Leader of the Opposition David Granger yesterday said that APNU is still open to talks with the Government on the 2013 budget even though it does not believe that anything could come out of them at this late hour and dismissed the notion – reiterated again yesterday by Finance Minister, Dr Ashni Singh – that the Opposition was to blame for stalled discussions.
And Granger brushed off reports of strife within the grouping as hinted at by a letter from APNU member Carl Greenidge in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek, saying that there is a well established shadow Cabinet mechanism which means that the process does not have to wait on one man.
In his letter, Greenidge said that Government was insincere in its approach to the talks. He also lashed out at the behaviour of unnamed members of the PNC for aiding a campaign of untruths against him. His letter followed statements from Minister of Finance Singh in the media a week earlier stating that he had been waiting since the end of last month for a follow-up meeting to be scheduled between the government and opposition. The Minister threw the blame on Greenidge, who he said pulled out of a planned meeting and failed to indicate when he would be available.
Greenidge for his part said the rescheduled talks were never hinged on his own availability and debunked reports to the contrary in the media.
When asked whether the party is still willing to participate in the process, Granger told Stabroek News, “APNU has never refused to participate in talks summoned by President (Donald) Ramotar or Dr. Singh and we intend to maintain our engagement although it is clear to us that the Government is not sincere in incorporating our concerns into the 2013 budget.”
“I would like to make it clear that given the experience of the 2012 budget I wrote President Donald Ramotar in August 2012 asking him to establish a tripartite budget committee so that the three parties – the PPP/C, APNU and AFC could avoid the problems of 2012 in the preparation of the 2013 budget. President Ramotar replied to me stating that APNU should submit its recommendations. In other words he declined to establish the tripartite budget committee that I had requested,” he said.
“It was only sometime later when the Minister of Finance had actually commenced his consultations with the Private Sector that APNU and AFC were invited to consultations. There were really only two meetings…the first was a matter of presentation of the conceptual framework and there was a follow up meeting, which occurred only after I personally asked President Ramotar to get Dr. Singh to meet with our team. Dr. Singh then gave us a thick file of documents which were not relevant to the new budget…and he gave us a very short time in which to study them,” he said. Granger explained that the documents had to be copied and passed to Greenidge’s team and this he said only happened in February.
“It is not the fault of APNU or Mr. Greenidge that only two meetings were held…and the meetings were really not serious attempts to take on board the recommendations of the majority…it is not true to say that Mr. Greenidge contributed to the delay and it certainly is not true to say that anybody in the PNC contributed to the delay,” he said.
Material times
He said that Greenidge has a team and in his absence Lance Carberry or any other member of his team could have gone ahead. “At all material times, the Chief Whip Amna Ally, the research officer Lance Carberry and I were aware of Mr. Greenidge’s whereabouts and no requests were made to us to have somebody to attend the meeting,” he said. “As Mr. Greenidge pointed out other persons could have attended the meeting, but as it turned out the Minister of Finance did not really have anything serious to bring to the meeting anyway,” said Granger.
“Mr. Greenidge has a team behind him and APNU is fully in support of him…he is a member of the shadow Cabinet and every week we meet and matters concerning the budget are discussed,” he said. APNU had not issued a statement denying Singh’s allegation last week that Greenidge was holding up the budget discussions.
APNU in a statement yesterday said that “the premeditated continuing output of deliberate misinformation” from the Minister of Finance confirms the position of APNU that, despite President Ramotar’s publicly stated commitment, he never intended to conduct meaningful discussions with the AFC and the APNU that could impact significantly on the framing of the 2013 National Budget.
“It must be noted that the first tripartite [budget] meeting was held on Wednesday December 21, 2012 at the Office of the President. At that meeting, the Opposition parties raised pertinent questions and requested specific information to enable us to become meaningfully involved in the framing of the 2013 National Budget. The Minister of Finance asked for the requests, from the Opposition, to be submitted in writing and this was done without undue delay. However, none of the information requested was provided,” APNU said in its statement.
It noted that the second meeting was hurriedly convened, on Friday February 8, 2013, after the Opposition stated publicly that the Minister was simply engaging in propaganda.
“That meeting proved to be nothing but a shadow boxing exercise, since none of the information requested by the Opposition was, up to that date, supplied. It should be recalled that the information requested by APNU was essentially that which the Financial Management and Accountability Act specifies should be made available by the Minister of Finance to inform the Budget making process,” the APNU statement said.
“Eventually, on Tuesday February 26, 2013 one copy each of a voluminous document, containing 15 attachments… was sent to APNU and the AFC with the unreasonable request for a meeting to discuss same on Friday March 1, 2013. It should have been obvious to the Minister that the Parties would have to circulate copies of the document to their own Budget Teams for review. Therefore, the Minister was informed that a new date would have to be agreed,” the statement.
“On review of the documents submitted, it became evident that, given the short time remaining for the Budget to be presented to the National Assembly, the Minister had not provided the vital information which would be needed for any serious discussion and meaningful inputs, by the Opposition, into the 2013 National Budget. Therefore, the invitation by the Minister was to nothing short of another round of a meeting about another meeting. In other words, a waste of time!” the APNU said.
“The charade conducted by the Minister of Finance can only mean that it was his intention all along that the 2013 National Budget would have to be dealt with on the floor of the National Assembly. Perhaps, he is convinced that he could shelter safely under the umbrella of the ‘provisional ruling’ by the Chief Justice” on the budget cuts, said the statement.
Seeking to blame
In a response last night, Minister Singh said that Greenidge was the one who committed to proposing a date for the continuation of the talks but never did. And he said that Greenidge is seeking to blame everyone but himself for his party’s abandonment of those talks.
A statement from the Government Information Agency (GINA) said Government proposed February 28, a Thursday. According to the statement, the Minister said that he chose that date deliberately because on that Thursday, there was no Parliamentary sitting scheduled and because Parliamentary Committees do not normally meet on Thursday afternoons given the potential for a clash with full sittings of the House.
“The Minister further stated that when he spoke with Mr. Greenidge on February 27 he explained this and Mr. Greenidge acknowledged that the February 28 meeting of the Public Accounts Committee was indeed an extraordinary one. On that basis, Mr. Greenidge asked for a postponement of the budget talks and offered to suggest an alternative date. He never did,” GINA said.
“For Mr. Greenidge to now turn around and say that I should have been aware of the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee on that day is most astonishing, given that he and I discussed the basis for my scheduling of the meeting on February 28, and he acknowledged that the PAC does not normally meet on Thursday afternoons for obvious reasons,” GINA quoted the Minister as saying.
According to the statement, Singh agreed to reschedule the budget meeting and invited Greenidge to propose an alternative date. “Several weeks later he is still to do so, and that is the simple fact of the matter. No twisting and turning by Mr. Greenidge can change those facts,” he said.
Singh said Greenidge must “own up” to this fact and accept responsibility for shirking his obligations as the Opposition’s lead spokesperson on finance, “instead of blaming everybody under the sun including his own Party colleagues.”
“It is noteworthy that Mr. Greenidge wants to blame the Government although the Government convened the talks and invited him to attend…he wants to blame his own PNC members for what he calls a smear campaign against him although they would be perfectly justified in their displeasure at his disappearance at this most critical period, he wants to blame everybody else in the whole world but himself, when he is the one who was unavailable to attend at the proposed date, and he is the one who failed to suggest an alternative time, and he is the one who failed to get his colleagues to suggest an alternative time on his behalf,” Singh is quoted as saying.
Singh also slammed Greenidge for incorrectly saying in his letter that the AFC had written him advising that it was no longer taking part in the budget consultations. Singh said he has seen no such correspondence.
