Last Friday, two news items caught my eyes. The first was the Chief Justice’s ruling that the Minister of Finance violated the Constitution by authorising withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund without parliamentary approval, thereby causing excess expenditure totalling $4.554 billion to be incurred during the first half of 2014. This ruling is consistent with the conclusions we had drawn in our column of 28 July 2014 that:
The Appropriation Act of 2014 did not provide for such expenditure,