CONSEQUENT to the receipt of the Ramon Gaskin Report into the state of affairs at City Hall, the Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) has recommended that five of its leading members be sent on leave in order to facilitate a proper investigation into those findings.
The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development recently asked Commissioner of Inquiry, Keith Burrowes and his team to provide an assessment of the recommendations that came out of that inquiry.
Burrowes was installed as Commissioner by former Local Government Minister, Kellawan Lall, and his task was to investigate the operations at City Hall. That report was completed and submitted to the relevant agencies over a year ago.
Following the ministry’s recent request, Burrowes tasked Gaskin, a member of the Implementation Committee, with going into City Hall to have the assessment done.
Speaking on the issue yesterday, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, said at his weekly press briefing that, at the last Cabinet meeting, Local Government Minister, Ganga Persaud had made a number of disclosures that were essentially extracted from a document labelled ‘The Raymon Gaskin Summary or Report on the implementation of the Burrowes’ Report’.
“On that submission to the Cabinet, I think they agreed that those disclosures were so damaging, and reflected such levels of financial irregularity, corruption, & misappropriation, that it needed to be brought formally to the attention of the City Council, and (that) a response from the council (should) be elicited.
“We were, subsequently at the Cabinet sub-committee yesterday, advised about a special select or meeting of the council, at which the Gaskin Report was the subject of consideration; arising from which the council, by resolution, was inviting the Minister of Local Government to make certain interventions.
“The resort of the mayor (was) to have five leading members of the city administration sent on leave so as to facilitate a proper investigation to corroborate the findings of the Gaskin summary of the implementation of the Burrowes’ Report,” Luncheon explained.
Meanwhile, Gaskin found that not a single recommendation out of the 40 key ones that came out of the ‘Burrowes Report’ had been implemented by the council.
Major irregularities have been unearthed instead, prompting authorities to vow that the three main players involved would definitely be sacked.
It was found 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.
Also discovered was a number of what Burrowes called “dummy companies.”
He said: “Those companies, if we look at the invoices, did not have any address or telephone number. It was very unusual. We checked the directory to see if the (companies were) ever in there – No! We checked if the (companies were) 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 City Engineer (Gregory Erskine) to the Treasurer (Andrew Meredith) [to] prepare this cheque to Mc Donald,” Burrowes explained.
When staffing was considered, it was 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 paid 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. He said that several pieces of scrap material leave the City Council to go out in containers owned by the Good Crop Scrap Metal Business, but there is no business registered by this name. “We don’t know if Good Crop Scrap Metal is made up of members of the Council,” Burrowes related.