Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

A full-scale in­ter­nal au­dit has been or­dered in­to the op­er­a­tions and fi­nances of the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC), af­ter new­ly ap­point­ed Cul­ture and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Michelle Ben­jamin raised alarm over a $178 mil­lion debt still owed to ser­vice providers from Car­ni­val 2025.

This comes just one week af­ter the swear­ing-in of a new Board of Com­mis­sion­ers, and amid rev­e­la­tions that al­though the NCC se­cured and spent a $200 mil­lion loan ear­li­er this year, the ma­jor­i­ty of stake­hold­ers have yet to be paid.

Min­is­ter Ben­jamin has sum­moned the Board to a high-lev­el meet­ing on Ju­ly 29, where they will be ex­pect­ed to sub­mit a de­tailed au­dit re­port along with cor­rec­tive pro­pos­als aimed at sta­bil­is­ing the Com­mis­sion’s fi­nan­cial and op­er­a­tional af­fairs.

“There will be no tol­er­ance for fi­nan­cial mis­man­age­ment or de­lay un­der my watch,” Min­is­ter Ben­jamin stat­ed. “The in­ter­nal au­dit must pro­vide a full ac­count­ing of NCC’s cur­rent state, and we must act ur­gent­ly to re­store trans­paren­cy, ac­count­abil­i­ty, and trust.”

Among the key de­liv­er­ables re­quest­ed from the Board are a full fi­nan­cial and op­er­a­tional au­dit, a for­mal re­port with rec­om­men­da­tions, a debt re­pay­ment plan for out­stand­ing Car­ni­val 2025 oblig­a­tions, and a clear­ly de­fined roadmap for the plan­ning and de­liv­ery of Car­ni­val 2026.

Min­is­ter Ben­jamin al­so sug­gest­ed that the prob­lems at NCC were part of a deep­er is­sue, ac­cus­ing the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion of us­ing short-term bor­row­ing to make po­lit­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed pay­ments in the run-up to the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion.

“What we are see­ing at NCC is part of a trou­bling trend of po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in pub­lic fi­nance,” she said. “These were not iso­lat­ed mis­steps.”

How­ev­er, for­mer Min­is­ter of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts Ran­dall Mitchell de­nied any im­pro­pri­ety, stat­ing that the loan in ques­tion was nev­er in­tend­ed sole­ly for Car­ni­val 2025 but rather to ad­dress a back­log of debts that had built up over sev­er­al years.

Mitchell said, “The min­is­ter ap­pears to be labour­ing un­der the mis­un­der­stand­ing that the $200 mil­lion loan was spe­cif­ic to this year’s Car­ni­val. That is sim­ply not true. The doc­u­men­ta­tion will show that it was used to set­tle out­stand­ing li­a­bil­i­ties, some of which date back as far as 2015.”

He added that the ap­proach of us­ing cur­rent-year fi­nanc­ing to set­tle pri­or debts had been in place since the NCC in­her­it­ed sig­nif­i­cant li­a­bil­i­ties from the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment.

Re­spond­ing di­rect­ly to Min­is­ter Ben­jamin’s call for an au­dit, Mitchell said the Min­istry was free to scru­ti­nise the NCC’s pro­cure­ment records for 2025. He ex­pressed con­fi­dence that any prop­er re­view would re­veal that past li­a­bil­i­ties—not new ones—were the source of the out­stand­ing pay­ments and that the loan was used to bring long-stand­ing cred­i­tors cur­rent.

“And an ex­am­i­na­tion of the out­stand­ing li­a­bil­i­ties ac­tu­al­ly paid, the Min­is­ter would al­so dis­cov­er that it was past li­a­bil­i­ties that were paid, en­sur­ing that ser­vices providers who were owed by the NCC for pre­vi­ous pe­ri­ods were made whole,” Mitchell said.

“And to the ques­tion as to why there would be out­stand­ing bal­ances, while the bud­get di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Fi­nance does a cred­itable job of bud­get­ing for the up­com­ing fis­cal year, the bud­get di­vi­sion can­not con­tem­plate the vi­cis­si­tudes of mar­ket forces dur­ing the Car­ni­val sea­son. There­fore, there will be oc­ca­sions when the NCC would be re­quired to in­cur ad­di­tion­al li­a­bil­i­ties over and above the al­lo­cat­ed amount in or­der to prop­er­ly dis­charge its man­date.”