any official world from the Government of Canada that the project has been suspended …I spoke with the Honourable Minister of Foreign Affairs and she has not received anything either… maybe it is on its way,” he said.
