Georgetown: Six former Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) board members will be charged today and place before the court after the Special Organised Unit (SOCU) charged them jointly Thursday with failing to make a proper entry into a register of a company.
This was following the findings of an audit into the finances of the GRDB. Those that will be charged are former Head of the GRDB, Ricky Ramraj; former General Manager, Jagnarine Singh; former GRDB board members Dharamkumar Seeraj, Badrie Persaud, PPP Parliamentarian Nigel Dharamlall, and former Deputy Permanent Secretary (Finance) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Prema Roopnarine.
The members of the opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) also visited Eve Leary and gave their fingerprints and were later released on station bail at the Brickdam Police Station.
Attorneys representing the persons charged includes: Anil Nandlall, Priya Manickchand, Sase Gunraj and Glenn Hanoman.
Former Attorney General Anil Nandlall said the charges are frivolous and vexatious since the charge surrounds the failure to make certain entries in relation to monies received through a foreign funded project.
“There is no evidence that this money was missing, that the money was not spent for the purpose it was disbursed, in fact the money was spent for the purpose it was disbursed, the international lending agency would have only released monies having been satisfied that the accounting process were complied with and that is because it’s a revolving fund,” Nandlall explained.
He said it is strange that members of the board are being charged and not the accountant since it deals with an omission of a ceremonial entry into an accounting log book.
“They are being charged jointly for omitting to record the particular inflow of money into a book, they were supposed to do it in at the GRDB, one would have expected that they would have charged them for missing funds or for some type of fraud if there was any evidence of such,” Nandlall questioned.
He said public monies have to be better spent since the charges implemented will cost the state millions of dollars to prosecute and in the end it would never yield a conviction.
“A person charged in these circumstances would be advised to sue the state for compensation because it is nothing short of malicious prosecution and public harassment of professional people that are being dragged through the mud,” Nandlall noted.
Nandlall explained that such scrutiny if applied across the board in the public and private sector would see thousands of persons being charged and the criminal justice system was not created to sanction and penalize persons in such a fashion.
He said SOCU is an enforcement agency to enforce anti-money laundering but when the agency goes about charging persons frivolously then it makes a mockery of the agency.
In January this year, Guyana Chronicle had reported that false and misleading statements by the GRDB from the former General Manager (GM) to the Governments of Guyana and Venezuela in order to obtain monies for the lucrative PetroCaribe Fund were among the glaring financial irregularities highlighted by Nigel Hinds Financial Services in its forensic audit.
Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman had said that the audit report indicated that via to the PetroCaribe Fund, the financial vehicle which saw millions of dollars passing through the accounting unit of the GRDB, there were “glaring” financial irregularities which were uncovered by the auditors with “no traceable signs that these were ever approved”, minus promissory notes in some instances.
The audit was conducted for the period 2011-2015.
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