Interim chairman of the Children’s Life Fund, Dr Colin Furlonge, reiterated yesterday that only 13 cases where it is believed money was misappropriated were flagged for concern last year and those cases are before the Fraud Squad. He said, however, no parents had made any complaints about any misappropriation of funds in any of the cases they administered.
He said so as he sought to clear the air on allegations about the misappropriation of money from the fund. He was speaking at a press conference at Children’s Life Fund offices, Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Mt Hope.
According to media reports, the former CEO of the fund, Genevieve Madoo, had raised concerns that families who were supposed to receive money for food and travel did not get their per diems when they travelled and of suspicious wiring of money from different banks to pay for a liver transplant operation at the Argentina medical institution Foundation ETHE (Experts in Liver Transplant).
Yesterday, Furlonge said the CEO of the fund had direct responsibility for the per diem money. He said under Madoo, four of the suspicious cases where actually under her purview. He added that under her tenure, which was from March 2015 to May 2015, a female employee was also fired as a result of suspicions into missing funds.
Furlonge reassured that a police investigation was ongoing and if any wrong was identified it would be rectified. On the reason for several wire transfers to Foundation ETHE, Furlonge said that was because the institution did not have a Caribbean account and its fees had to be sent through brokers.
He read an email he received from Dr Carlos Luque, an official at the hospital, which said: “The ETHE does not receive funds in its account. It is simply because we do not have it yet. We are in the process of opening one account in the Caribbean area.
“Why the funds are sent to different bank accounts is because we work with brokers. We cannot give our Argentinian accounts because any money that enters Argentina system it is automatically converted into Argentinian pesos and this is a huge financial problem in case we need to give back the money if the transplant is not done.”
Addressing an excess of money sent to the ETHE account, Furlonge said any excess money would be rolled over for another operation instead of returning it to the Life Fund. He said it was protocol to pay the money in advance. Contacted yesterday, however, Madoo said Furlonge was trying to mislead the public into believeing that families had not complained about not receiving their funds.
She said during her tenure she received documents from a number of families who claimed they did not even know they were entitled to the funds and raised the issue after she investigated the complaints and realised there were discrepancies. She said there were a number of issues that perturbed her about how the fund was being managed and as a result she changed the old system while she was there.
Pressed further she declined to comment, saying the matter was under a police investigation and she did not want to compromise the case.