JUNIOR Finance Minister Jaipaul Sharma has reiterated his position that a forensic audit should be held into the Skeldon Sugar Estate after the massive US$200M investment failed to bring the facility into full operation.

Sharma told a gathering of retrenched workers during a ministerial visit to Skeldon last week that huge sums of money was pumped into the estate but it never performed as it should. He laid the blame for Skeldon and the eventual failure of the industry squarely at the feet of the previous administration, stating that not only had they taken money from other sectors, many of which were in financial disarray, to build Skeldon, but also other sums of money were “secretly” injected into the facility to fix problems that arose after its construction.

Sharma told the Guyana Chronicle that apart from finding out what really happened at Skeldon, it is necessary that the failure of such a huge project should attract some type of audit or report. “If you look at the Commission of Inquiry report, you will see that the factory never functioned as it was intended. It never did what it was supposed to do and if you have a project of that size failing, there must be a report. You must know why it failed, what went wrong, what happened.”

As former chair of the Economic Service Committee, Sharma said he was interested in having such an audit done but it did not manifest during his time. The junior minister is adamant that there is a lot of information to be unearthed involving the Skeldon project based on surface information which could only be confirmed by way of an audit or investigation. Sharma had said to sugar workers in Skeldon that some US$72M had been taken from the sugar company to invest into Skeldon. It was around that time the current troubles facing the sugar industry began. He said GuySuCo by then had no money left for the factory, field, plant maintenance and payrolls, while severe fertilizer shortages was upon the industry.

Sharma went on to say that the Skeldon project was originally pegged at a whopping US$165M but ended up at a final figure of US$192M as more money had to be found to fix major defects of the Chinese-built plant. “It is around that time that Guysuco had to start burrowing money to meet basic demands,” a clearly upset Sharma said. He continued that authorities suspect that a forensic audit of the project might well show that up to US$50M might have been siphoned off during the project life.

“That was the nail in the coffin for GuySuCo regardless of what Mr. Jagdeo and others might want to say. Money for Skeldon should have come from the sale of Guysuco’s lands, but they simply took it from the company and that was the beginning of the end.” Sharma recalled Jagdeo’s reassuring words back in October of 2010 that he personally intended to see the success of the Skeldon project. The former president had told the nation that if the Skeldon project did not work, “well the sugar industry is dead.”

Skeldon was supposed to be a hallmark for the Jagdeo presidency but the factory faced crisis after crisis and failed to perform accordingly. Jagdeo said that his government would not let Skeldon fail. “This is a US$200 million facility. Unfortunately, it’s not delivering the results we expected it to. They have too many mistakes going on there and I intend to fix it. It has to change. We’re not going to make that sort of investment to have a few people mess it up. So even if it means personally I have to get involved, I will get involved to ensure that it is fixed, that it’s delivering the kind of results that it should deliver so that we can safeguard the sugar industry. Today Skeldon is among the three major estates closed for poor performance. Authorities are adamant that the nation will face greater financial constraints if the Skeldon facility is kept in operation.