28th December, 2021
The Government-owned Walesi company is shifting into typical Government mode for explaining its lack of accountability – blaming somebody else.
For the last six years, Walesi has spent tens of millions of dollars of Government money. We don’t know how much because no accounts have been made public.
In its statement at the weekend, Walesi claimed that its accounts were late because the Auditor-General had delayed their release.
But its own words tell the real story.
Companies prepare their accounts at the end of the financial year. This should take them four or five months. Then they send them to their auditors.
But these are the facts that come from Walesi’s own statement:
To prepare their 2015 accounts, Walesi took three and half years. The 2015 accounts were submitted in May 2019.
The 2016 accounts took two and a half years. They too were submitted in May 2019.
The 2017 accounts took one and a half years. They were submitted in July 2019.
The 2018 Walesi accounts took seven months to submit.
The 2019 and 2020 Walesi accounts each took ten months to submit.
In the real world, if managers took three years to submit their accounts to their auditors, they would be fired.
Walesi now says its 2015-2017 accounts have been tabled in Parliament. This means that they will not be debated in parliament until next year, when the appropriate standing committee has looked at it. .
Walesi and its owners, the Fiji Government should release those reports publicly now. There is no law that stops them from doing it.
And to the Government - please don’t give the excuse that you respect Parliament. Everyone knows, from the way you behave in there, that you have no respect for Parliament at all.
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