-Retemyer says cases amounting to $12B hang in the balance
The State Asset Recovery Unit (SARU) and its successor, the State Asset Recovery Agency (SARA) had saved Guyana billions of dollars after unearthing a string of corrupt practices that occurred under the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Administration pre-2015, Major (Ret’d) Aubrey Heath-Retemyer said as he rubbished the contention by the country’s Attorney General Anil Nandlall that SARA had not even recovered a pencil.
Heath-Retemyer served as SARA’s Deputy Director alongside Dr. Clive Thomas (Director), before the PPP/C Administration, through the Attorney General, took a decision last week to close the agency, and in the process terminated the contracts of its 38 employees. Hanging in the balance, Heath-Retemyer said, is a number of cases, if successfully tried in the Courts would amount to approximately $12B. At the time, he was speaking during an interview on KAMS TV aired on popular social media platform – Facebook – on Friday.
In keeping with its powers enshrined in the State Assets Recovery Act of 2017, SARA – a creature of the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Government had launched an expansive investigation into the sale and development of the Sparendaam, East Coast Demerara (ECD) land, commonly called Pradoville 2. It was found that the lands were sold way below market prices, and even before SARA could have approached the Courts to recover the assets, two beneficiaries paid $10.5M each to cover the true cost of the lands sold to them.
According to Heath-Retemyer, had it not been for the No-Confidence Motion brought against the APNU+AFC Government by the Opposition in December, 2018 with the support of then Government Member of Parliament Charrandass Persaud, SARA would have recovered between $40M and $60M from other beneficiaries who had signaled their willingness to reach a settlement.
In addition to the Pradoville 2 case, investigations done into the allocation of lands under the PPP/C regime, revealed that at least two foreign investors, Bai Shan Lin included, were leased approximately one million acres of land at a cost of 25 US cents per acre per annum for a period of 99 years. Describing it as blatant robbery, Heath-Retemyer said the recovery agency was successful in retrieving the land.
THE COMING OF SARU
But he said in an effort to truly understand the magnitude of the work done, it is important to reflect on the life of SARU. “It is important for us to go back before SARA to SARU, because SARA came out of SARU. SARU was the initial vehicle that we utilised to start going after State Property, and after the [State Assets Recovery] Act was passed, it was changed from a unit to an agency,” Heath-Retemyer said.
Approximately 45 forensic audits initiated by the APNU+AFC Administration shortly after it took office in May, 2015, had unearthed massive irregularities, discrepancies and corrupt practices within a number of ministries and state-owned agencies, and it was SARU’s responsibility to recover the assets stolen from the State. Between, September 2015 and May, 2017, SARU focused on five primary areas: state vehicles, state buildings, state lands, money and gold. “SOCU was responsible for criminal prosecution and SARU was responsible for civil recovery, so when the Act came around, SARU converted to SARA, the responsibilities remained exactly the same. SARU or SARA was never responsible for sending anybody to jail. The act the limits us to going after civil recovery, so if a person stole something, we had to prove that this thing was stolen, but we had to go only after the retrieval of the thing that was stolen,” Heath-Retemyer explained.
Cognizant that SARU’s limitation due to the lack of the requisite legislative framework, Health-Retemyer and Dr. Thomas together with Eric Phillips, had set out to slow down the losses.
“For example, when the Government took over, it was recognised that the doors were still open, the horses could still escape, things were still moving out of the system, so it was pointless to go after things which were gone, and ignore the fact that you didn’t close the door…so we put energy into addressing them,” he explained.
Heath-Retemyer said when the David Granger Administration took office, the situation, with regards to state properties such as vehicles, buildings and lands, was chaotic and a “total mess,” and SARU had the herculean task of putting corrective systems in place.
“We also realised that all across the ministries, all across the regions, people could not account for government properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s why it was easy to steal vehicles… [and] SARU took on the responsibility of straightening out that mess, which was worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” he posited.
According to him, there were at least two cases in which government buildings were “willed” to children of State officials. Further, he said the unit had detected cases in which ex-State Officials at the time had purchased properties in Florida using questionable funds; and in other cases investigations revealed that 40 per cent of the gold mined in Guyana could not have been accounted for. “We couldn’t approach the courts because the act was not passed, and even after the act was passed, Ramon Gaskin took SARA to court, and therefore you couldn’t use the legal avenue to address some of these problems,” Heath-Retemyer explained.
Adamant that both SARU and SARA had done extensive work notwithstanding their limitations, Heath-Retemyer said more could have been done had it not been for PPP/C agents, who actively worked against the recovery bodies. “SARA would have done a lot more, had it not been a fact that some elements that had a political agenda, were left in place in the Granger Administration and it seriously affected his policies and especially SARA. They used their professional positions, as cover for their political agenda and so there were times when [we] were stifled and to my horror, within the last two years, I have heard people in the government echoing precisely what the opposition was saying,” Heath-Retemyer reasoned.
