Contractor General wants new government to consider anti-corruption recommendations

As part of the move to tackle corruption in governance, Contractor General Greg Christie has asked the new Peoples National Party (PNP) administration to consider several anti-corruption recommendations for implementation.

In a letter to Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller on her first day in office, Mr. Christie sought a meeting to discuss the administration's direction in addressing the more than 25 recommendations.

The recommendations are similar to the ones previously submitted by the Contractor General to former Prime Minister Andrew Holness on October 31, just days after he had assumed office.

 According to Mr. Christie, they are “among the many corrective and remedial anti-corruption recommendations that the Office of the Contractor General, OCG has repeatedly made under the stewardship of the incumbent Contractor General.”

However the OCG says to date no satisfactory action has been forthcoming from either the executive or the legislative arms of the state to effectively implement them.

Chief among the recommendations is one that was first made on March 22, 2010 to revamp the Special Prosecutor Bill, to establish instead a National Independent Anti-Corruption State Agency for Jamaica.

This entity would be a merger of the functions of the Parliamentary Integrity Commission, the Corruption Prevention Commission and the OCG.

It would also be vested with the exclusive mandate to among other things criminally investigate and prosecute all corruption and related criminal offences.

It has long been the contention of the OCG that the Special Prosecutor Bill which is currently before Parliament will do very little to halt the scourge of corruption in Jamaica.

The Bill which gives the Special Prosecutor powers of arrest and limited prosecution, at present only seeks to merge the Integrity Commission and the Corruption Prevention Commission.

And this has led the OCG to question what it says is its deliberate exclusion from what is conceptualised to be Jamaica's all embracing National Anti-Corruption Agency.
 
According to the OCG, its exclusion by the previous administration raised worrying questions about the depth of the administration's political will to tackle corruption.

The OCG further believes that as currently conceptualised, the Special  Prosecutor will be subjected to the prosecutorial directives and control of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

And this the OCG says is a step in the wrong direction.

In his letter, the Contractor General has also asked the Prime Minister to consider the following issues:

- The ongoing separation of the National Contracts Commission from the OCG;

- certain draft policy positions of the former Administration which have signaled an intent to terminate the OCG’s jurisdiction to monitor and to investigate the sale of state-owned assets;

- the OCG’s strong objections to the apparent intent of the Government to award, without international competitive tender, a sole source contract, to China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), to among other things, complete the construction of the approximately US$600 million Spanish Town to Ocho Rios North -South link of Highway 2000; and

- the Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme.