Chief Executive Officer of the State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) Major (rtd) Aubrey Heath-Retemyer has assured that if anyone from the current administration steals state assets, he or she will be pursued.
“Yes,” he said, when questioned by the Stabroek News.
After taking office in May, 2015, the APNU+AFC government said it discovered that there was widespread corruption under the former PPP/C administration, which resulted in the country being robbed of approximately $300B per year in assets.
It is expected that the unit would review transactions that occurred over the entire 23 years of the PPP/C’s rule.
Heath-Retemyer, speaking to Stabroek News at his office at the Ministry of the Presidency on Tuesday, said that so far the unit has not received any serious reports concerning officials in the current administration.
He assured that no one is above the law and if anyone is found in possession of government property “then you will be prosecuted.”
Meanwhile, he said that knowing that it is not governed by legislation, the unit has been very careful about how it operates.
“It is as a result of not having the legislation that we have been moving slowly on issues as we have,” he said, while adding that the unit, in some cases, could not go after things in the manner that it should because of the absence of the legislation.
Once the State Assets Recovery Bill 2017 has been passed, a State Assets Recovery Agency will be created, resulting in some amount of autonomy. There will also be the hiring of additional staff to ensure it is properly resourced to efficiently function. Currently, Heath-Retemyer said, the unit’s staff consists of about 23 persons, including drivers. He said that the unit has decided that “there is no point complaining and crying” and added that as the CEO he decided early on that training was necessary and as a result sessions have been facilitated by the Caribbean Institute of Forensic Accounting, the Guyana Securities Com-mission and the World Bank.
He said that the aim of the unit presently is to work as best as it could to have government funding and to make the nation aware that while it is working, the unit has to meet legal standards in order to prove a case.
