Category: Letters to the editor

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Teixeira was very wrong

In his presentation at the awards dinner of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry last Thursday Mr Clinton Urling, the Chamber’s President included in his wish list for Guyana a stronger civil society. In the course of his presentation Mr Urling not only referred to the work of the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc but also echoed a recent call by that young organisation – made on the day Transparency International released its 2012 world Corruption Perceptions Index – for measures to enhance accountability, combat corruption and strengthen governance.

Mr Urling would most likely have been aware that only a few hours before he spoke the youth arm of the ruling party had attacked Transparency Institute, singling out its highly respected Vice-president Dr Anand Goolsarran for its vituperation, and severely chastising Transparency International for daring to include Guyana in its 2012 survey. Significantly, even if Mr Urling was aware of the attack, he offered no comment or defence of a civil society organisation in the presence of two Ministers of Government, Messrs Irfaan Ally and Robert Persaud.

One day later, PPP/C governance czarina Ms Gail Teixeira took the PYO vulgarity one notch down when she dismissed the 2012 CPI by stating that “only four persons were surveyed [by TI] as it related to Guyana.“ She even suggested that they must all be male! Surely anyone who knows anything about surveys would know that no sane person would regard a sample of four as reliable or representative of any population and that such a statement simply could not be right. Indeed, Ms Teixeira was wrong, very wrong.

The Transparency International website discloses that for its 2012 CPI with respect to Guyana, TI used four surveys, which in total, and even allowing for overlap, would have covered hundreds of individuals and organisations. The four surveys were Global Insight, World Bank’s Control of Corruption Index (WB), World Economic Forum and the International Country Risk Guide.

If this better information does not have any impact on Ms Teixeira and her “youths”, it is inevitable that any discourse in Guyana would continue to be backward-looking, uncivil and profoundly infected by manipulation and distortions. The leadership of the PPP/C must be in dreamland if it does not realise that for many Guyanese, the ‘C’ in PPP/C has long since ceased to represent any evaporated Civic and now, on empirical evidence as well as well-founded perception, unmistakably stands for Corruption.

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An abomination for an Auditor General report

The report of the Auditor General on the public accounts of Guyana was tabled in the National Assembly on Monday. In a country with weak accounting and accountability, an Access to Freedom Act that has not been brought into force, an Integrity Commission without Commissioners, no Public Procurement Commission, no anti-corruption or whistleblowers legislation, the report by the Auditor General – if its Executive Summary is an indication of its contents – is striking for its sterility.

A comparison of the 2011 Executive Summary is an almost identical reproduction of the 2010 report.

Note that 2011 was a less effective audit than 2010 which in any case was itself not a good audit: it ignored the armies of contract employees, the off-constitution spending by that abomination called NICIL, slush funds across ministries and including the dormant accounts, the loan recovery unit, the National Frequency Management Unit.

The problem we face is an unqualified acting Auditor General who plays to his master’s voice in order to retain one of the most lucrative employment contracts in Guyana. If we need any proof of this we need go no further than the clandestine attempt to lay a path for confirmation.

If that happens, if we think the 2011 audit is poor, we have not seen anything yet.

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Contrary to Singh, Nandlall and Luncheon’s statements Chief Justice’s decision was not final in the Budget cuts case

The Attorney General, the Minister of Finance and the Head of the Presidential Secretariat have been busy distorting the decision in the Budget cuts case to mislead the public. They appear to use their flawed interpretation as the basis for continuing payments to party comrades like Mr Reepu Daman Persaud, Ms Gail Teixeira and Mr Kwame McCoy, in violation of a vote by the National Assembly.

On the day Mr Ian Chang, Chief Justice (ag) delivered, to use his own words, “his views,” the Attorney General Mr Anil Nandlall went from the court, via the Office of the President, to NCN to shout victory.

And in the 2012 mid-year report Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh presented recently, he said that “The [National] Assembly was later deemed by the Courts of Guyana to have acted outside its constitutional remit in inflicting those cuts to the budget.”
Not to be left out, Dr Luncheon was quoted in the press on September 7, 2012 as saying that “the $1 that was approved by the opposition for the various agencies was totally inconsistent with the constitutional provision as ruled by the Chief Justice.”

Let us turn to the Chief Justice’s decision. He rejected the application of the Attorney General and denied the Minister of Finance the “liberty” to make advances/ withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund to restore the $21 billion 2012 budget cuts, except for the sum of $99,000,000 for the ERC. The reason for restoring the amount for the ERC, according to the Chief Justice, is that it is a constitutional body subject to a direct charge on the Consolidated Fund. Accordingly, its budget allocation was not subject to a vote of the National Assembly.

And let us be reminded that the Chief Justice concluded his decision with the words that the matter brought by Mr Nandlall is in its “preliminary stage” and that “the views expressed at this juncture are not final.” The misinterpretation suggests that the three do not have any regard for the truth, respect for the court, or deference for the National Assembly, the only body with the power over the spending of public funds. We may be tempted to discount Mr Nandlall and Dr Luncheon as ineffective political spinners. Not so Dr Singh. He controls the public purse of Guyana and the records show that he has not been unwilling to play around with the Contingencies Fund and the dormant bank accounts to the tune of billions of dollars.

