Warmington blasts decision to let Petrojam select forensic auditors
Published:Wednesday | January 30, 2019 | 12:00 AMLivern Barrett/Senior Parliamentary Reporter
A junior minister in the Andrew Holness administration yesterday sided with the parliamentary Opposition, suggesting that the management of the scandal-scarred state-owned oil refinery Petrojam should never have been given the responsibility to craft the terms of reference for the forensic audit into the $5.2 billion oil losses uncovered at the entity.
Everald Warmington, state minister in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), stunned other lawmakers at yesterday’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament meeting when he declared “it was totally illogical to have thought of this in the first place”.
“I’m being honest. We need to have a system that is totally transparent,” Warmington insisted.
His pronouncement came after Sancia Bennett Templer, permanent secretary in the OPM, revealed that an initial draft of the terms of reference was completed by the management of Petrojam and submitted to her office for review.
“Petrojam will proceed to market to procure a consultant to undertake that audit of oil losses as soon as we have completed the procurement process,” Bennett Templer added at the meeting, which was held at Gordon House in downtown Kingston.
The consultant will be selected through the open-tender process, she revealed.
The arrangement triggered outrage among the opposition members on the committee, who questioned why the management of the refinery was being allowed chose its investigator.
“It’s like the person on trial choosing their own prosecutor, judge and jury. I must say, PS (Permanent Secretary), I am very disappointed with the methodology that has been followed,” PAC Chairman Mark Golding lamented.
“I think that it was the wrong way to proceed with this to have started with the terms of reference being prepared within Petrojam itself,” he added.
Warmington agreed.
“How can Petrojam prepare terms of reference to investigate themselves?” he questioned.
“Even if Petrojam puts together a good document for the terms of reference, there are people out there who are going to have doubts or question the process. So I believe for us to have total transparency and confidence in the work to be done, it ought to be taken out of the hands of Petrojam,” Warmington said.
“It has to be done,” he insisted.
Another opposition member of the committee, Fitz Jackson, said he was disappointed that Bennett Templer would “implicitly endorse” the arrangement to have Petrojam engage the forensic auditors “knowing all that preceded and is before us”.
“That is unacceptable and, in my mind, unthinkable,” Jackson said.