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Reply to "Govt to fork out $50M to handpicked Ram, Goolsarran"

This disclosure, which was made during the final hours of the consideration of the Budget Estimates, took the House by total surprise, because, not only was it discovered that these two individuals would be cashing in on hefty chunks of taxpayers’ monies, but the Government finally admitted that the auditors were hired without going to public tender as was required by the law. Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, speaking to reporters shortly after Budget 2015 was passed, noted that this was another act of deception by the A Partnership for National Unity/ Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Administration. “There was no public tender in sourcing them…no public tender whatsoever. These are some of the worse acts of

Chartered Accountant Christopher Ram

Chartered Accountant Christopher Ram

corruption by this Administration. These were the people who lectured about probity and accountability and being transparent,” Jagdeo stated, exposing the coalition’s duplicity once again. Jagdeo had already revealed that the haphazard manner in which the Government decided to embark upon these audits was in complete violation of the law, but noted that the only reason the PPP/C did not take the matter to the courts was because the Party did not want to give the impression that it  was scared of being scrutinised. “We don’t want people to think we have something to hide and that we are afraid of these audits and that is one of the reasons why we haven’t moved to the courts to stop this audit, because we don’t want people to think we are opposed to the audit,” he stated. Former Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Anil Nandlall had also previously noted that the entire undertaking of the forensic audits was completely unconstitutional. He too noted that the recruitment process of the auditors was an infringement of the Public Procurement Act. “It is beyond dispute that those auditors were handpicked by the Minister of Finance without any public procurement process embarked upon…This mandatory statutory process was wholly ignored by the Minister of Finance and millions of dollars of services have been contracted to audit, ultra vires and in breach of the laws of Guyana and persons were simply handpicked by the Minister of Finance and given jobs.

FM
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