Nadaleen Singh

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai has asked for in­for­ma­tion on a No­vem­ber 2014 au­dit con­duct­ed in­to the cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions de­part­ment of State-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC).His re­quest fol­lows re­ports that the de­part­ment's bud­get in­creased from $67 mil­lion in 2012 to $200 mil­lion last year and that there was non-com­pli­ance with stan­dard and req­ui­site re­quire­ments of a State en­ti­ty in spend­ing. The au­dit not­ed that a pat­tern of bad spend­ing was an in­di­ca­tor of fraud or gross neg­li­gence.

Howai said he has asked En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine, En­er­gy Min­is­ter to pro­vide him with the "facts" about the NGC au­dit be­fore he comes to any con­clu­sions."Let's find out what is hap­pen­ing. They are in the process of putting that to­geth­er. I have asked my Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary to co-or­di­nate with them to get the in­for­ma­tion. When we have the facts we could then de­ter­mine where we go from there," the min­is­ter said in re­sponse to ques­tions from re­porters yes­ter­day.

"I don't want to jump to any con­clu­sions just yet. They told me it's a pre­lim­i­nary re­port and it hasn't got­ten to the au­dit com­mit­tee. They are dis­put­ing some of the in­for­ma­tion, so let's hear what some of the facts are."Asked whether he was con­cerned about the find­ings of the au­dit, es­pe­cial­ly as NGC was one of the most prof­itable State en­ti­ties, Howai in­sist­ed that he want­ed to get the facts first.

"Let's get the in­for­ma­tion and we can de­ter­mine if there is a prob­lem and I am as­sum­ing the facts are cor­rect. I must have the min­istry pro­vide me with the in­for­ma­tion be­fore we move for­ward," he said.NGC's prof­it af­ter tax in the last fi­nan­cial year was $6.5 bil­lion.Howai said the com­pa­ny's div­i­dend pol­i­cy had been ad­just­ed.

"What I had done in the last cou­ple of bud­gets is that I had put quite a num­ber of in­cen­tives in place for the en­er­gy sec­tor, and part of it, the change in the div­i­dend pol­i­cy for NGC, was to help make up for some of the in­come I was giv­ing up by way of con­ces­sions that we were giv­ing to the en­er­gy sec­tor."I re­alised that we had to make that up, so we have looked at the div­i­dend pol­i­cy and we have in­creased the div­i­dend pol­i­cy."

Howai added: "NGC pays us now about $3 bil­lion in div­i­dends. I think this year it will be a lit­tle bit high­er but that div­i­dend is al­so in keep­ing with what is nor­mal­ly tak­en from large com­pa­nies on the stock ex­change. Large com­pa­nies nor­mal­ly pay a div­i­dend of 50 to 55 per cent."