The leader of the Opposition Dr Godwin Friday has written to this country’s Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves on the matter of an Urgent need for public accountability.
Friday in his letter told Gonsalves that in a modem, properly functioning democratic society, public money could not be spent in the dark.
“If we are to develop and progress as a country and people, public accountability must be a fundamental and necessary component of that journey”.
The Opposition Leader said PM Gonsalves in responding to his statement on the accounts for the IADC, held on strictly to legalistic grounds that he as Minister of Finance is not required by law, and therefore do not intend to lay before Parliament and the people, through the Director of Audit, audited financial statements of government-owned or controlled corporations that are not statutory corporations, even though they have received and used taxpayers money provided by Parliament.
Friday said Gonsalves position is unfortunate and incorrect.
The Opposition leader noted in writing that the Constitution of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, at sections 75 and 76, the Finance Administration Act 2004 at sections 4, 5,7, 49, and the Audit Act 2005, at sections 2(4), 5, 11, 12, 15 and 19 all clearly speak to the legal requirement for parliamentary accountability in the use of monies appropriated by Parliament and for the central role of the Director of Audit in same.
Summary Of Letter Below
I am concerned that the last audited central government accounts that you as Minister of Finance have laid in Parliament have been the Director of Audit’s report and audited financial statements for years 2009 and 2010. I am also concerned that no financial statements appear to exist, for Petrocaribe No 126 of 2005 and PDV St Vincent &The Grenadines No 136 of 2006, two local companies that your government established in 2005 and 2006, which have been involved in transactions concerning hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds since then.
At present, however. I wish to focus on the state of affairs surrounding the operations of the International Airport Development Corporation (IADC), a company which your government established in 2004 for the purpose of financing and constructing the Argyle International Airport (AIA).
It is a matter of public record that, after appropriation by Parliament of hundreds of millions of dollars for the Argyle airport project to be used through the IADC, you have handed over an undertaking that was opened six years behind schedule, with hidden final cost and cost overruns of hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, despite your promise that there would be, in your own words, “no significant increase in our long-term debt”, the project has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars of long-term, public debt to be repaid by the citizens of this country.
Moreover, then you exhort us, the citizens of the country, to make it work. You have provided the people of this cow.), with no proper accounting for the project’s cost, which may be more than one billion dollars. Indeed, to the contra, when opposition members of Parliament correctly and consistently requested a proper accounting of public monies expended on the project, your unfortunate and unacceptable response at one point, was to ask whether you should show a man your title deed.
Surely, you must by now see the profound and untenable contradiction that your position poses to the citizens of this country. Your view that the law does not require you as Minister of Finance to give a proper account in Parliament in the form of audited financial statements by way of the Director of Audit is wrong, legalistic and one-dimensional, and will surely place you on the wrong side of history in relation to the necessities and prerequisites of good governance in any mature, modern democracy.
Our position, on the other hand, is legal, morally and ethically correct.
Through you, I am also calling on the Attorney General as the principal legal officer of the Government to remind the Director of Audit of her duty in the above-mentioned laws to have oversight of the accounts of all government-owned or controlled corporations and recipients of government money, including the IADC, Petrocaribe and PDV SVG and to present them to the Minister of Finance to be laid in Parliament.
We await your prudent response. Sincerely.
