According to the Leader of SVG Green Party, Warrant Officer Ivan Bertie O’Neal BSc (Hons), MSc, MBA, the highly incompetent ULP regime does not have enough money in the Contingency Fund, in the SVG Treasury, to fund the $117.9m Supplementary Budget.
SVG Contingency Fund
EC$15m
World Bank Catastrophe Deferred Risk Insurance Facility
EC$54m
The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility
EC$5.9m
Eastern Caribbean Central Bank
EC$1m
Caribbean Development Bank
EC$13.4m
International Monetary Fund
EC$16.1m
World Bank International Association
EC$4.9m
Total
EC$110.3m
Fiscal deficit on the contingency fund
(EC$7.6m)
Finance Minister Camillo Gonsalves told the Parliament that other financing was presently being negotiated and the expectation was that the Budget of EC$117.9 million would be exceeded.
Warrant Officer Ivan Bertie O’Neal, who spent three years at Oxford Brookes University, England, reading for his BSc (Hons) in Accounting and Finance and Economics, strongly contends that Gonsalves’ tabling of the Supplementary Budget in SVG House of Assembly on 11 May 2021 was extremely poor, unprofessional and unacceptable.
Gonsalves should have been able to provide the SVG House of Assembly with details of the total expenditure and total receipts of revenue for the EC$117.9m emergency requirements of SVG. On what exactly will this supplementary budget be spent?
The ULP regime’s Budget Estimates 2021 show that the SVG economy is almost dead with a total Fiscal Deficit of EC$ 247,831,329. They have borrowed millions more money to pay debt, and will plunge our country further into debt. This is the worst form of management of public accounts. SVG will become even more swamped with poverty, crime and corruption.
The core problem beyond any doubt in SVG is an apartheid state giving away more revenue to the super rich in Mustique and Canouan in Tax and Customs duty Exemptions, and to Taiwan in Fish Tax Exemptions, than the ULP Regime puts into the SVG Treasury.
It is a very serious matter, in that, it is in breach of Section 13 of the St Vincent and the Grenadines 1979 Constitution – ‘no Law shall make any provision that is discriminatory either of itself or in its effect’.
The highly incompetent and useless ULP Regime has been in power in SVG for almost 20 years and has not been competent nor educated enough to create an annual budget with a fiscal surplus.
The solution to SVG’s economic and financial demise is a change of government. SVG urgently needs a Green Government to bring competent management of SVG’s finances and good economic planning.
It is the ULP regime’s financial incompetence and their inability to create revenue that is holding our country back. SVG needs economic variables that drive a high yield in jobs and revenue creation. Getting rid of the privileges accorded those in Mustique and Canouan and Taiwan, and creating our own billion-dollar fish canning and processing factory will significantly help SVG’s dangerously weak economy.
A Green Government would deport all migrants back to the country where they came from for refusing to pay tax and customs duty to the SVG Treasury.