So when Dr Luncheon announces in last month that “no one lost their jobs” and that “Contingency funds were approved and funds made available belatedly but still available to meet the wages and salaries of the contract workers [at OP].” it is time to get worried. Because, if that is so, the Minister of Finance is in violation of not one but two Acts – his own amended 2012 Budget Act and the Fiscal Management and Account-ability Act, under the pretext of a misrepresentation of the court’s decision.

The question now is whether, after a prolonged break, the political opposition can muster the capacity and the courage to confront with all the powers at their disposal, the continuing lawless manner in which the country’s public funds have been mismanaged and misspent by Dr Singh, assured of a pliant and ineffective Audit Office.

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In the final NCN debate on institutional corruption Ashni Singh committed the same error of which he accused Nagamootoo

In the final NCN debate on institutional corruption broadcast recently, Senior Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh accused Mr Moses Nagamootoo of the AFC of “pretence,” “misrepresentation,” “opportunism” and “making false charges of corruption” against the PPP/C.

In an attempt to show how far the government has gone to remove the opportunities and possibilities for corruption, the Minister said on the programme that in the case of the tax laws, his government has “removed opportunities for discretion, imposed rigid rules-based system over all aspects of the corporations, rules have been framed for the granting of incentives …” The facts show otherwise.

What makes the Minister’s accusations so contrived is that he could not have forgotten the infamous case of the Ramroop group in which he and Mr Jagdeo rushed to grant illegal tax concessions to the group. And when confronted with the embarrassment of the illegality – which Dr Singh missed not once but thrice – he spearheaded a change in the law to legalise the concessions to the government’s friend. That cannot constitute a rules-based system.

What was ironic about the accusation is that by his false boast of removal of discretions, the Minister committed the same error of which he seeks to accuse Mr Nagamootoo. A tax holiday under the Income Tax (In Aid of Industry) Act is easily the most valuable tax concession available, and its award is substantially discretionary. This is how the relevant section of the Act begins:

“Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the Income Tax Act or the Corporation Tax Act, it is hereby provided that the Minister may grant an exemption from corporation tax…” (emphasis added).

Readers might be aware that by law once an entity is exempt from Corporation Tax, it is also exempt from Property Tax (section 6) and Capital Gains Tax (section 5). These combined concessions can run to ten years and cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenues. Spin it how much one wants, the language and the power are clearly discretionary.

A less known but certainly not inexpensive concession is contained in the Value-Added Tax Act. By regulations made by the same Minister, any supply of goods and services under an investment agreement entered into on behalf of the government is zero-rated. This means that while the entity does not have to charge VAT on its supply of goods and services, it can recover any VAT it pays on its inputs. The Minister responsible for that Act (Dr Singh) has not indicated the criteria, if any, which a company must meet to qualify for an investment agreement or, that it is he who has the final say on whether or not a person qualifies.

And to go back to the tax holidays, the Minister of Finance who confidently makes such statements that “it is a matter of public record” and that this or that person “ought to know,” must himself know that the Investment Act requires him to publish information regarding tax holidays incentives under the Income Tax (In Aid of Industry) Act. Would the Minister say how transparent and compliant the government has been?

To compound the institutional silence and dereliction, the Act also requires the Audit Office to carry out annually a process audit of the concessions and to make a report to the National Assembly “within six months of the end of each of the financial year.” June 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 have come and gone since the Investment Act became law. Would the Minister say for which year any such a report was made to the National Assembly?

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Teixeira’s position was absurd and disgraceful

I was invited to make a keynote address to the UG Students for Social Change on the topic ‘Legislating as a means of Effecting Policy Changes.’ It is not important that the invitation to me did not indicate that there would be four panellists comprising the Government, the PPP/C, the APNU and the AFC. Nor that ‘certain politicians’ had insisted that they would only participate if they were given the same time to speak as I was given.

What is important for the purposes of this letter is that in the course of the question-and-answer session following the presentations, Ms Gail Teixeira, Presidential Advisor on Governance was categorical that her government did not wish to be distracted by copyright laws and was only interested in reducing the cost of school books. Displaying an enormous insensitivity to Guyana’s obligations under the rules of the World Trade Organisation/WIPO; and under the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU and the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, she dismissed authors’ rights as property and questioned why copyright had to last more than a few years.

Even if the governance czar does not know that the rule of law is the first requirement of governance, I had hoped she would understand that her economic and political case could be met by the government contracting for the writing of the required textbooks. The government could then be free to grant the right to any and everyone to copy as they please.

The issue of respect for the intellectual property of writers was strongly supported by Mr Khemraj Ramjattan of the AFC. But I was extremely disappointed that Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, who like Ms Teixeira is a member of the Council of the University of Guyana, did not offer a comment on Ms Teixeira’s absurd and disgraceful position.