Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Corruption or carelessness?

So hot hot story is the issue with the PS of Agriculture and his company that sells goods to his own Ministry for exorbitant prices. I watching it on news right now.

It is high time that a rule be put in place in relation to matters like this -

Whether or not Allan Alexander really upped the price for items sold to his own Ministry is not even the key issue - why is it even possible for any person (high level or low level) in the Public Service to create a business enterprise/company that makes its profit from the Public Service itself?

What happened to transparency? What happened to plain honesty?

Why is this an occurrence, oftentimes leading to corruptible circumstances on a repeat performance on the national landscape? In and of itself, is there not an obvious conflic of interest?

Like the allegation that Glen Beache has set up a marketing company to do all the business for the Tourism Authority? Or that Dr. Rudy Matthias incorporated a company that made huge real estate deals with the IADC?

I am not against a legitimate transaction between a business/company in which a public official has an interest and a government ministry/department. But it should be done in a transparent manner, where independent assessment is undertaken to ensure that there has not been an exploitation of authority and that the deal is indeed a beneficial one for the government.

But this is what I am not certain about - do any of our leaders see this as being a fault in the government system or are they merely content to ensure that the purses are not bursting but just filled to capacity?

1 comment:

  1. That Ministry of Agriculture seems bent on dealing with manure.That's all I have to say

    ReplyDelete

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