The irony that the People’s Progressive Party has had to resort to the courts to get the coalition Government to pay over monies into the Consolidated Fund, after being accused of that very practice when in office, is not lost on PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo.
During a recent press conference, Jagdeo zeroed in on the recent writings of Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, who, in his column, accused the PPP of not paying public monies into the Consolidated Fund. But Jagdeo was not amused with the current legal fight to get the Government to pay into the Fund the US$18 million signing bonus it received from ExxonMobil.
“Imagine, he’s saying nonpayment of public monies into the Consolidated Fund. They said that about the GGMC. They said that in NFMU, the housing fund, etc. (They said) those were slush funds, (and that) we didn’t pay it over. They did audits there; nothing came out of the audits. They recognise they (the funds) were all legally there, they refused to transfer them,” Jagdeo detailed.
“This is the only Government since — a very long time — that we have to go to court now to get them to pay the US$18 million that they kept in secret, to pay it into the Consolidated Fund. We had to go to court for that. The other time (we had to do this) was in the 80s, when they used to export the gold from Guyana,” Jagdeo detailed.
Explaining the manoeuvres that were once employed in the 1980s to bypass the Consolidated Fund, Jagdeo related that, armed with an overdraft, the then Government would export gold and bank the proceeds in Canada rather than place same into the Consolidated Fund.
“Then the Office of the President used to give directions to the manager over there to release funds to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, bypassing the Consolidated Fund. If you go back to the early audit reports, you will find that,” the former President explained.
Besides the signing bonus, which has been the subject of court battles, Government was only last year accused of using the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) as a slush fund to make land purchases from the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GUYSUCO).
Referring to the reports, Opposition Parliamentarian Juan Edghill had questioned why the money was coming from the CH&PA, rather than the Government or the Consolidated Fund. He had noted that the law requires excess monies from agencies to be paid into the Consolidated Fund.
In the 10th Parliament, the PPPC was accused of holding monies in extra- budgetary agencies. And those monies were even referred to by (the AFC) as slush funds. One of those agencies was the Central Housing and Planning Authority.
“And the (APNU/AFC campaign) promise was (that) all these monies would be transferred to the Consolidated Fund,” Edghill had stated. “I am shocked that the CH&PA has $2 billion in an account. Why is this money not coming from Central Government and the Consolidated Fund?”
According to Edghill, the Permanent Secretary of the Communities Ministry, Emil McGarrell, had provided assurances that monies in the CH&PA Fund would be transferred to Ccentral Government’s Consolidated Fund.
“If you accuse the PPPC of all of these bad things and violations, I don’t expect the God-fearing, righteous, sincere APNU/AFC Government to be doing this,” Edghill said as he brandished the headlines. “I am judging them by their own standards.
“We are happy that GuySuCo is getting money, but we are very concerned about the process that is being used to get this money to GuySuCo. This is criminal behavior,” Edghill had warned.
During a post-Cabinet press conference, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon, revealed that the cash-strapped GuySuCo would receive the money as payment for its land. This comes after an emergency cabinet meeting had been held earlier this week between GuySuCo officials and the Government.
All that Harmon revealed about the source of the cash was that the CH&PA, with assistance from the Finance Ministry, would be making the purchase.

https://guyanatimesgy.com/apnu...ppp-of-doing-jagdeo/