AFC again misleads Guyanese people
ONCE more up to their usual tricks of misrepresenting facts to boost their sagging popularity and take credit for the achievements of others, Gerhardt Ramsaroop of the Alliance for Change has been posting information on Guyana’s Old Age Pension Programme, based on some erroneous and seriously misleading assumptions and configurations, and he is doing so while quoting unsubstantiated statistics and data on Guyana’s census figures.
This is to support that Party’s reprehensible and dishonest attempt to take credit for the investigations that led to the discovery of the massive multi-million dollar fraud scheme at the Accountant General’s Department of the Ministry of Finance, under the contention that it was the AFC Prime Ministerial candidate, Sheila Holder, who first exposed the fraudulent activities in that ministry.
To the uninformed and those applauding Holder and the AFC, there are two different pension schemes at two different ministries.
Some months ago, Sheila Holder had contended that, based on an analysis she did of the National Old Age Pension Scheme, it would appear as if some 17,000 phantom pensioners are in the system; and concluded that if these were removed from the pension database, the monthly sum now being paid to pensioners could virtually be doubled for legitimate pensioners.
Minister of Human Services, Ms. Priya Manickchand, appropriately responded to her fictitious and wholly ludicrous contentions, quoting real statistics and figures, and the Chronicle would not rehash those in this column, because it is a different issue.
The real issue that is being addressed herein is that Party’s predilection for misrepresentation of facts and taking credit for successes of events of which they had absolutely no input. In this instance, they did not even have prior knowledge, until they read of the fraudulent activities unearthed by, not Sheila Holder, nor any other member of the AFC, but by vigilant employees of the Accountant General’s Department and the Ministry of Finance, who worked painstakingly before, with minute precision, they began unravelling the fraudulent scheme.
In contrast to Holder’s phantom figures, Minister Manickchand could provide solid statistics, and in Holder’s own words, “Some months ago I requested and received from Minister Manickchand the number of persons who were in receipt of Old Age Pensions for the period 2002-2009. In answer to this parliamentary question, she supplied the information to the National Assembly.
This should have quelled the AFC on this issue, which it did at that time, because their allegations could not stand up to scrutiny.
In early March, Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh had invited the Office of the Auditor General and the police to investigate suspected unauthorised and irregular transactions within the Accountant General’s Department. The investigations were spearheaded by the Audit Office and the police, and were focused on improprieties committed over a period of time within the agency, involving sums of monies left unclaimed by government pensioners.
The fraudulent transactions were detected following internal checks by senior supervisory staff from the Finance Ministry, who, according to Minister Singh, conducted “relevant intelligence gathering activities.” In April, police issued arrest warrants for 12 persons in connection with this same investigation. Out of this batch, one man, Lawrence Dundas, 51 was charged.

It was alleged that between March 22, 2010 and October 8, 2010, being entrusted in the Public Service of Guyana as a supervisor and being entrusted by the virtue of his employer with receipt, mainly pension funds, belonging to retired teacher, Mariam Agatha Patterson, he embezzled a cheque valued in excess of $1.6M by fraudulently disposing of it for other use than public service.
The scope of the investigations expanded and continued, with many more fraudsters caught in the net.
This activity at no time came into the orbit of Holder or the Alliance For Change; so for them to seek to take credit for any aspect is in itself fraudulent; but that is the trademark of their leaders. One Prakash Persaud is an expert on the activities in this light of AFC leaders, which he has exposed to the public time and again.
The criteria for Old Age Pensioners in Guyana’s National Pension Scheme are different than the government pension scheme for Public Service retirees.
Sheila Holder’s unsubstantiated contentions were based on a cursory and illusory study she said she made of the National Pension Scheme.
The Old Age Pension Programme in Guyana dates back to 1944 when the Old Age Pension Act was enacted. The programme is administered by the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security and provides financial support and other benefits to Guyanese senior citizens, based on eligibility criteria, which qualify them for receipt of a monthly pension. The eligibility criteria include, inter alia, that: (a) The person must have attained the age of sixty-five years. (b) The person must have been a citizen of Guyana for at least ten years, and (c) The person must have been ordinarily resident in Guyana during twenty years immediately preceding the claim for pension.
The pension scheme in which the fraud was discovered is an altogether different pension scheme, which is a public service retirees pension scheme administered through a different regime under the auspices of the Accountant General’s Department in the Ministry of Finance, distinct from that of the general nation old age pension scheme administered by the Ministry of Human Services.
Two different pension schemes under the jurisdiction of two different ministries; but, true to their colours and their natural proclivity to dishonest rhetoric and misrepresentation of facts to confuse the general public, the AFC once again seeks to mislead the Guyanese people.