The draft legislation for the State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) is still being looked at by the World Bank, according to Attorney General Basil Williams who said yesterday that that process is almost complete.
“I think it is almost out of the pipeline”, he said when asked for an update yesterday. He had moments earlier handed over the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry (CoI) report to the Speaker of the National Assembly Dr. Barton Scotland.
Asked to be specific in terms of a time period, he said that he is not sure. He said it has not yet reached the AG’s chambers and that the information is that “the World Bank really hasn’t concluded its examination of the relevant bill”.
A meeting was held in January with a World Bank/United Nations team on the proposed legislation.
Following the meeting Williams had said that consultations on the content of the legislation will be held. The discussions during the meeting focused on the vital piece of legislation that will empower SARU to request information through the courts.
“What we are trying to do is build from scratch an organisation designed to prevent the stealing of public assets now, and in the future as well as to capture and return some of the property that was stolen in the past, the recent past.
So we have a two-fold obligation. To do that we need to establish the capacity to make that pursuit and that means building up our strength in many different [ways], organisational, legally, personnel, resources-wise, contacts overseas and all that sort of thing…it is an evolving global structure of which we are part that we are trying to build a net,” SARU head Dr Clive Thomas had told Stabroek News in an interview.
He emphasised that going forward, the unit needs to be a fully independent agency being propelled by autonomous forces to ensure it can pursue investigations free of favour.
“I hope to get it done as soon as possible. I would have liked to get it done yesterday so it is the most pressing need that we have now because we don’t want to rely on other agencies to take action, we want to be able to do our own execution,” Thomas said of the need to introduce a bill that will transform the unit into an agency.
