— Minister Whittaker
CITY HALL was recently called upon to provide a written response to major irregularities at the Council, but Town Clerk Yonnette Pluck has sought to “politicize the acts of dishonesty” that were unearthed, and to shift the blame around. This is according to Minister within the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, Norman Whittaker, who spoke to the Chronicle yesterday in an invited comment.
Recently, head of the Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate the operations of City Hall, Mr. Keith Burrowes, briefed members of the press on some of the financial irregularities that were unearthed.
Burrowes was installed by former Local Government Minister Kellawan Lall, and his task has been to investigate the operations of City Hall. He completed and submitted that report to the relevant agencies over a year ago.
Recently, the Local Government Ministry asked Burrowes and his team to provide an assessment of the state of the recommendations that came out of the inquiry. Burrowes subsequently tasked Ramon Gaskin, a member of the Implementation Committee, with going into City Hall to have that assessment done.
It was compiled into another report, a copy of which was presented to Pluck before he briefed the press. The Council was asked to respond to the issues contained therein by June 20 last.
Commenting on the response provided by the Council, Whittaker said Pluck failed to deal with specific issues, and sought only to shift the blame around. Whenever she did attempt to address the issues, she missed the point and tried to exonerate herself and staff.
Whittaker said the rather “defensive” response failed to satisfactorily answer the 18 issues that came out of the assessment.
Cabinet discussed the matter last Tuesday, and Pluck’s response is still under examination, Whittaker disclosed. The ministry is pursuing the matter, but just not in the way that the Council wants, he said.
By Tuesday, the ministry should be able to announce its decision with regard to the senior officers implicated in the major irregularities.
Whittaker said Georgetown Mayor Hamilton Green wrote the Local Government Minister seeking an audience to discuss the way forward. Asked to comment on the issue yesterday, Green would only say that he wrote to the ministry and is awaiting a response from the minister.

Recommendations
Meanwhile, of the 40 key recommendations flowing from ‘the Burrowes Report’, not a single one has been implemented by the council; but major irregularities have been unearthed instead, prompting authorities to vow that the three main players involved will definitely be sacked.
At the press conference, Burrowes had said that normally, in Guyana, inquiries such as this one end up on shelves and are never implemented. He and the team have, however, been following developments because a lot of time and resources have been invested into this inquiry.
Some members of the Implementation Committee have been so frustrated by some officers of the City Council that they have refused to continue ‘wasting time’ there, Burrowes informed. In fact, the man who was tasked with assisting the Council with its financial management, at no cost, could not have obtained any information from the Treasurer’s Department.
“I’ve concluded that it’s not incompetence; they just don’t want to implement (the recommendations). But we are not going to sit idly by and have the work that was done by myself and colleagues go down the drain,” Burrowes remarked.
He confessed to being “shocked” to learn that of the four brand-new trucks given to the municipality by the government, just one was working, while the others, plus three more, remained parked.
“We started to look into why, and it led up to believing that it was deliberate to have these trucks lined up, because then you had to contract other people. And we are now seeing a link between some members of the Council and these other persons,” he explained.

Dummy Companies
A number of “dummy companies” have also been discovered, according to Burrowes. “Those companies, if we look at the invoices, did not have an address or a telephone number. It was very unusual. We checked the directory to see if the company was ever in there, no!; We checked if the company was registered, no!    What was more worrisome was the fact that one cheque prepared for $8M was prepared to a Miss Mc Donald. If a company is engaged, it is highly unusual that you prepare that cheque to an individual.The cheque has to be prepared to the company. But there were clear instructions from the Engineer (Gregory Erskine) to the Treasurer (Andrew Meredith) [to] prepare this cheque to Mc Donald,” Burrowes explained.
There are many other such companies, Burrowes said, all of which he has information about.
It was also found that the Council now has a record of about 800 members, but Burrowes believes that had this really been the case, the city of Georgetown would have been a bit cleaner. “About 400 of those persons are phantoms,” he remarked, while acknowledging that this amount may be a bit exaggerated.
The amount for overtime is unbelievable, he said. “I think it is the only place where the overtime [is] rivalling the total cost of employment. I think it’s much more than 50 percent.”
The issuing of gas and diesel was also looked at, and it was discovered that the amounts being given to the officers are “unbelievably high. “It means, therefore, that the gas is not only going to the officials’ vehicles, it’s got to be going somewhere else.”
Burrowes also spoke about the issues surrounding scrap metal. “A number of the scrap materials the City Council got going out in containers (are owned by) the Good Crop Scrap Metal business.” The problem here is that a business by this name is not registered. “We don’t know if Good Crop Scrap Metal is made up of members of the Council,” Burrowes related.