–Jagdeo says; gov’t unable to find records in some cases

PEOPLE’S Progressive Party (PPP) General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo has said that the government is still clearing a huge backlog of debt left by the former APNU+AFC administration.

Jagdeo made these remarks during a recent press conference, where he said that the former government owed several service providers.

He said that every year the PPP/C Government budgets for the clearing of the backlog of payments.

Added to this, in some instances, they are unable to find records of transactions by the former administration, but many persons are still owed payments.

“[They owe] a ton of people around the country; we are trying to find a way to clear the backlog of those people,” he said.

Giving an example, Jagdeo noted that just before the election, in the health sector, the former administration hired about 500 persons to work for elections, and never paid them.

“We ended up paying them in September or October of the year for the whole year that they worked; they didn’t even pay these people,” he added.

This, he noted, happened frequently under the APNU+AFC government.

In 2020, an assessment of Guyana’s financial assets showed that the coalition administration spent over G$1.2 trillion unproductively, and abused the country’s Contingency Fund by withdrawing large sums of money, and not reconciling over $4.2 billion.

Senior Minister with responsibility for Finance in the Office of the President Dr. Ashni Singh had said that the state of public finances was nothing short of ‘disastrous’.

He related that excessive taxes imposed on the private sector and citizens were exorbitant; the then government collected revenues totalling $992 billion between the period 2015 and 2019.

Despite this huge revenue collection, the coalition utilised these funds in an “unproductive manner”, through what he described as wasteful and inefficient government expenditure, with total government spending amounting to G$1.2 trillion.

Dr. Singh was also critical of transactions conducted by the coalition, which were viewed as illicit because they were all conducted after the successful passage of a No-Confidence Motion against the coalition, in December, 2018.

The passage of this motion ‘stripped’ the former government of their substantial authority and reduced them to a ‘caretaker’ administration.