Ali­cia Llanos

Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley says peo­ple are con­cerned about how pub­lic funds were be­ing spent be­cause they are not be­ing told the truth.

He said pub­lic en­ter­pris­es were spend­ing mon­ey and there was no "clear path­way" for the cit­i­zens to judge if they were in fact get­ting val­ue for mon­ey.Row­ley spoke in an in­ter­view af­ter yes­ter­day's Caribbean Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment Con­fer­ence ses­sion held at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.

Row­ley said due to a lack of trans­paren­cy, poor pro­cure­ment process­es and ev­i­dence of wide­spread cor­rup­tion in the con­struc­tion sec­tor "the pub­lic does not trust any Gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­ture, even when it is done right.""Peo­ple don't trust the State any­more, be­cause they are not get­ting the facts up right and up straight," he said.

Cit­ing the ex­am­ple of state en­ter­pris­es, Row­ley claimed that these en­ter­pris­es were spend­ing mon­ey but there was no "clear path­way" for the pub­lic to judge if they were get­ting val­ue for mon­ey.

He said wrong­do­ings of state en­ter­pris­es of­ten end­ed up be­ing de­fend­ed by mem­bers of the Gov­ern­ment.

"Peo­ple have gone sad­ly wrong and two Gov­ern­ments have col­lapsed be­cause of wrong pro­ce­dure," he said.The pop­u­la­tion, he said, had be­gun to dis­trust the en­tire Gov­ern­men­tal sys­tem.Row­ley said at every stage of spend­ing Gov­ern­ment mon­ey, some­thing could go wrong if the prop­er pro­ce­dures were not fol­lowed.

He said in terms of es­tab­lish­ing pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion, the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) scan­dal should be used as the bases of the leg­is­la­tion.Ad­dress­ing re­porters on ques­tions on the UFF in­quiry in­to Ude­cott, Row­ley said the out­come came in a se­ries of rec­om­men­da­tions which was in the hands of the Gov­ern­ment.