7 News Belize

Mayor Moya Explains the Missing Money
posted (July 13, 2009)

On Friday, Prime Minister .Dean Barrow dropped a bomb on City Hall. He said that the financial regulator that his Ministry of Finance sent to the City Hall Patrick Tillett had uncovered, “serious financial irregularities.” Tillett had made a statement to police and the PM said he expected arrests soon. In the news business it doesn’t get any bigger than that and all this weekend – eager political speculation mingled with gossip and got sprinkled with fact – so much so that this morning, the story in wide circulation was that Mayor Moya herself would be arrested!

But she wasn’t; far from it, actually – the Mayor coolly held a press conference where she offered an explanation for what she explained as more or less a mix up. Now to understand this story, you’d have to understand a very unusual term – it’s called under deposits – and literally it means when you take money, cash, that is, from a deposit. The books show that a deposit with X amount of money was to have been made – but the actual bank statement shows that less than the X figure was deposited – and that’s because an amount was taken out in an under deposit. It’s a strange creature and no finance person we spoke to had heard of it before – but apparently it was an everyday transaction at the Belize City Council.

And this is what the Prime Minister’s regulator Patrick Tillet discovered when he reviewed the month of April – $27,000 and change missing. It’s marked as being set for deposit, but the deposits were short – because, twenty seven thousand was taken out and paid out in cash for various things. On June 29TH, Tillet asked Financial Controller Dwain Davis for documents to show where the money went. When 10 days passed and only some documents were provided – documents that did not satisfy Tillet, he went to make a report of theft. That’s how it happened. And all because of these strange under-deposits which Davis explained at the press conference today.

Dwain Davis, Director of Finance – BCC
“The way the under-deposit works, for example the cashier every day takes in cash. If for some reason the council needs to pay out monies against which on that day we cannot write a check and we maybe take it from the cash at the cashier. So at the end of the day, the cashier will total the cash, she would have so much, but it is a sort of a automated system that is there so that system says you should have collected so much. So the difference then between what the actual cash and what the system says should be there should be for the amount of money taken out to buy or take care of whatever and that is what we term as under-deposit because we are saying for example we should deposit say $1,000 because that is what the system says but we are only depositing $900 because that is all the cash; we had taken out $100. So that $100 is termed as an under-deposit.”

Jules Vasquez,
Is that an accepted accounting terminology?

Dwain Davis,
“Whether it is accepted or not, I really don’t know but it is a term that I’ve seen used here from the time I cam here. A number of things were paid out with that. As I said before there are times the council finds itself in a position, we can’t write a check, because the bank account is to its hilt.”

Jules Vasquez,
Mr. Davis is there not a regulation that stipulates all payments from City Council over $50 have to be made by check, you are talking about cash.

Dwain Davis,
“Yes there is such a stipulation but as I said you, there are times, many times, we cannot write a check and then what do we have, people standing up out here quarrelling for their money because that is going to happen. So we try to pay them off.”

Jules Vasquez,
But sir that is not just a invention, that is the City Council Act that stipulates that payments over $50 must be by check. So at least you’re aware of that part of the law was being systematically ignored.

Dwain Davis,
“Yes I am aware.”

Jules Vasquez,
Would you say if we had $24,000 in that month; $24,000 x 12 is $288,000. Is that a fair annual projection, that it is something like that? And then second, was it in all cases cash transactions?

Dwain Davis,
“Well in all cases cash but saying that for the year is not necessarily true because it is not every month that that will happen.”

Jules Vasquez,
Speaking in specific terms then, was all those under-deposit transactions in cash?

Dwain Davis,
“In cash, that’s the purpose of it.”

So cash – tens of thousands of dollars – were paid out with this under-deposit mechanism. The Mayor says it was to cover these invoices which she laid out for the media.

Dwain Davis,
“I am not sure what report was made to the police but for April which seemed to be the month in question, those under-deposits totalled some $24,790.”

The Mayor says that on last week Tuesday some of these documents were given to him.

Zenaida Moya-Flowers, Mayor of Belize City
“Most of these documents were furnished to him on the same Tuesdays July 7th 2009. The rest were going to be presented to him last Friday July 10th 2009 but he did not show up to him on that particular day.”

Today, the remainder were provided to him.

Zenaida Moya-Flowers,
“Which has apparently led to the perception of financial irregularity. The supporting documents however have since been provided to the Financial Controller to clarify any such alleged irregularities. We had a meeting earlier with him, myself, Councillor Phillip Willoughby, Mr. Dwain Davis, the City Administrator, the internal auditor as well, and we asked pretty much why this was done the way it was done. What he had informed, and I must say I did ask him to please be here, I really begged him to be here just so that I am not the one speaking on his behalf, but notwithstanding that I will do so and I have my witnesses here; Councillor Willoughby is here and so forth. It had to do with the fact that he felt that the documents were not given to him in a timely manner, okay.

We wanted to present it to him with the police as our witness but a particular police that was supposed to come down, because the statement was made in Belmopan, this particular police just called, I think like five minutes to three, and by then I was not going to hold back the press conference for this. We had already discussed what the matter was so we couldn’t with that.

It is something unfortunate. I think that it is something that could have been prevented. I believe it was unnecessary. I think you can say on whose part. As I told you Mr. Davis really had until Wednesday, this coming Wednesday, two days from now, to present those documents. Had he been given that chance to present these documents, I believe that we would not be sitting here in a press conference and I would be in my office or wherever dealing with other very important matters.”

Tillet declined to comment on camera. We did ask him if he was satisfied that the $27,000 in missing money from the deposit had been satisfactorily accounted for and he said he’d have to review the documents. But he did make it very clear to us that the receipts the Mayor showed us are hardly satisfactory to him because from what he indicated to us the under-deposits were not properly documented when they were taken out – so he has nothing to reconcile the Mayor’s invoices against. One council source told us that the under deposit monies were noted in the accounts with a post-it note.

At any rate, right now this is far from over. And we are told Tillett will not at this time withdraw his criminal complaint alleging theft. We’ll keep following it.

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