ARTICLE - PM - AUDIT OF CONTRACTS

THE PRIME MINISTER GAVE EXPLANATIONS ON THE AUDIT OF CONTRACTS OF PREVIOUS GOVERNMENT
(Haiti Libre) -

The Prime Minister, Dr. Garry Conille gave explanations at a press conference yesterday Monday, on what justifies the creation of an independent Commission of audit on the contracts signed under the Préval-Bellerive government, and what will be its role. Members of this Commission should probably be known tomorrow Wednesday.

"A week after the government took office, we first gathered all the ministers to take stock [...] we saw that there are hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts that have been signed since 2010, and which continue to be committed my government.

Secondly, there are projects that are supposed to be delivered under my government, for which my government will be accountable for results. So immediately, I had asked all ministers to return to their respective ministries, and to take for me all contracts and projects so that we can look at them together, to form a small committee to see which we want to keep, which we will try to renegotiate, in what state are the projects, to be able to have a balance.

We made several steps to obtain these contracts. This took some time and so far we have not yet all of them. When we took a first look at these contracts, we realized that there were things a little disturbing in them. Things that for me, as a manager, I would not have accepted. Without going into details, the first batch they gave me, from the December to May period, there are $42 million of contracts that were signed, and there is even a firm that has received 9 contracts or almost 80% of this amount... [...] you must explain why a firm was chosen, we must provide a justification [...] In the files we received, we do not see it and we do not understand why it was decided to choose this firm 8,9,10,11,12 times [...] When you give a contract to a company for a certain amount, you must make a vetting, that must be included in the file [even when using a procedure that is an exception], perhaps they existed but I have not seen them, so, when at the reading, we realized that there are questions, we said, we must stop, and form a committee that will be totally independent of me; an audit committee to look at these contracts, and to give three recommendations:

- the contract is good, we can keep it and continue with it

- the contract does not protect sufficiently the state and it should be renegotiated

- the contract makes us vulnerable and in this case, we must find a way to discontinue it, see how it was done, its content and the problems it has.

We have identified three people who are supposed to help us. For now we will not give names for obvious reasons [we will probably confirm by Wednesday]. They gave me a first work on cases, which has reinforced our thinking that we need an analysis that goes somewhat further [...] The objective is to ensure that state interests are protected [...] I will try for one of the three to be a Haitian from the diaspora who has extensive experience in auditing..."