The report that started it all

Early December, Vanuatu’s controversial ombudsman Marie-Noelle Patterson released yet another damning report implicating top lead ers in a retirement scheme scandal.

Little did she know this would be the people’s first act of awareness in many years.

Patterson, whose office has been work ing on the case for the past two years, labels the case as a “sad story of systemat ic corruption” and alleges former finance minister Willie Jimmy, who appointed “unqualified political friends” to the Vanuatu National Provident Fund board of directors for being at the centre of the scheme.

The VNPF was set up 10 years ago as a compulsory savings and retirement scheme.

It is made up of three per cent of the workers salary and another three per cent paid by the employer.

“Since 1992, it seems the council of ministers and the minister of finance saw the board to be their own private bank, they thought they could give instructions to the board”, Patterson said.

The instruction was to start a housing scheme which favoured politicians, with

reduced interest rates.

Most of the houses sold were former government houses attached to higher pub lic servants posts.

Former Prime Minister Maxime Carlot, who was sent a preliminary copy of the report, said the scheme was a “just deci sion” taken by his government to “allow (Vanuatu) people to live among Europeans” in the centre of the capital, to counter an “apartheid”, “racist” policy of the former French-British condominium of the New Hebrides (which became indepen dent Vanuatu in 1980).

“Your office is not competent on the decisions made by government. These decisions are never illegal in a parliamen tary democracy. The council of ministers cannot and will never be in a position to commit embezzlement.

The leadership code has nothing to do with government decisions”, Carlot replied to Patterson in a letter annexed to the report.

“We found approximately 900 million vatu (SUS 7.4 million), a third of VNPF’s reserves, were loaned through this housing scheme and at least 50 per cent of that was granted directly to political people”, Patterson said.

Of the some 800 applications, only 150

were accepted and over half of those were granted in priority to the “politically cor rect” ones with no ceiling on the amount borrowed, she said.

“This effectively means people bor rowed money they couldn’t repay and this is going to lead to losses, because people cannot reimburse, the houses were overval ued and the interest rate is very low”.

Patterson alleges there is currently no track kept of who has paid and who has not.

“If these funds don’t bring any interest rates, that means the people won’t be able to get the minimum guaranteed interest on their savings, that is at least three per cent”, Patterson said.

“And if the capital funds are lost, the retirement of all these people might be affected in future”.

Last month, in an attempt to reduce Patterson’s investigating powers, Vanuatu’s parliament passed a bill to repeal the ombudsman’s act.

President Jean-Marie Leye, who

appointed the French-bom investigator

three years ago, refused to promulgate the bill.

For the past three years, Patterson has

published numerous reports implicating

top Vanuatu leaders in cases of malprac tice, corruption and abuse of power ■