ST GEORGE’S, Grenada (CMC) — Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell has confirmed that financial corruption has occurred with the rebuilding or building of new houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, which devastated the northern part of the country on July 1 last year, but said the illicit practice is not widespread.

“I am sure that with any government programme from time to time you may have mistakes or you may have issues that need addressing but as far as I am aware there is no widespread corruption, no systematic corruption in any of these instances,” Mitchell said in response to a question posed to him during his weekly Tuesday “DMs with the PM” interactive talk show.

Admitting that there are challenges with some contractors who were awarded contracts to build the homes, Prime Minister Mitchell said that a lot of it had to do with the financial management of fixed-term contracts issued by the Ministry of Mobilisation, Implementation and Transformation and/or the Ministry of Housing.

“I have said that repeatedly with many of the contractors because in many of the instances, the ability to manage their money, the ability to have the type of financial literacy that is required, is sometimes not there,” he said, without providing details of the financial wrongdoings.

“Now you could say you not dealing with them, in which case those homes are not going to be rebuilt because we simply don’t have the capacity,” he said, while pointing out that the government awarded fixed term contracts for rebuilding of the homes.

“If you give a contractor a fixed price contract, say EC$75,000 (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) to build or EC$85,000 to build a “Build Back Better” house and he does not realise that he cannot pay his workers per day because if he pays them per day and if they unproductive and if rain falls and they don’t work and they still have to be paid, he will quickly find himself running out of money and will be unable to build a home because he ought to have said if the price is fixed I then have to give a fixed labour price,” the prime minister said.

Recently, Finance Minister Dennis Cornwall announced that the Audit Department will be conducting audits into several contractors who were awarded contracts to construct houses under the Hurricane Beryl Response initiative and failed to complete the project.

The Ministry of Mobilisation, Implementation and Transformation was allocated EC$15 million under the 2024 supplementary budget to assist with the rebuilding of the homes.  A total of EC$50,000 was allocated for each house.

Speaking about the alleged financial misconduct, malfeasance and irregularities of public funds through the contracts, Cornwall said that he has heard one or two cases where contractors have started houses and disappeared.

When asked why this is happening, he said, “I don’t really know but I believe that the persons issuing the contracts to those contractors need to basically make sure that they vet these people properly.”

Announcing that all government funds must be accounted because of the various supporting legislation, Cornwall said, “I want to put out a warning to persons who have collected government moneys and did not do what they should do with it, or you used it for other purposes and so on…”

“We will have the Audit Department audit those things, we will have the necessary steps taken to make sure you can account or account for the moneys you were given,” he said.