–about PPP’s multi-billion-dollar contracts

AFTER more than a year in office, the David Granger Administration is still finding it difficult to secure the details of multi-billion-dollar contracts signed under the former Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar administrations.Cabinet Secretary Joseph Harmon said, a few days ago, that this Government is yet to jump the hurdles left by the former administration on the disclosure of details on two controversial projects, namely the Amaila Falls Hydroelectricity Project, and the Specialty Hospital at Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown.

“Certain contracts had such deep confidentiality about (them) that (are) so deeply buried that, until now, we cannot see (them),” Harmon told reporters on Thursday.
He said he was informed by Finance Minister Winston Jordan that the Specialty Hospital contract is still being kept in the dark. The contract was drafted in partnership with the Government of India.

Harmon is accusing Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo of conveniently having amnesia, saying, he is “behaving in a manner as if he (doesn’t) remember things.”

Harmon posited another theory, in that Jagdeo must have been left out of the loop by former President Donald Ramotar, especially where these controversial contracts are concerned.

Harmon expressed concern that the State has poured millions of dollars into the Specialty Hospital contract, but that contract is still out of Government’s view.

Jagdeo, on the other hand, sought to dispel said claims while reiterating his call for the David Granger Administration to “release the evaluation reports and contracts for several projects initiated by the PPP/C governments which they have labelled as corrupt.”

“While Mr. Harmon has said he is still to set his eyes on the contracts for the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project and the Specialty Hospital, in both cases I can prove a different story,” Jagdeo said in a statement yesterday.

Mr Jagdeo is adamant that the APNU and AFC, when in opposition, were provided with information from the Amaila Falls hydroelectricity project.

Jagdeo said a compact disk (CD) containing those documents was even handed over to the Cabinet sub-committee following the change in government after May 2015.

For his part, Mr Harmon told the media on Thursday: “We were invited to these offices to meetings, and we were told by the [PPP/C] government that these are confidential arrangements,” Mr Harmon said a few days prior to Jagdeo’s statement.

From 2011 to 2015, Mr Harmon served as a parliamentarian for A Partnership for National Unity (APNU). The APNU is now the major bloc of the David Granger-led coalition government with the Alliance For Change (AFC).

Harmon told reporters on Thursday that the former President, Jagdeo, should allow the Government to do its work, rather than seek to dictate to the Government from the PPP Freedom House headquarters at Robb Street.

Harmon recalled that after the Government changed, a number of state documents had to be retrieved from private homes of persons close to the former PPP/C government.

That many state documents were not stored in Government offices meant that there were hurdles against the new administration, especially as it related to accessing state information.

“We have to reconstruct in order to understand what the previous administration did,” Harmon said.