Weeks after the long-awaited State Assets Recovery Bill was passed, the newly-established State Assets Recovery Agency (SARA) is operating without a budget, but according to its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Major (rtd) Aubrey Heath-Retemyer, the entity’s financial plan will be submitted within another few weeks which will pave the way for key administrative matters to be addressed.
He said that ideally, “we should have had the finance arranged or lined up so that as long as the bill was passed, the money could have been there and we would have been able to move into somewhere…that’s the ideal.”
He told Sunday Stabroek during an interview that the completion of the budget, the hiring of required staff including lawyers and the rental of a building which will see the agency being removed from the Ministry of the Presidency compound, are among the top priorities.
The CEO said that in the absence a budget, the agency has to make requests to the Minister of Finance and await his decision. He added that an initial submission of SARA’s budget will be made within the next two or three weeks.
The Bill was passed by the government following an opposition walkout on April 13. The entire parliamentary session had been set aside for a debate on the bill but was cut short because of time constraints. The parliamentary opposition PPP/C had signalled that a court challenge to the Bill was imminent. However, the Bill was assented to by President David Granger shortly after.
The Bill gives effect to the non-conviction-based asset recovery recommendations contained in the United Nations (UN) Convention against Corruption 2003, which was ratified by the Government of Guyana in April 2008. “The Bill therefore introduces legislation to combat unlawful conduct and corrupt practices in relation to property and other assets owned by the State, or in which the State has an interest,” it reads.
The Bill is divided in seven parts dealing with the establishment of SARA, the establishment of the Recovery of State Assets Fund, civil recovery and preservation of state property obtained through unlawful conduct and orders to assist investigation and international cooperation among others.
Heath-Retemyer, while noting that the agency was aiming to ensure that the transition process was smooth, said it had to be a position to provide the lawyers who would be recruited, with information that was “a good starting point”. He said the aim was to ensure that the “blanks are filled in as soon as possible” so that when matters go to court, “we will be able to win these cases.”
He said lawyers are just one of several categories of professionals the agency requires; investigators and forensic accountants are also needed.
According to the CEO the recruitment of adequate staff will ensure that the agency can be properly manned.
“… Even though we were here we could not aggressively recruit the kinds of people that we wanted to because we didn’t have the budget and we were not an agency,” he said adding that now that the entity is an agency, “we are in the pursuit of financing ….putting together a budget.”
He said that the hiring of lawyers was the agency’s immediate need as matters need to be pursued in the civil courts. “We need competent lawyers who will be able to prepare cases because we have to go before the courts and we expect… that the defendants will be people with money and they would hire some of the most competent hands around so we have to get competent people to go up against them,” he said.
Relocate
Because of the limited space and the fact that the agency wants to be independent, efforts are being made to relocate.
Heath-Retemyer said that in order to move out of the compound the agency will have to rent a building but they have found rental prices for properties in Georgetown and its environs quite expensive. Thus far they have not been able to find a location that could accommodate all the personnel currently on staff.
He said that while the agency was exploring the rental option, it was also “aggressively” looking for somewhere to build. “We are looking for somewhere in the short term to rent and that process has started…we are trying to identify somewhere that is at least readily available for us at this time and shortly thereafter to begin to build. We do believe that one way of saving government money is to be able to build our own place,” he stressed.
“Unfortunately in here we just don’t have the space…even if we were to recruit people …even if we were given the money tonight…we could not recruit because we don’t have anywhere to work. We don’t have the space.”
He said once the issue of space is sorted out, the agency can pinpoint what areas need immediate attention with respect to the recovery of state assets.
International collaboration
According to Heath-Retemyer, the agency has had initial discussions with international organizations on multiple occasions and the intention is to continue along that path.
He said the Bill was only recently assented to and “we have to allow the process of gazetting and everything to take place and as soon as we are clear enough that there are no reasons why we cannot enter into contracts… some agencies that offered to work with us, would come in and we would have to stand part of the initial cost while others would come and they would offer funding…”.
On the local front, he said, there is “sensible cooperation” with the Special Organized Crime Unit (SOCU), the Guyana Revenue Authority and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
“We see the benefit of working with other agencies. Our commitment here is to approach this in a manner that makes good sense and would allow us to cover tracks in the fastest possible time,” he said, adding that overlapping of information can hurt the overall situation, thus the need to share and collaborate.
“We believe that this is the best course of action for us…because we each come with some specialty but we cover a section of the effort. We have the unique responsibility of recovery but SOCU deals with the criminal aspect…they [FIU] can talk not only with this country but with other countries… and GRA is an agency which we would work with. Contrary to the nonsense you have been hearing, we don’t want to supersede these places. We have no interest in superseding anybody. We know that we have our own part to play and they have their parts to play and…we can work together and we will work together,” he said.
Further, he said, the agency can be involved in concurrent activities. “We don’t have to wait for one [matter] to be fully in play before we deal with the other but nonetheless we are constrained by the fact that we have to prepare the cases properly and we have to have lawyers to do so and we can’t do that without the money to pay them and….we have to find space for them to work,” he said.
“We do the best we can,” he said adding that while it was the State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU), the agency was able to do a lot of work including visiting locations to physically check equipment and buildings. He reminded that the agency is looking at land issues very closely.
In a previous interview in April, Heath-Retemyer had informed that in 2016 SARU looked at 54 government agencies. He had explained that the biggest area being looked at then was the misappropriation of money. Vehicles and other movable assets, government buildings and land were also looked at by SARU up to the point when this newspaper had spoken to the CEO.
