ladies and
gentlemen because I accept the concerns of the religious leaders among us about
the moral dangers of casino gambling, and since it is not only fundamentally
right, to heed the concerns of major sections of our citizens which should
direct government's actions in a democracy, and not the nonsense pronounced in
the Honourable Parliament by Cement Rohee that the religious doctrines have no
place in state decisions, the PPP representatives in the national assembly can only
tell us about jobs and investments in this Casino Gambling matter as they have
been instructed to do by their executive, it really does not matter what they
individually think since some are Catholics and some are Muslim they will, like
the rubber stamps that they are, deny their obligations to their religion and do
what they are told to do.
It is appropriate
at this juncture to point out that this government's economic vision has not to
date proven to be one which has benefited this nation, in fact their lack of
vision is now legendary under the uninspired guidance of Bharrat Jagdeo and has
contributed in no small way to our poverty situation in this nation, the result
is that under pressure from the IMF they now have to resort to unconventional and
dangerous methods of investment and draconian taxations
such as Casino Gambling and a high 16% Value Added Tax with no proper
transitional period of implementation which is causing so much hardship to this
nation.
To establish that
the religious groups represent a substantial part of our population ladies and
gentlemen, I direct your attention to the world fact book for Guyana and there under population it is clearly stated that this country's population is
made up of the following; Christian 50%, Hindu 35%, Muslim 10% and those
described as other at 5%.
Apparently circumstances
and deception in this nation have conspired to place in the National Assembly
of this nation only people from that 5% of our nation who are godless or are referred
to religiously as other, and who are disregarding the opinions
and beliefs of the 95% of this nation who are protesting the implementation of
this bill, on religious grounds.
I will not respond to the to the
Home Affairs and Education Ministers' presentations in the house, since I will
not dignify such patent heresy and nonsense with a response, I would however like,
to place on the record my total dissatisfaction with these ridiculous
presentations in the National Assembly, whilst the new Chairman of the Guyana
Council of Churches and my own Catholic Bishop, the deputy chairman of the
Guyana Council of Churches, were present in the National assembly, and I demand
that they apologise. Actually I see in the newspapers [after I wrote this comment]
that their President is apologising for them but that is not enough they, Rohee
and Fox, must apologise to this nation and I will say this, these two people
have no place in the legislative assembly of a nation where the overriding
majority of the population are god fearing people.
Because I accept the concerns of the
religious among us about the dangers of casino gambling on moral grounds, and
since it is not only fundamentally right, in a democracy, to listen to the
concerns of the citizens which should direct government's actions and not be
repressed, I condemn this Bill in the most vehement way possible.
So now I come to the what Minister Ramsammy
said to the honourable house when he alleged that Casino Gambling is 'not a
sham for money laundering' in doing so he displays his ignorance, because
if he researched this matter properly, he would have found the real evidence,
which are the conclusions of one of the world's leading accounting firms Ernst
& Young which has estimated that the amount of money laundered annually by
criminal networks is US$1 trillion dollars, with casinos being one of the
easiest and therefore preferred options of laundering money, and so we must take
notice since the criminal underworld functions at a capacity at which it is
allowed to, based on the authorities' abilities to enforce regulations Ladies
and Gentlemen you live here, you decide how effective the Jagdeo Government has
been in enforcing our regulations for anything, from the unimplemented
procurement commission to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Revenue
Authority which is more inefficient today than it was when we had the old
system of Comptroller of Customs and the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, that
old system used to collect 95 Guyana dollars for every one dollar spent at both
the agencies, today after we merged these two agencies every dollar spent only
collects 35 dollars i.e. 3 times less than before, but in the end when the
consequences of the incompetence of the people who are running our affairs in
this nation are examined, they are costing us a lot because if criminal
endeavour operates at a level at which the authorities allow them to operate
at, and in this country the line dividing the government itself and known
criminals and drug lords is no longer clear, then you decide how much trouble
we are in.
Ramsammy referred to 100 countries now
allowing legalised Casino Gambling with Trinidad and Tobago among them, because
we are so close to Trinidad, Suriname and Venezuela we have some appreciation
of what Casino Gambling is really doing to those nations, and in the end the
bad always overshadows the good; ladies and gentlemen, no matter what the
rhetoric, the excuses, or the promises, countries that introduce institutionalized
gambling always pay a heavy price in the end. Trinidad does indeed permit
casino-style gambling in members' clubs only and depending on how you
count them, there are about forty such establishments there, many offering no
more than a few pin-ball machines in backstreets without even telephone
numbers. Ramsammy's fictional number of '10,000 direct jobs' provided by
casinos in Trinidad and Tobago is just science fiction, just as his claim that
we will have a state of the art medical facility here in Guyana for heart and
other very invasive surgeries, after consulting with some of the most knowledgeable
people in this country about this, I am convinced that minister Ramsammy is having
a pipe dream, since with the level of qualifications and therefore competence of
the nursing staff he currently has, it does not matter what he builds, it will
not work!
