THE Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) says it will not be sidetracked by election campaign advertisements being published by the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) as it does not intend to go easy on the Government regarding alleged acts of corruption.

“I am greatly concerned about the corruption that seems to be everywhere,” JLP deputy leader Audley Shaw told a fund-raising dinner for Dr Raymoth Notice at the Terra Nova Hotel on Saturday night.

Notice is the JLP’s candidate for East Central St Catherine. He will face the PNP’s K D Knight for that seat in general elections which the prime minister said he will call by year-end.

Shaw, over the past two years, has earned a reputation for exposing a number of cases of government corruption and on Saturday he told his audience that he had not received answers from the administration in relation to some of the issues.

“In December, I asked the minister of finance, Dr Omar Davies, to table the report on the activities at Caymanas Track Limited, but up to now I don’t see that done,” Shaw said.

“The Government is hoping that elections will come and go and these critical issues will go unanswered, but we won’t let that happen.”

Shaw also called on the minister of industry, commerce and technology, Phillip Paulwell, to talk to the nation about $200 million he charged was missing under the Government’s PL480 programme.

“Paulwell must say what happen to the $200 million. The money is missing and we need to know what the situation is,” he said.

Under the PL480 programme, the United States sends food to Jamaica and the proceeds from its sale go towards development projects.

But on Saturday, the Government’s Trade Board, which administers the PL480 programme, announced that it had won an injunction against Grains Jamaica for that company’s failure to hand over proceeds from American food aid rice that it processed on behalf of the Government.

In this case, Grains Jamaica, during the 1999/2000 fiscal year, milled an estimated 13,000 tonnes of rice under the programme and the earnings from this were supposed to have gone to the agriculture ministry’s Food Tree Crop Project.

The company, however, had run up arrears and later worked out a payment schedule with the Trade Board to clear the debt. The Trade Board eventually took legal action against Grains Jamaica when it failed to follow the negotiated commitments for payment.

According to the Trade Board, it would continue to work with the office of the attorney-general to recover the outstanding debt.

Shaw also took aim at the director of public prosecutions, saying that he needed to say what was happening with his probe into the operations of the National Housing Development Corporation and Operation PRIDE, the Government’s shelter programme for the poor. “The Opposition won’t allow these questions to go unanswered. We will not waste time on side issues like ads placed by the PNP while the real issues go unanswered. It can’t work and the JLP will seek answers,” he said.