U.D.P. distances itself from city mayor as new allegations arise
It’s open season on Belize City’s first female Mayor Zenaida Moya Flowers. First, the government has charged her with twenty-two counts of Uttering a False Document. Then the United Democratic Party expelled her from its National Party Council on October third. And the next move afoot is to have her removed entirely from the U.D.P. On the heels of the auditor general’s report of the council’s finances for the months of January to April of this year, which outlined approximately two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars that were under deposited from the council’s reports, another damning report has come out against Moya Flowers.
The Auditor General’s office has sent a memo dated October sixth to the mayor which details salaries and stipends that the mayor has collected from March 2006 to December 2008. It alleges that Moya Flowers was overpaid by a whopping sixty-nine thousand two hundred thirty one dollars and twenty-nine cents. During the period in question, she received her regular three thousand dollars per month salary which was paid from the payroll plus a stipend and telephone allowance of five thousand nine hundred dollars combined. That’s almost double her salary in extra benefits.
The auditor general’s memo, however, points out that at a meeting held on March seventeenth, 2006, the council met and agreed that the mayor would receive a maximum amount of six thousand dollars which would include salary and stipend. So that means she was overpaid three thousand nine hundred dollars a month for the period in question.
The memo says that the two hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars that the mayor collected during the period does not include the payments made from the finance department. That is because the manual cashbook could not be located. It sounds eerily similar to recent events of missing documents at city hall. The same cashbook was available when the audit began but when it was needed to examine the mayor’s salary, it disappeared. The incident was reported to the Council’s Director of Finance Dwain Davis, but Davis and the internal auditor could not locate the book.
The new report does not include payments made from Finance Department. According to the auditor general’s document, the sixty-nine thousand extra dollars the mayor received also includes nineteen thousand dollars that was overpaid to the mayor when she received two vacation grants in 2007 and two more in 2008. The memo asks her point blank “(quote) “Could you say why this was done? Why was she paid a vacation grant” (unquote). The minutes never approved annual vacation grants to be paid to the Mayor. There were additional questionable payments mentioned in the auditor general’s memo including fuel payments to a private motor vehicle in the name of Zenaida Moya and Troy Flowers.
We reported on Tuesday, Mayor Moya Flowers isn’t taking all the licks lying down. Her attorney has filed constitutional motion challenging central government’s placement of a financial controller on her office as a duly elected mayor. She had filed a Supreme Court claim in which she is challenging her removal from the UDP’s National Party Council. It is not yet known how the mayor will handle this additional political blow.
But the punches keep coming. The United Democratic Party sent an official release late this evening concerning the Mayor’s suit against the U.D.P. It says “Her attempt to prevent the Party from holding her to account only heightens the Party’s feeling that she is consistently engaged in behavior that violates the Party’s commitment to transparency. Her court action also comes at a time when the Party has just learned that a new audit query is accusing her of, among other things, having illegally paid herself vacation grants of nineteen thousand dollars
