Millions missing from Region Ten SLED fund

LABOUR Minister Joseph Hamilton suspects fraud in the missing of several millions from the
Sustainable Livelihood and Entrepreneurial Development (SLED) programme following an
investigation in the bauxite mining town of Linden.
Already, strong suspicions swirl around opposition legislator Mr. Jermaine Figueira. But he, in a
social media post, rubbished Hamilton’s statement as a bid to score “cheap political points”.
Hamilton ordered a forensic audit into the country’s cooperative societies under which the SLED
programme operated. The Minister and Chief Cooperatives Development Officer, (CCDO) Ms.
Perlina Gifth, visited several SLED projects in Linden and were alarmed by their findings.
One of the coops under suspicion and visited by Minister Hamilton and a team was a business
allegedly owned by Figueira called the Green Jaguar Environmental and Community
Development Co-operative Society.
Documents purporting to link the MP to the coop society and seen by
www.aroundtheregions.com revealed that the government official received funding in 2019 to
construct styes for a pig rearing project in Wisroc, also in the depressed bauxite-mining
community in Upper Demerara – Berbice (Reg Ten).
But the Registration documents for the farm were missing and further probes revealed that the
project was executed on private property.
Figueira in a Facebook defended himself lashing out at Hamilton dismissing his utterances as
chaff.

“I take this opportunity to publicly state and make it absolutely clear, that I Jermaine Figueira,
Member of Parliament for Region Ten, has never been the recipient of any disbursement of
monies from the Sustainable Livelihood and Entrepreneurial Development (SLED) programme
in 2019 or any other year for that matter”.
Figueira is demanding the government minister withdraw the “character assassination” and the
“malicious article” that was published regarding the same issue. He has also demanded a front-
page apology threatening legal action against Hamilton and the offending media entities, which
published his libelous statements.
When Hamilton spoke to www.aroundtheregions.com a while back he said “tens of millions of
dollars were being made available to co-ops in the SLED programme and my Chief Co-op
Officer is engaging the person who was running the programme at the Ministry of Human
Services and Social Security (then the Ministry of Social Protection the period under which the
audit was done) to get all the information and details about these co-ops in Linden, so that we
can go there to see their activities and interact to see whether they exist or not”.
Then, Hamilton was deeply also troubled by the cavalier attitude driven by flawed thinking
among many beneficiaries of development funding provided by the government.
“There are some people who have this attitude that CIDA (Canadian International Development
Agency) or EU (European Union.) money is not government money. But it’s the Guyana
government that is responsible for the intervention. It would be an inflow coming to Guyana,
whether its external money or our (local) money you will have to account for it,” the Minister
emphasised.
“I will ensure that people account for the monies given to them. I don’t know why people think
that if I give you a million dollar this year and you can’t account for it that I give you more,” he
promised
Hamilton reiterated the need for coops to be transparent and accountable, irrespective of the
source of funding. Each, Hamilton said, will show proof how monies were spent as part of their
statutory responsibility.

“We will ensure that they are transparent and to see, to ensure that they can be transparent and
accountable, we have to see where the money went, we are not interested in who is running it,”
he had revealed.
“There will be a (wider) investigation into how the SLED monies were disbursed. The officer
that was responsible must give a document as to all the groups in Guyana that got monies: who
are their principals? and for what projects these monies were given?” the Minister asked
rhetorically.
The CCDO has already been engaging the person at the Ministry of Human Services and
Social Security, Hamilton said. It is believed that some 34 million can’t be accounted for.