Almost $100M spent for lawyers to assist Basil Williams

In 1 year
…despite presence of Solicitor General, 3 Deputies, 6 State Counsels

Despite a fully staffed Attorney General’s Chambers, which included a Solicitor General and three subordinates as well as State Counsels, the former A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Government spent almost $100 million for external lawyers to assist former Attorney General Basil Williams.
According to the Auditor General’s 2019 report, the $207.2 million was budgeted under “others” for the Ministry of Legal Affairs, while $199.6 million was expended. According to the Auditor General, $99.143 million was spent on legal fees and retainer agreements to three law firms and seven external attorneys-at-law.
The Auditor General noted that this is all despite Williams, a Senior Counsel, having the services of “one Solicitor General, one Deputy Solicitor General, two Assistant Solicitors General and six State Counsels.”
According to the Auditor General, however, a special audit is being conducted into this state of affairs, and a separate report will be issued.
Williams’s successor, current Attorney General and Senior Counsel Anil Nandlall, had also bemoaned the staggering sum of $146 million that APNU/AFC forked out for the services of private lawyers between 2017 and 2020… the bills and invoices for which he was greeted when he entered office.
Nandlall has revealed to the media that these lawyers who were hired from both Guyana and the Caribbean were retained in a series of meritless political litigation that the former Government initiated and eventually lost.
“Dozens of invoices cannot be found for lawyers retained during the melee of madness, the five months from March to August 2020, when a series of disgraceful and useless cases were filed in an effort to get the Judiciary to conspire with the rigging cabal at Congress Place to pervert democracy,” Nandlall had said previously.
“A special audit is currently being undertaken by the Auditor General’s Office in relation to these expenditures. But from the invoices that were found, the Attorney General’s Chambers paid the staggering sum of Gy$146,099,180 from 2017 to 2020 to private lawyers. This carnage of taxpayers’ dollars will be halted under this Administration,” Nandlall had also said.