Brassington must be jailed for his treachery—IMC Chairman
… “Government must treat everything he says with a grain of salt.”
Linden Interim Management Committee (IMC) Chairman, Orrin Gordon, is calling on the Granger-led administration to treat “everything said by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NICIL, Winston Brassington, with a grain of salt.”
Gordon said, “My reason for saying this is premised on the fact that Brassington lied to forensic auditor Anand Goolsarran about the expenditure in the Linden Mining Enterprise (LINMINE).”
He recalled that the forensic audit report on NICIL stated that total expenditure for the company for the period 2002 to 2014 amounted to $8.6B. Of that amount, NICIL’s operating expenses was $2.1B.
The forensic auditor, Anand Goolsarran, found however that LINMINE accounted for 59 percent of NICIL’s operating expenses—$1.3B. Goolsarran noted that this didn’t make any sense since the company had enough assets to sustain itself. Additionally, when he examined the activities of LINMINE, Goolsarran said that nothing could have justified why the company accounted for 59 percent of NICIL’s expenditure.
He subsequently asked Brassington to explain this situation. The NICIL CEO said that $983M was spent on salaries for a staff of 75 while $122M was spent on rates and taxes for the entity.
Gordon said that the CEO’s explanation was nothing but a “nasty lie”. “I have the records to prove otherwise.”
He said that the most that was paid to the Municipality was $35M in rates and taxes and with even that figure he is even being liberal. Gordon said that LINMINE used funds from the Mackenzie/Wismar Bridge to pay staff and to maintain the operations of the LINMINE secretariat.
Earlier, Gordon had said that NICIL would have sold 83 properties on South Mackenzie, including the old Surapana Golf course, for which it would have received millions of dollars. “So where has the money gone?”
He added that to date, the Municipality has not received “a single cent” for rates and taxes since 2009, when those properties were sold, and that NICIL currently owes the Municipality about $500,000, which he claims as being an “extremely conservative” figure.
Scrap iron sales accounted for another revenue earner for NICIL, Gordon said, but yet the question remains, “Where has the money gone?”
The IMC Chairman said, “The point is that Brassington lied about the expenditure on LINMINE and he should be jailed for his treachery. I have the evidence to prove that he is lying through his teeth and if he lied about that then I am left to wonder what else he lied about in the report just to defend himself and his cohorts.”
He reiterated that Government must be cautious when listening to Brassington, “and try as much as they can to always verify his explanations. He cannot be trusted.
