No audit from CitCo before municipal elections

But still there is not going to be an audit of the finances at City Hall under the stewardship of Mayor Zenaida Moya, not before the March fourth elections, despite repeated calls for one and all the hype about accountability and transparency. Yesterday, the Mayor told News Five to expect one today, but what landed at our desks instead is an audit concluded in August 2008 of the former P.U.P. council. And to borrow from her recent words on the cheques to her brother’s company, there “is nothing new” about the audit for the financial years 2003 to 2007 to city residents. The most telling information about that audit is that it commenced on July thirty-first, 2007 and was aborted on the fourteenth January 2008, because according to the Auditor General, this was a consequence of the time spent on waiting for records and the fact that most of the records required were not presented to the audit team for scrutiny. The rest of the information has to do with the now well ventilated ills of the former council. Mayor Moya is on the last leg of the 2009 election campaign and while the mayor convincingly beat off her opponent at the U.D.P. convention in 2008, next week’s elections are another matter. City residents are screaming to open up the accounts and want answers to what is happening at City Hall, including the default of payment in Social Security contributions of the council’s employees. There is also the question of why over a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars was spent on transport and travel by the mayor’s office while only one thousand six hundred dollars was spent on playgrounds. And then why no progress has been made in paying off debts at Scotia and Alliance banks that attract interest charges of fifteen percent and up to March 2008 had amounted to approximately five million dollars.