Finance Minister is insulting National Assembly – AFC

The Alliance for Change (AFC) through its Vice Chairman Moses Nagamootoo has flagged the justification by the Finance

AFC Vice Chairman Moses Nagamootoo

Minister Dr. Ashni Singh that under the Fiscal Management and Accountability (FMAA) Act he had the right to spend $4.5 B of $31.5B that was disapproved by the combined opposition in the National Assembly. According to Nagamootoo, the Minister of Finance is “disingenuous; I think he invents these stories as he goes along. The Act to which he refers, the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act, permits us to establish the Contingencies Fund.” This fund is used for very specific situations of unforeseen, emergency situations and not a situation that is at hand. “So the Minister trying to shelter under that law is very futile effort to cover up what is a massive, illegal and unconstitutional act on his government’s part and on his part.” Nagamootoo said that the expenditure items that the Finance Minister has brought were not unforeseen nor were they urgent. He said that those expenditures were part and parcel of the 2014 Budgetary Estimates and were before the Committee of Supply and disapproved. “We do not think the bringing of supplementary allocations on the ground which the Minister has brought them, that these are in the public interest and are emergency spending. “When you deal with an issue of request for Excess, it means that the money had already been spent, coming post facto having disobeyed the National Assembly, having gone and done something contrary to what happened with the Appropriation Bill,” said Nagamootoo. He said, “The Appropriation Bill was passed with certain reductions; the government had to agree to those reductions, i.e. to take away those items not approved. “To ignore the fact that these items were there before and bringing them as if these are sudden unplanned emergencies, we believe, is unacceptable.” The AFC Vice Chairman said that he could imagine that if the government had come to the Parliament and said the money that was voted for health is not adequate for the vector control section because of the Chikungunya outbreak, “we could hold that as an emergency immediately.” Nagamootoo said, “When you try to bring this kind of eye pass on your National Assembly as if we are a pack of dunces and you want to come and say I spent it and Roger Luncheon went and say now we are going to spend it because the Chief Justice told us we could spend it, they are seeking constitutional cover, seeking legal cover for the spending of the money and then they come to the Parliament and say well it is authorized by law.” He said that his party takes a responsible position with regard to spending taxpayers’ money. It understands that there are expenditures that cannot be opposed because they are statutory. “The government wanted to foist on us funding for propaganda so it brought in the National Communications Network (NCN) and GINA (Government Information Agency) funding. According to Nagamootoo, the AFC is “prepared to play a game where you abide by the rules and where we see transparency in what the government is doing. At this point in time we do not accept the Minster’s explanation as valid and we believe that they are trying sneak up an illegal appropriation on the National Assembly, which is an insult.”