Dear Editor,
I welcome the appointment of Therese Turner-Jones as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) General Manager for the Caribbean with oversight of the Guyana office. Turner-Jones holds a very important post and developing countries like Guyana look forward to her support and co-operation. I welcome her to this important and challenging post. Turner-Jones’s appointment no doubt comes at a time when the IDB Guyana office is embroiled and ensnared in a series of issues of allegation of mismanagement and corruption and seemingly political partiality. A number of questionable and seeming lack of transparent transactions have occurred at the IDB local office in recent months mainly relating to contracting of forensic auditors and contracting of staff at the Office of Climate Change (OCC). Both of these transactions seem not to have gone through any transparent public procurement process which is contrary to good governance and public practice. I have asked IDB publicly through sections of the media numerous times to make public the information on these contracts but to date the IDB local office and its head Sophie Mc Konnen have been silent on it, very much to the dissatisfaction of the public and transparency advocates. There is absolutely no excuse regarding their involvement and to say this is a government process when the IDB knows that for all posts paid through the IDB, the IDB gives approval and reviews the procurement process. I would also add that it is exceptionally uncanny that IDB cannot account for its procurement process, or at least has not been transparent at all about it, and has in turn participated in the hiring of a plethora of persons at OCC through the “back door process.” And the very person who participated whilst at the IDB as a staffer in this approval, is now the head of the very agency (Office of Climate Change) that has these persons in its employ, it cannot get more interesting than that. The non-disclosure of the requested information adds to the assumption that the IDB local office has serious issues of mismanagement, corruption and lack of transparency. For example, I also raised the matter of single-sourcing of large value, multimillion dollar contracts for forensic audit purposes. Even if one were to try to justify this by saying there is no option for alternative consideration and the auditors chosen were the only ones who could do it (ie sole sourcing), I am certain a large number of practitioners in the field of auditing in Guyana, can right away debunk this by showing long lists of qualified companies and individuals who could have very capably carried out these audits. Turner-Jones, I call on you to urgently investigate the operations of the IDB Guyana office and its leadership. I will be the first to compile a dossier of these events and questionable transactions and present them to your office.
Yours faithfully,
