A growing payments scandal is putting a tight squeeze on the Briceno administration and tonight, the country’s top financial official is weighing in. Financial Secretary Joseph Waight says the emerging details surrounding contracts linked to Minister Oscar Mira and his family “don’t look good.” The controversy centers on millions of taxpayers’ dollars paid out to businesses tied to Mira and his siblings for food supply contracts, most of it flowing through the Ministry of Defense. Now, with leaked Smart Stream records raising eyebrows over how those payments were structured and approved, questions are mounting about whether the system was manipulated to sidestep stricter oversight. Waight insists that’s not how the process was designed, setting up a critical question: did the system fail, or was it pushed beyond its limits?
Joseph Waight
Joseph Waight, Financial Secretary
“Clearly there is a breakdown in the system. It was not intended to work this way. It takes, in our system there are levels of approval depending on the amount of money. There is a first approval and second approval in any payment that goes through. Depending on the level, if it exceeds a certain amount it goes through a third level at Treasury. It appears from what we have seen that there was a deliberate effort to fragment payments, break them down to below that. But I will wait on what the audit reveals, but certainly, sure enough, it does not look good. In my view, I think what happened is that either somebody dropped a ball, fell asleep or they moved together on it. Now, whether that can be placed at the feet of Mr. Mira, I cant say. I do know that when it comes to food supply there are regular deliveries and regular payments. I am told sometimes that they would batch the payments together and issue them in one day for their convivence. That is the convenience of the accounting staff. The convenience of the supplier who would wait at the end of the month sometimes and drop a bunch of payments and it goes through. But I don’t think that is the whole explanation. That could be a contributing factor, I don’t know. But, certainly the system was not designed to produce what we are seeing.”
MP Farms Payments Slip Through Without Government Scrutiny
Records show dozens of payments, each just under ten thousand dollars, pushed through for MP Farms in a single day, and even more over the course of a month. So why didn’t anyone at the Ministry of Defense stop to question the pattern? Instead, the invoices were batched, processed, and paid. According to Financial Secretary Joseph Waight, each invoice required individual approval from a financial officer. Now, with an audit underway, investigators are zeroing in on whether those checks actually happened, or if the system simply waved the payments through.
Joseph Waight
Joseph Waight, Financial Secretary
“Each has to be signed individually. When I say batch, it is possible that, and I have seen it happen, today we work on supplies so we will pay supplier x. Bring all the invoices and when that goes through it looks like a batch. But each goes through individually, checked and paid. Similarly, you have a supplier saying guess what, i am circling Belmopan let me bring all my invoices too. But that I don’t think account for the level of what we are seeing here.”
Reporter
“Do you believe these should have been flagged?”
Joseph Waight
“If you see a whole lot of payments, it should have raised alarms and it should have raised an eyebrow. I think so.”
Paul Lopez
“How about the practice of breaking down these numbers, these big figures into smaller figures under ten thousand dollars?”
Joseph Waight
“You could make part payments. That is not the case, but imagine you have a big invoice and you cant pay it all. You can pay it in installments, you can pay it in parts. You could say a hundred dollars, forty now, balance remaining sixty, next thirty, that is possible. That is possible, but you can split a payment in pieces. Imagine you get your money every month, coming to the end of the month you dry.”
Paul Lopez
“But that is not what happened in this case, because in this case those payments were made on that same day when all those payments were issued.”
Joseph Waight
“So what I am saying is that is a way, another possible explanation, but not in tis case, this case looks cute to me.”
Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.
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