Speaker and ex-CO escape PAC scrutiny

Juliana O’Conor-Connolly, Speaker of the Cayman Islands Legislative Assembly (Photo by Dennie Warren Jr)

(CNS): Neither the former minister for District Administration, Works, Lands and Agriculture (DAWLA), Juliana O’Conor-Connolly, nor the former chief officer, Kearney Gomez, were called by the Public Accounts Committee Wednesday as it examined a critical audit report. And few questions were asked of the current chief officer or the former chief financial about some of the damning revelations in the report concerning that ministry’s travel and hospitality expenses during the time that O’Connor-Connolly, who is now speaker of the House, and Gomez were both in office.

In particular, no explanations were given about the massive write-offs of travel advances that were never reconciled and said to have been incurred by a senior official in that ministry. Nor was any light shone on why O’Connor-Connolly spent significant sums on hotel accommodation for herself and her former executive aide in her own constituency of Cayman Brac, even though she had a home on the island.

Although McKeeva Bush had not answered a lot of questions when he was in the hot seat during the PAC hearing, he had offered a defence and justification of his own spending and that of his staff when he headed up the tourism and finance ministry, which had accounted for the largest amount of travel and hospitality spending.

Bush was the only member of PAC to question why the details of who had run up travel bills of tens of thousands of dollars in O’Connor-Connolly’s ministry without ever accounting for them had not been identified and asked for more details about the write-offs, but there were no answers.

Alan Jones, who took over as ministry’s chief officer following Gomez’s retirement, and the former CFO were questioned in general terms about the overall management and difficulties getting receipts and accountability from the minister. However, no one was asked and no answers emerged over why O’Connor-Connolly had run up a bill of some $34,000 on Brac hotels. No one asked and there were no answers over why the ministry had spent $45,742 on trip to a postal conference in Qatar or why the minister received a much higher per diem rate when travelling than anyone else, among a number of other controversial revelations in the report.

The CFO was asked about the issues relating to the lack of documentation supporting travel for the minister and senior staff. She explained that she had brought this to the chief officer’s attention but nothing was done, and so, despite knowing that she needed better quality information, she was not able to get it.

There was no explanation as to why PAC did not call O’Connor-Connolly or Gomez and the issue of the write-offs was not addressed.

Jones, who is now the CO in an altered but similar ministry, said he had introduced a tighter regime and that the possibility of civil servants running up debts would not be possible in future. He warned, however, that as a result of what is written in General Orders, civil servants still could not force ministers to adhere to the travel policy, and those regulations also provide for ministers and chief officers to continue signing off on their own spending.