By YOURI KEMP
Tribune Business Reporter
ykemp@tribunemedia.net
Former Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis blasted the government yesterday for the level of taxation, wasteful spending and lack of fiscal accountability.
Dr Minnis, in his contribution to the 2023/2024 Budget debate, said the budget is a “strategy” by the “greedy” Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) to manipulate the tax system to ensure a “historic transfer of wealth from the people to the PLP elite”.
Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis has said the current Budget has “no new taxes,” but it does have several increases in levies and service charges.
Dr Minnis said the government is also implementing Value Added Tax (VAT) at the University of The Bahamas that “will have to be passed on to our young people”.
Dr Minnis also accused the government of “hoarding the resources” from the Bahamian people.
In response, Mr Davis said Dr Minnis’s loose lips are designed solely to smear people’s character and that his administration is nothing like the former Minnis administration.
Dr Minnis said: “The Prime Minister, the tax collector in chief, is so defensive about the extra tax burden that he has put on the Bahamian people. This is why he is so defensive about his luxury travel and the over $60m being paid to consultants.
“They won’t tell us why they stopped the Central Bank, the new Central Bank (project). They won’t tell us what is really going on with the cost of the new prison. Their plan and cost about a new hospital for New Providence aren’t adding up.”
He further asked about all of the “confusion and lack of transparency” about these million dollar capital projects. “We wonder if the interest maybe 14 percent or 15 percent may subsequently decrease if the if there were any mobilisation fee by the government. Whenever it comes to state funds for major capital project works, the PLP can get their stories, right. They’re constantly trying to deflect from their failures and grand mistakes. But Bahamian see through all of this propaganda and hide and seek,” Dr Minnis chided the administration.
Meanwhile, Dr Minnis added: “The Ministry of Finance is so concerned with the overly spending of members of members of this particular government, that the Ministry of Finance is presently in consultation with a particular bank to introduce an app that would allow them to see and monitor the government spending, because it is out of control.
“Hopefully, they will have such an app available, because I do not want to call names, because there are individuals in the government who are abusing the system that Ministry of Finance is so concerned that this particular app being discussed, to be established by one of the major banks in this country to monitor the Bahamian spending.”
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