Free National Movement (FNM) Leader Michael Pintard yesterday called on the Davis administration to follow the law and report on the millions of dollars worth of contracts it has awarded.
"What is stopping the prime minister from publishing the first annual procurement report due October 2022?" Pintard asked in a statement.
"He stated eight months ago that we would get it imminently.
"Are there things in that report he wants to keep hidden? Why doesn't the prime minister want to tell the Bahamian people how he and his team have been spending the Bahamian people's money as required by law?
"When the information is eventually released, the opposition believes that the public will find out that this PLP administration has given millions and millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to its cronies and hangers-on, likely for jobs that should have been be subject to competitive bidding.
"Why else would the excuses persist?"
During the weekly Office of the Prime Minister press briefing last week, Minister of Economic Affairs Michael Halkitis said the infrastructure to comply with the law still needs to be finalized and put in place in order to publish the information.
"In order to really effect it, there was a serious, large infrastructure that had to be put in place at the back end of it," Halkitis said.
"For example, the appointment of a chief procurement officer, the training of procurement committees, in not only the Ministry of Finance but in every single ministry and government agency.
"We're talking about IT (information technology), acquiring the IT and getting people trained up on it.
"And so, that is what we have been doing for the last, you know, 18 months. We are at [a] position right now, where we have just about completed the training, and there are some of the contracts that have to be uploaded. We think we are almost at the position where those are completed, so we can look for that in the coming weeks."
But Pintard said is it incredible that "competent, capable senior public officers in the various government agencies cannot put together a simple spreadsheet with the details of the contracts approved by their departments and then publish that online and in the newspapers".
"These are the same public officers who have posted notices online and in the press almost daily for years," Pintard said.
"We beg Minister Halkitis and the PLP to stop trying to denigrate the professionals in the public service. We know they can follow the law and publish this information relatively easily.
"We remind the government that the boards of public corporations and all of the state-owned enterprises should be posting the details of their contracts over $25,000, and we do not see evidence that any of them are complying with the law."
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