Minister of Health Dr George Norton has formally disclosed that the government has halted what was clearly an attempt a few weeks ago to ‘walk’ a $572 million payment to the New Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation (New GPC) through the system. This was despite the various red flags that had previously gone up about the present administration’s concern over its predecessor’s relationship with the company in the matter of the acquisition of drugs. Hence, this newspaper ventures a somewhat more expansive comment on one of the issues connected with this matter.
Stabroek Business had stated in a comment on this issue a few weeks ago that Minister of State Joseph Harmon owed the public an explanation on this issue. We had said too that the fact that the attempted multi-million-dollar payment was stopped, at least until the whole matter of the contractual arrangement between the previous administration and the New GPC has been properly probed, does not delegitimize our call for an explanation.
The fact is that the processing of the huge New GPC payment had been going on at a time when all involved ought to have been cautioned by the earlier very public revelations about what appeared to be serious anomalies in the relationship between the previous administration and the New GPC.
If it would be wrong to draw any conclusions from the aforementioned, one is at least entitled to ask just what those functionaries who were involved in the processing of the payment were thinking when they were proceeding with this exercise. It is worth mentioning, of course, that all of this was taking place inside a ministry that would have already come under particular official scrutiny on account of the role that it would have had to play as the facilitator in the relationship between the then Government of Guyana and the New GPC.
Of particular interest is the time lag between the April 21, 2015 ‘no objection’ decision to the award of the contract for the supply of drugs to the New GPC and the July 14 surfacing of a request for payment. All this was occurring at a time when none of the drugs for which New GPC were, it seems, about to be paid, had been received.
Arising out of all this we believe that the attempt to process the multi-million dollar payment to the New GPC in circumstances where the whole business of supplying drugs to the state was under scrutiny was an example of an appalling lack of diligence, to say the least. We can think of perhaps even more worrying conclusions to be drawn from this episode.
Subsequent events have revealed that the official functionaries responsible for scrutiny/oversight in this matter were Minister Harmon and Minister Norton and, yes, we do still think that given the magnitude of its importance, the public is owed some sort of explanation.
Perhaps beyond an explanation one would hope that there be no replication of this kind of official inattentiveness.
