More than one year after a former employee of the Grove/Diamond Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC) has been accused of stealing in excess of $21M in revenues and taxes during the period between August 2015 and February 2017, police are yet to lay charges.
This was confirmed on Thursday by the Chairman of the NDC, Bharrat Narine who raised several questions regarding the apparent “slack off” of the police with regards to bringing justice. He also noted that the matter seems to be “catching dust” in the hands of the Auditor General’s office.
According to reports received, the accused has been identified as Latoya Moore.
This publication was told that after the Regional Authorities became aware that the monies were missing, Moore was invited to attend a meeting to discuss the matter on February 9 2017. However, the very next day, the woman reportedly tendered her resignation without reason.
Narine at a recent Regional Accounting Communities meeting held, raised his concerns over the status of the missing monies and insisted that the regional authorities support the probe and subsequent police investigation into what he described as the “fraudulent embezzlement of the council’s money by a former employee”.
“Madam Chair I am rising again to plead for this matter to be properly investigated as we cannot sit by as an NDC and have these millions missing and nothing being done. Since this matter was exposed the auditor general’s office visited and said that they have a lot of work and that is all we have heard from them and this is not good enough as with only 60 per cent of the internal audit completed we found that 21 million were missing and with the remaining 40% completed it is estimated to be around 30-35 million…This matter has been with the AG’s office since last year and nothing has happened,” the NDC said.
According to Narine, since the disclosure of the embezzlement was made, the initial stages of the investigation was done by his councillors with little to no help from actual law enforcement ranks.
“All the police said to us is that they cannot locate Latoya Moore as she apparently moved out from her Kaneville address, but what we are concerned about is why no one else was ever questioned as such a fraud could not have been committed by one person alone,” he posited.
Meanwhile, Regional Chairman Geneveive Allen assured that she intends to follow up the matter with the police and Auditor General’s office to ensure that this matter is addressed.
“I am in support of your views and concerns and you would have noticed that since this matter we have made several new implementations of systems across all the NDCs in the region as we will not wait for another situation to occur before taking action. I agree with you that action needs to be taken and I can assure you that the RDC will continue to do all within its powers to ensure such,” she promised.
