NICIL was never audited under APNU/AFC Govt – Jagdeo

During the five years the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) coalition was in Government, there was never any audit conducted into the operations of the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), the Government’s privatisation arm.

This is according to Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, during a recent radio programme “Guyana’s Oil and You”.
Jagdeo was at the time discussing measures that the new People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Administration would be putting in place to ensure high levels of transparency and accountability of Government’s operations, especially as it relates to the spending of oil funds.
“NICIL, in five years of the (APNU/AFC) Government, with all the talk of transparency, never had an audit,” Jagdeo noted.
He explained that when the new PPP/C Government took office in August of this year, it found “horror stories” of highly questionable transactions under the previous Administration.
“With all the criticisms of NICIL under us (PPP/C Government), we ensured that in 2012 we published a list of every privatisation transaction … and showed the process through which they were privatised,” Jagdeo said.
According to Jagdeo, that process involved the Privatisation Unit, under NICIL, going to the Privatisation Board; which is made up of three persons from the Government, one from the Private Sector, one from the labour movement and one from the consumers’ affairs sector.
He noted that once this process was completed, a recommendation was then presented to Cabinet for consideration.
However, Jagdeo stated that in the case of the APNU/AFC Government, NICIL, in some cases, made decisions on its own about the sale of assets and so on without going through the necessary procedures that would allow for transparency.
According to the Vice President, the coalition Government destroyed and undermined the institutional settings for the awarding of contracts.
He said when the PPP/C took office recently, it found “stacks of contracts which were dealt with outside of the tender board scrutiny”.
“When you undermine the procedures for awarding contracts, you don’t advertise and you go to selective tendering … then there is room for corruption, enormous corruption,” Jagdeo declared.
He said the PPP/C Government was taking immediate steps to ensure that proper systems were put back into place that would discourage corrupt practices.
“So, we have to go back rigidly to put in place the safeguards we had in relation to tendering, etc, and the regulations would be in place and then audits,” Jagdeo said.
In this regard, he noted that the Auditor General’s capability would have to be built up enormously to carry out the necessary audits.
Jagdeo also noted that President Dr Irfaan Ali has already made it clear to Ministers and other Government officials that they must act transparently.
The rapid assessment team that reviewed 19 agencies, including NICIL, had made some disturbing discoveries that State lands may have been sold by NICIL to cronies of the former Government at undervalued prices.
A source familiar with the contents of the report had told <<<Guyana Times>>> that land was being sold by NICIL at rates akin to “con” prices.
“There’s a consistency in that the land was being sold at ‘con’ prices. There’s an urgent need for every land transaction post the No-Confidence Motion, to be reviewed, investigated and where undervaluation happened, the Executive President needs to use his executive powers to reverse those transactions,” the source had said.
Radha Krishna Sharma was recently appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer of NICIL.