Rowley alleges UNC used agency to pay CA

RENU­KA SINGH

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is al­leg­ing that the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) fa­cil­i­tat­ed pay­ments to Cam­bridge An­a­lyt­i­ca un­der the guise of ad­ver­tis­ing con­tracts through State com­pa­nies.

Speak­ing at Tues­day night’s Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment elec­tion meet­ing at Sig­na­ture Hall, Mon­trose Ch­agua­nas, Row­ley list­ed pay­ments to the tune of $13 mil­lion for a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA).

He said the pay­ments start­ed at $250,000 and bal­looned to over $13 mil­lion with­in the space of a few months.

He said while Op­po­si­tion leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar dis­missed the Cam­bridge An­a­lyt­i­ca bomb­shell re­port with a “who the hell cares”, he was more cu­ri­ous about what Ch­aguara­mas was ad­ver­tis­ing for that $13 mil­lion.

He said the mon­ey spent un­der the CDA was a “joke” com­pared to the spend­ing at the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC).

Row­ley pre­sent­ed and read from a doc­u­ment about sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions at the NGC.

“All of a sud­den the NGC was re­quired to have Cor­po­rate So­cial Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty projects,” he said.

Row­ley said the doc­u­ments de­tailed an ex­am­i­na­tion of the records dur­ing 2010 to 2015 dis­clos­es de­lib­er­ate at­tempts to con­ceal ex­pen­di­ture, poor record keep­ing, run­away and in­de­fen­si­ble wastage of mon­ey and si­phon­ing of mon­ey.

Row­ley al­so de­tailed the ten­der and con­tract award sys­tem at the NGC un­der the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion. He said that five dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies with the same list of di­rec­tors would ten­der for a mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar con­tracts at NGC.

“The man­age­ment said no, we are not do­ing it be­cause it does not meet our ten­der­ing rules, you know what they did? They took the pack­age of $274 mil­lion with the same fraud­u­lent ten­der­ing arrange­ment, car­ried it from NGC to an­oth­er State com­pa­ny, PSAEL (Pa­lo Seco Agri­cul­tur­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd) and had that com­pa­ny award the con­tracts,” he said.

He said there is no doc­u­men­ta­tion for the com­pa­nies to use to de­fend them­selves in court.

He read from a pile of doc­u­ments and said he had an­oth­er pile at home which he in­tends to pass to the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice for in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to the doc­u­ments Row­ley de­tailed mas­sive mis­spending by the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion at the NGC.

Row­ley said un­der the la­bel Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Brand­ing, NGC’s spend­ing bal­looned from $57 mil­lion in 2013 to $236 mil­lion in 2015.