The People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) is calling for a probe into how the billions Government allocated to the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) since taking office in 2015 was spent.
Articulating the party’s position on the matter during a Friday morning press conference was PPP/C General Secretary Dr Bharrat Jagdeo.
According to Jagdeo, there are discrepancies between the figures quoted by President David Granger in his January 10, speech that was read in the National Assembly by Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo and and the recent pronouncements made by Agriculture Minister Noel Holder.
Among other things, the President’s speech on the payments to GuySuCo workers outlined that Government was “expending G$48.02 bn in financial support to the industry since 2011 and G$32 billion over the past thirty months – a rate of about a billion dollars a month.”
The President attributed the “rate of about a billion dollars a month” as one of the reasons why they “cannot sustain the sugar industry in its current state.”
However, according to Jagdeo “when Guyanese hear this figure, they will say, yes, it can’t be afforded because this is a large sum of money…Let’s look at what Holder said on the matter. Holder said ‘over the past seven years, Government pumped $48B in GuySuCo. $600M in 2011, $4B in 2012, $5.3B in 2013, $6B in 2014, $12B in 2015, $11B in 2016, $9B in 2017. So when you add this, you see $48B over seven years. The President said $48B and he added $32B on top of it in his speech,” he explained.
Jagdeo further explained that this $32B was then divided by the number of months, resulting in the approximated cost of $1B a month for 30 months.
However, the Opposition Leader maintained he has suspicions as the claims by Holder and the President are contradicting.
According to the Opposition Leader, the President “over inflated the figures by 2 times in his speech to the Nation and Holder gave the accurate figures. And even in those figures, you would see that for the period 2011 to 2014, an average of $4B per year was given subsidy to GuySuCo.
“Between 2015 to 2017, $10.6B average and now, that is impossible. Its more than double, almost three times more subsidy they gave in the three years. We need to have a full fledged investigation whether this money was given, how it was spent and knowing the nature of this government, I suspect that a significant part of this money may have disappeared,” Jagdeo asserted.
“If this money had gone into GuySuCo we should have seen something different…and we are talking about subsidies increased to three time more when there were no salary increases or payments of API (annual production incentives).”
Jagdeo added that the use of sums paid to the Government by the European Union (EU), after the loss of preferential markets, should also be included in the investigation.
