– President, PM, VP, Cabinet members to benefit

AFTER the discovery of severely damaged vehicles that were used by the APNU+AFC administration, government has set aside $95M in the 2020 budget for new vehicles which will serve the President, Prime Minister (PM), Vice-President (VP) and Cabinet members.

This disclosure was made by Governance and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Gail Teixeira when the House met as the Committee of Supply and was considering the estimates of expenditure for January 2020 to September 2020.

“When former ministers submitted their vehicles, we were shocked to see a high percentage had cracked windscreens, scratches, bumps, and the seats were very confusing; they were damaged, stained and ripped up. We don’t know who did that and how that happened, and we also had vehicles that our ministers got into thinking the vehicle looked alright and discovered when they went down the road there was [SIC] two different sets of tyres on and radiators were damaged,” the governance minister said.

Currently, she said, government will have to fix some of the vehicles for a number of ministers whose vehicles are being recycled.
Former Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson, who called on Minister Teixeira to provide more details, was told that no attention on such details relating to procurement was made, but assured the House that public tendering will be done.

“I’m not aware of the type or the cost. Because of the urgency to get the budget and get the money we had to rush and put in allocations because there was a problem and we had to attend to the safety and security of the President, Vice-President, and Prime Minister; so this allocation is here for that purpose because we had five weeks to bring the budget,” she added.

She promised the former minister that in the 2021 budget, all new purchases of vehicles and their details will be made available since there will be time to do so, but with the emergency budget that was not possible.
She reiterated that the safety of the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister is also important, since their vehicles are also severely damaged.