FINANCE Minister Winston Jordan said while Guyana has achieved its target for the first quarter of the year, it has had some “unanticipated” expenditure.
“Unanticipated expenditure, that is expenditure outside the budget, seems to be growing every day to be quite honest…. It is quite a bit, quite a bit,” Minister Jordan told reporters on the sideline of the launch of the 2016 Human Development Report at the University of Guyana, Turkeyen Campus on Wednesday.
He said Government will have to review its budget, noting that some of the expenditures must be accommodated as he pointed to the Marriott Hotel. “We now have to take that over.”
In March, Minister Jordan had disclosed that Government had to find an “unbudgeted” US$1.1M to bail the Marriott Hotel out as the controversial hotel’s loan due to Republic Bank.
The Marriott Hotel, which is a US$30M investment by the Government, through the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), is owned by Atlantic Hotel Inc. (AHI) and was reported to have been financed by a US$27M loan raised from a consortium of businesses.
Republic Bank had assumed responsibility for managing the loan, which with interest and other costs would see the hotel repaying US$26M in 26 installments. It was disclosed that neither AHI nor NICIL had the money to repay the loan.
Additionally,Minister of State Joseph Harmon in March had disclosed that the Government was cutting on its expenses. He had noted that Government was in the process of implementing certain measures to ensure that the funds allocated in the $250B Budget last longer.