President of Pan Trinbago Beverley Ramsey-Moore said it is the government that commissioned the audit on the steelband body and they should go after those who left the association in financial ruin.
“Pan Trinbago did not commission the audit it was the Ministry of Community Development and the Arts and I would be really happy if they went after them. They left us in a bad situation,” she told the Sunday Guardian in a telephone interview.
Ramsey-Moore, who spoke candidly about the audit on Pan Trinbago by Ernst and Young (EY) which was laid in Parliament in April last year, denied claims that she wanted to “bury the report” and move on.
“If it’s anybody that would want to expose the last Pan Trinbago management team it would have been me. They made me persona non grata. I told them we are now recovering from a narrative of an organization involved in putting money in their pockets and they were removed and the entire slate clean,” she explained.
“I told them that this was not on the agenda of this meeting to be discussed but we shall have another meeting where that can be discussed.”
Ramsey-Moore admitted that she hoped the EY report would not have been made public because she feared it would further taint Pan Trinbago’s image.
“I felt this is our business and we have to discuss this on the inside,” she said.
She agreed, however, that they had to account for their monies as well as to pan players who are owed more than $7.8m in remittances.
“We as a new body cannot afford this type of pan revenue to treat with the issues of the players,” she said.
Ramsey-Moore said she read the report in its entirety and was disheartened by the state of Pan Trinbago and the wasteful and wild spending that took place under the last administration.
“This is why there is an MOA for the next two years between Pan Trinbago and the National Carnival Commission (NCC). Most of our bills are paid by them and the only money we get is to deal with administrative expenses,” she said.
To avoid exorbitant staff costs, Ramsey-Moore said “there are no perks, no honoraria nothing like that. This executive is functioning to perform events.”
She said there is a $3m overdraft left by the last administration which they are “chipping away to pay it off.”
“We have paid back about $300,000 but that is just a drop in the ocean. There is still a long way to go but as we said at the AGM the theme is weathering the storm and adjusting the sales.”
Ramsey-Moore said she is determined to change the image and perception of Pan Trinbago We are committed to ensuring things are different. We are going to work hard with our members to clean up this administrative diarrhoea. Trust me it will happen and I stand committed to action that changes for the better,” she said.
