Justice Franklyn Holder on Monday ruled that the government’s failure to circulate the proposed budgets for constitutional agencies to the National Assembly back in 2020 was in breach of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act (FMAA).
According to Senior Counsel Roysdale Forde, who represented APNU+AFC Member of Parliament David Patterson, who had sued Attorney General Anil Nandlall SC and Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh, the High Court ruled that the budget and or proposals of the Audit Office is to be submitted to Parliament by the Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee in accordance with Section 80B of the FMAA.
Patterson had been the Chairman of the Committee at the time.
Forde told this newspaper that the Court specifically granted declarations that the purported consideration and approval of those budget proposals of September 1, 2020 were in breach of the Act.
The attorney said the Court noted that that the Minister of Finance and the National Assembly had “no legal right or justification,” for breaching the Act or Article 219 (3) of the Constitution, while holding that Nandlall’s resort to the doctrine of necessity was misapplied.
He said, too, that the Court rejected the AG’s contention that the case had become academic and of no use as Parliament had since repealed the provisions in the Act.
On this point, Forde said the judge found that notwithstanding the repeal of the provisions of the Act, the Court “was under a constitutional duty to ensure that the Rule of Law be maintained and the public interest protected.”
The lawyer said that it is against this background the Court found that in protecting the public interest, the grant of relief in the form of a declaration was appropriate to protect the rule of law and to vindicate legal rights.
Further observations made by the Court, according to Forde, are that the Applicant (Patterson) was not a “busy body,” but that he had a real interest in protecting the interest of the public and the rule of law, particularly as a Member of the National Assembly.
Court costs, he said, were awarded against the AG and Minister of Finance and are to be assessed.
In his fixed date application, Patterson, who served under the former APNU+AFC coalition government as Minister of Public Infrastructure, advanced that the consideration and approval of budget proposals for constitutional agencies by the National Assembly on September 1, 2020, were in breach of the FMAA.
His complaint was that the proposals, which were not made available to his party before that date, breached the Act.
Patterson asked the Court to grant, among other things, a declaration that the budget and/or proposal ought to have been submitted to Parliament prior to approval and consideration by the House in accordance with the FMAA.
Crediting the delay to the former government, the AG had said that given the country’s financial crisis, the PPP/C Government “was forced out of necessity to urgently pass an emergency budget so as to enable the Government to restore stability in Guyana and to offer much-needed relief to Guyanese given the delay in having the 12th Parliament convened and the novel global Covid-19 pandemic.”
Nandlall’s argument was that there was an absolute necessity to safeguard the continuation of the effective functioning of the State and that “there was no other course of action reasonably available to the present Government than the passing of an emergency budget.”
Nandlall, however, had defended government’s failure to circulate the proposed budgets, while blaming a constitutional crisis created by the APNU+AFC administration for forcing emergency actions to preserve the effective functioning of the State.
Such circumstances, he argued, had not been provided for in the Constitution nor contemplated by its framers and he further said that the former government failed to prepare and layover a proposed budget for 2020.