Madam speaker now I come to the crux of
the matter and why I don't care what economic benefits Casino
Gambling will allegedly bring to this nation; why I don't care
that the Prime Minister has now told the parliament that this country has no
eco tourist industry; why I don't care about the contemptuous
remarks made in this honourable assembly by the prime Minister that those who
don't like this government's introduction of Casino Gambling can vote them out
in 2011, why I don't care that the government is cash strapped, since
they are paying the price for their own ineptitude and corruption, what I
do care about is that they are passing the fruits of their ineptitude and
corruption on to the citizens of this nation in the form of higher taxes and
with this Casino Bill, what I do care about is that in doing so
they are about to break the constitution again, since chapter 2 article 9 says
this "sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it through their
representatives and the democratic organs established by and under this
constitution" article 13 is just as clear and says this "The principle
objective of the political system of the State is to establish an inclusionary
democracy by providing increasing opportunities for the participation of the citizens
and their organisations in the management and decision making processes
of the state with particular emphasis on those areas of decision making that
affect their well-being" end quote, there has been no such consultation with
the people or their organisations, in this case their churches, as is required
by the constitution itself; what I do care about is that in this
matter the PPP are behaving as if Bharat Jagdeo is the sovereign king in this
nation rather than its elected president and as such he had a legal and
statutory obligation to discuss this matter and come to a national consensus before
he gave Buddy Shivraj the undertaking that he will be granted a
Casino license if he builds this hotel for the world cup cricket, what I
do care about is the fact that the first major beneficiary of this act
by Jagdeo is to reward a man who stands accused of smuggling massive amounts of
fuel in this country thereby establishing that he is a business man that skirts
the line between legality and illegality; Madam Speaker there is also credible
evidence that Buddys' financial partners in this endeavour may be very big
players in this country's drug trafficking, one extremely reliable source has
told me that one of Buddy's major partners in this endeavour is a known drug
lord who may have invested as much as 750,000 to 1,000,000 Euro dollars in this
hotel.
The question now has to be whether there
is any place in Buddy's hotel, currently under construction, which has been set
aside for Casino gambling? If there is, then this matter was resolved long ago
and Jagdeo stepped way out of line, in giving permission on such a fundamental
matter affecting our god fearing population without consultation, and we should
give him as much trouble as we can until he comes back into line with behaviour
consistent with being the elected leader in an inclusionary democracy.
And finally ladies and gentlemen I
do care that public funds have been given to this man who is skirting
the line of legality in this country to ensure that this hotel is completed on
time!
Ladies and gentlemen I do not know where
this concept of Casino Gambling as a development tool for Guyana comes from, it
is not contained in the National Development Strategy, neither is contained in
the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper which this nation has submitted to the International
Financial Institutions and which is supposed to act as the blueprint for our removing
poverty from the poor citizens in this nation the current VAT fiasco is
evidence that the PRSP is a failure, we are not getting less poor we are
getting poorer and we being forced to find newer and more onerous ways of
taxing our citizens, neither I may add does implementation of Casino Gambling appear
in the manifesto of the PPP in the just concluded general elections, I consider
this to be a completely unacceptable, reprehensible and deceptive act since if
the PPP had made such a disclosure before the elections, many votes including
the Muslim and Amerindian vote would probably not have gone to them, and even
the devout Hindus would probably also have been reluctant to vote for a
gambling government, so if Buddy's hotel does contain a place identified in its
blueprints for Casino Gambling, then this President Jagdeo gave permission to
allow Casino Gambling in this country almost two years ago, long before the election,
without consulting anyone and it is that which I find most offensive about this
entire stinking matter.
Finally I want to quote from a letter
written by my friend Christopher Ram in the Stabroek News and published on 18th
January 2006,... now ladies and gentlemen Christopher Ram is probably the most knowledgeable
man I know on these accounting matters and more importantly he is a man who
will tell us fearlessly and intelligently what the facts in any particular matter
really are; ladies and gentlemen any idiot can go to the internet and find
articles extolling the virtues of Casino Gambling, but if one looks deeper as
Ram has done, one sees a very different picture, now remember that for nearly a
decade Ram's business page column in the Stabroek news has stood out as the
defining word on business matters in this nation, so his competence in this area
cannot be questioned, he says this and I quote him "It is hard to believe that,
in the words of Dr. Ramsammy, the Government has 'studied the experiences of
other countries, some in our own region of the Caribbean.' If it had, then he
would be aware that in the Budget Speech reported in the Trinidad Express of
October 5, 2006, Prime Minister Manning vowed to eliminate casino-type
establishments in his country.
The 'industry' in Suriname is under the
strong influence of the Ukrainian Mafia while in Venezuela, the owner of the
Casino de Venezia is on record as telling the supreme court there, that the
hotel was frequented by a group of Italians associated with the Italian
Camorra, known for its Mafia connections. In South Korea several public
officials including a minister of the Government have been guilty of accepting
bribes in connection with the granting of licences to sell gambling machines
while in the Philippines a close ally of President Arroya owns the Metrowall
Mall in which an illegal casino was recently opened and which is associated
with the assassination of a previous owner. And Cyprus admits to contemplating
casino gambling because 'it is the lesser of two evils'. that the state that
hosts the gambling capital of the world Las Vegas, has the second highest rate
of homelessness in the US, twice the national average and that even developed
countries like the USA and the UK can barely regulate their gambling industry.
people might not even be aware that while the government bowed to international
pressure and passed legislation in 2000 to prevent money laundering, the
legislation was not brought into effect even as the illegal narco-trade, fuel
smuggling, tax evasion and money laundering took root and grew in the country
and along with other elements of the underground economy now account for some
40% of the economy. Simultaneously, the Government has ignored warnings that
the non-bank cambios do much, much more than change money for the person who
may not have access to the commercial banks or who care simply about a better
rate.
