A veteran anti-corruption advocate has sounded a warning that if the scourge of corruption is not successfully tackled, Trinidad and Tobago as a society could be destroyed.
Victor Hart, chairman of the 19-member Cabinet-appointed Trinidad and Tobago Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Steering Committee, stressed this point even while remaining optimistic that his fears would not be realised.
Hart, a former head of the local chapter of Transparency International, sees corruption as a major issue in the forthcoming general election.
Q: Mr. Hart, the Trinidad and Tobago Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Steering Committee (TTEITI) has been given a tremendous mandate to deal with anti-corruption perceptions in three major sectors of the economy—oil, gas and mining—but so far it has not attracted the kind of public prominence one would expect from such an organisation?
A: (In a pensive mood in the living-room at his One Woodbrook Place apartment Thursday morning)
The TTEITI that is being implemented in Trinidad and Tobago is not a response to any anti-corruption initiative on behalf of the Government.
T&T is replete with rumours about corruption and we have lived with those rumours forever it seems. But what the TTEITI is about is a response to the fact that the energy sector—oil, gas and mining—belong to the people and we seek to bring transparency and accountability by revealing details for the people’s knowledge and benefit.
That being so, the TTEITI acts as a disincentive to corruption by the exposing of hitherto confidential information to the general public.
How does the TTEITI get the companies to work with the TTEITI when they have their own auditors and so on?
What we do is to get Government to declare independently to us what monies they have received from the companies, and they independently reveal to us what monies they paid to the Government so that we have figures that we can compare to what is paid and what is said to have been received.
Has Government been happily co-operating with you all in terms of your perusing the books…?
Absolutely. What is really good about this exercise is that it is voluntary and we have full co-operation from the Government side, in that the Government receives these revenues from the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) and through the Ministry of Energy and Energy Affairs.
Mr. Hart, the public knows that you have been an anti-corruption advocate for many years and, as a matter of fact, five years ago you and your wife sailed off to Tobago where you “retired.” But, lo and behold!, you have returned to Port-of-Spain resuming your battle?
(Smiling) I have made two failed attempts at retirement, the first in Grenada and the second in Tobago. I, however, have recognised that, like many of us, I cannot escape my destiny to play a role in safeguarding our country’s future so as to arrest and reverse the current downward [trend].
Mr. Hart, given the assignment being undertaken by TTEITI, can one reasonably assume that there was some kind of “hanky panky” going on in these sectors?
I don’t think that the TTEITI was adopted in Trinidad and Tobago because there was concern that maybe “hanky panky,” as you said, was going on in the energy sector.
It was adopted more as a recognition that the people of T&T were the owners of that sector and they are entitled to have more information on how the resources are exploited.
Given the kind of sensitive work of the TTEITI, what sort of challenges have you all been confronted with?
Well, the major challenge in the four and a half years that we have existed was the disclosure of taxes and royalties paid by the companies to Government which could not be readily made available to us because the taxation laws made it a criminal offence for the BIR to reveal that type of information to any third party.
We had to find a way around that prohibition and it took us 18 months to find a solution.
Any more serious challenges?
Our next challenge is to get the mining sector (quarries and asphalt) to adopt the TTEITI and bring transparency to a very opaque sector of our economy.
We have had our first engagement with the mining sector in February and, given its intractable problems and the rumours of illegal quarrying, we expect some resistance to our efforts to bring transparency and accountability to the sector.
Mr. Hart, do you believe that the average citizen is buying in to the activities of the TTEITI?
Well, not as much as I would have liked. On the one hand, the Government applied to the parent body (based in Oslo) for membership in March 2011, and in January this year T&T became a compliant member, which is the highest level of membership.
So the Government is fully committed, companies are fully committed, but the people who should be most committed, the general public because it is their resources and their inheritance, we find that it is taking a long time to get the message across.
By the way, we have found that the media too is not buying into the importance of the TTEITI and helping us to promote it as much as they should.
But we have been making many approaches to the media via press releases and so on, but the response has been mixed and we are now trying to engage the media more so they would understand the importance of the TTEITI to the well-being of Trinidad and Tobago.
Have you found any discrepancies while going through the financial records of the oil and gas companies?
They have been doing it willingly, so now we now know in very great detail how much money each company is paying to the Government.
Very minor discrepancies; happily, these were easily accounted for when our independent accounting firm looked at the differences and reconciled them. So that there has been negligible differences which were always easily explained by the timing of payments or foreign exchange rates.
Mr. Hart, the TTEITI has said it has to fight very hard to “save the country” from the spectre of corruption. Is it that bad or are you all exaggerating?
(A heavy sigh) I think it is accepted by one and all that corruption has been and is still a big, big problem in T&T and it is a cancer in any society. And unless we put our heads together, we put our efforts together and fight that battle and win it, this could mean that corruption would become endemic.
It could take over the country, it could take over the government, it could take over the private and the public sector, and it could destroy a country.
Therefore, we are a long way from really tackling the corruption problem...we are making stabs at it in small ways and TTEITI in a sense is one such initiative.
Given that grave expression on your face, Mr. Hart, do you believe you all are fighting a losing battle?
Absolutely not. In fact I remain very optimistic that as big a battle as reducing corruption is in this country, whether it is in procurement, in any of the sectors in the economy, it is a battle that has to be won and is being won.
So what’s the problem then?
Simple, Clevon, we are making gains but these gains have been small in coming. But I see clearly there is room for hope. All we need to do is to have the resolve and the political will to continue this fight.
We cannot afford to lose it because the whole future of the country and our children are at stake.
You mentioned the word political and I am sure you are aware of the pending general election this year. Would corruption be a major issue again as in the previous years?
The corruption as an issue? Oh, absolutely. You might recall that in 2010 many felt that the government of the day lost because of such charges and they resonated with the electorate and this time around too one can already see charges of corruption will rank very high on the speakers’ talking heads.