Ministers allowed private investments, but cannot use office to influence gains – VP Jagdeo

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has made it clear that while Cabinet Ministers are allowed to have stakes in private investments, they cannot use their office to influence any personal gain.

Jagdeo, who is also the General Secretary of the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP), made these remarks in response to questions posed at his weekly press conference held on Thursday at the Party’s Freedom House headquarters.
According to Jagdeo, “We made it clear [to Cabinet members] that there should not be any conflict of interest in the discharge of your work.”
He went on to explain that many of the Ministers would have had businesses or private investments prior to entering public office in 2020. In fact, he recalled the situation with the Minister within the Public Works Ministry, Deodat Indar, who had a company that was doing work in the oil and gas sector under the previous administration.

Jagdeo revealed that before his appointment to Cabinet, Indar was informed that he would first have to “disengage” from his company to become a minister.
“[Indar] came back and said ‘I will remove myself from the company’ and that’s what he did,” the PPP General Secretary noted.
Nevertheless, Jagdeo acknowledged that while there may be some Cabinet members with private investments, the Party has made it clear that they cannot use their position in office to influence the award of contracts to those entities that they may be associated with, especially those operating in the sectors for which they are responsible.
Additionally, the Vice President pointed out that all ministers – like the rest of public officers – are also required to submit annual reports to the Integrity Commission, detailing all their assets and revenue sources. In fact, he noted that there is a set date by which all the Cabinet members and Government Members of Parliament (MPs) are required to file their reports to the Commission every year.
“If you earn money from a company in which you have shares, first of all, in the Integrity Commission report, you have to declare whether you have shares in companies. [And] if you make a false declaration there, you go to jail… So, you’re required every year to declare and to declare your earnings from those shares, not just ownership of shares.”

“So, that is the position now; not that people cannot own investments anywhere. If they take their money and buy shares in a particular company… they can’t use their influence to steer business to that company and they can’t be in their sectors or their ministries, etc,” he stressed.
According to the Vice President, he does not look into the Ministers’ personal assets as long as they use their own, legitimate money to do that.
Having highlighted this position of the current People’s Progressive Party/Civic Government, Jagdeo used the opportunity to remind of what used to transpire under the previous A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance for Change (APNU/AFC) regime.
Under the coalition Administration, a contract was awarded to the husband of the then Housing Minister Valerie Patterson-Yearwood to build houses for the said ministry which she helmed – something which was flagged as a conflict of interest.
In another instance of a glaring conflict of interest under the APNU/AFC Government, former Telecommunications Minister Cathy Hughes had signed off on a number of contracts from her then ministry to her own company.
Hughes’ company, Videomega Productions, has previously been in the spotlight owing to it receiving several contracts from the coalition Government. It was reported that the company received some $6 million in contracts from the Administration.
But while Hughes had claimed that she relinquished all control of the company after 2015, there were documents that emerged with her signature as minister between 2016 and 2018 for payments to be made to her own company – something which she admitted to during an ongoing trial in a separate matter before the High Court. (G-8)