P.M. Barrow Finds No Smoking Gun in Audit Reports, But Will Question Ministers

Dean Barrow

The Special Audit Reports on the Immigration and Nationality Department are to be laid before the House of Representatives on Friday, and are sure to engineer much talk and opprobrium. But the man who saw them first, Prime Minister Dean Barrow, has a considered view on how much they condemn the government and the Department. While he concedes that the audits confirm “a sorry picture” within the Immigration and Nationality Service, finding anyone to blame, especially in the Cabinet, still seems to be a difficult decision for the nation’s maximum leader.  Today he used the example of Ministers writing recommendation letters for constituents seeking visas, passports and nationality certificates, which the Audit explicitly states is not provided for in law. And even though an independent investigation by the Auditor General has taken place, he will now be questioning the guilty parties himself.  The Prime Minister still insists that no smoking gun on corruption has been found.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“I will have to have a talk in Cabinet on Tuesday with the Ministers who wrote a number of recommendations and they will have to answer; but as I said, absent a smoking gun, absent evidence to show that Ministers wrote recommendation letters, went beyond the writing of letters, tried to put pressure on Department officials, and they did this sort of thing in return for bribes paid, favors done them by these applicants – in the absence of that, there really is a limit to how far I can go. Ministers, like everybody else under our system, have to be given fair play; the rules of natural justice have to be observed. And in the absence of the kind of evidence that would justify my coming to the conclusion that there is sufficient material that entitles me, obliges me to fire anybody, I’ll have to be very careful.”