joel julien

Pan Trin­ba­go of­fi­cials were un­able to present au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments at the steel­band body’s An­nu­al Gen­er­al meet­ing yes­ter­day be­cause of an out­stand­ing debt of $640,000 owed to its au­di­tors. The AGM was held at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah.

This was the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments were not pre­sent­ed at the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s AGM.

The debt to PKF Char­tered Ac­coun­tants & Busi­ness Ad­vi­sors forms part of a $60 mil­lion debt the Bev­er­ley Ram­sey-Moore led Pan Trin­ba­go ex­ec­u­tive were faced with when they took of­fice. This bill has since been re­duced by $18 mil­lion.

Trea­sur­er Ger­ard Mendez re­port­ed that mon­ey was owed to steel­bands, lawyers, staff and ser­vice providers, in­clud­ing au­di­tors.

“By let­ter dat­ed Ju­ly 31, 2018, PKF Char­tered Ac­coun­tants & Busi­ness Ad­vi­sors, our au­di­tors, in­formed us that they would re­quire the pay­ment of all out­stand­ing feeds for the 2016 and 2017 au­dits in or­der to com­mence work on the 2018 au­dit,” Mendez said.

“So far, this debt has been one of those which we have been un­able to liq­ui­date. As a re­sult, I ask you to please ac­cept our sin­cere apolo­gies, as we are again un­able to present au­dit­ed ac­counts for 2018, es­pe­cial­ly as those for 2017 have not been com­plet­ed as yet. All ef­forts are be­ing made to ad­dress this sit­u­a­tion, with a view of hav­ing it rec­ti­fied as soon as we are able to liq­ui­date our debt.” 

“Look­ing back at the year un­der re­view the 2018-2021 Cen­tral Ex­ec­u­tive is firm in its opin­ion that more could have been ac­com­plished, if we did not have to deal with the ap­prox­i­mate­ly $60 mil­lion debt that we en­coun­tered as the neg­a­tive fall­out in the im­age of the or­gan­i­sa­tion from the pre­vi­ous Ex­ec­u­tive’s last two year in of­fice,” Sec­re­tary Denise Her­nan­dez said.

“Too much of our en­er­gy went in­to what tran­spired to bring the or­gan­i­sa­tion to this sor­ry state and to find bal­ance in deal­ing with the myr­i­ad of un­paid ex­pens­es. Fur­ther, if we did not have the ex­per­tise in­house to deal with some of the prob­lems, more ex­pens­es could have been added to make mat­ters even worse.”

Ram­sey-Moore said the ex­ec­u­tive has been “able to steady the ship” but “the storm is still there but it’s not rag­ing as when we got in”.

She said next year she hopes to see growth and de­vel­op­ment take place.

The Sin­gle Pan Bands na­tion­al pre­lim­i­nar­ies for Panora­ma 2020 are ex­pect­ed to kick off to­day.