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The chairman of the National Commission for Self Help (NCSH) Edgar Zephyrine has called a meeting of senior managers at the commission as he began an “investigation” into the Abercrombie Fund, which he described as a “mystery fund” at Wednesday’s meeting of Parliament’s Public Accounts Enterprises Committee (PAEC)
On Wednesday, several questions were asked about the fund.
Committee member David Small questioned how an agency so strapped for cash could have made a $20 million investment in the fund at First Citizens in 2014.
Zephyrine described the fund as a “bit of a mystery” and promised to investigate the fund and present the findings to the PAEC.
He told the committee that when he came into office in December 2015 there was $5 million in the Fund.
But committee member Jennifer Baptiste-Primus said the commission had submitted documents which reflected a balance in the fund of $15 million on December 1, 2015.
She said. “I just find it strange the document gives one figure when another figure is placed before the committee.”
Zephyrine said, “We need to do some tracing to see how we got from the $15 million in the report to the $5 million the notion in my head is when the Board assumed office this is what was there.”
On Thursday, senior managers were called to a meeting at the commission’s head office in Port- of- Spain when the Abercrombie Fund was discussed.
Senior officials of the commission, who spoke to the T&T Guardian on condition of anonymity for fear of victimisation, said they found it “laughable” that Zephyrine had told the parliamentary committee that the fund was a “mystery” since a top official of the commission had signed off on withdrawals from the fund.
One senior official said the fund, which stood at $15 million when the Board took office in December 2015, is now “just about $2 million with principal alone, all the interest has been used up.”
Asked what the money was used for, senior officials told the T&T Guardian it was used for “administrative purposes in one instance and money was withdrawn to pay gratuities after an allocation for gratuities was utilised for another purpose.” In addition, some of the money has been used to pay contractors.
The T&T Guardian was also told that the Abercrombie Fund was actually set up at the First Citizens in 2001.
“It represents a principal investment in the sum of $20 million, which was the residual amount of Infrastructural Development Funding received. It was set up as an investment account from IDF funding. They took the balance and put it in this fund to gain interest. It was supposed to be an investment,” according to one official.
This was confirmed by Krishna Ramcoomar who chaired the commission for 13 years until 2009. He said the commission invested in the Abercrombie Fund because it “generated the most interest in all the fixed deposits.”
He said, “It wasn’t much eh we talking a few million dollars, and the interest we got we used that to do internal things like if the office wanted stationary or we having a function and we had no funds to host it, we took from that. It was spent wisely on the commission.”
Ramcoomar said when he was there the fund had “four, five million dollars, or sometimes when we get the early releases we take some and we put it in the fund, so while we waiting to use it we getting interest.
We use what we had to use in grants and we put the remainder in the fund, and that money will generate the interest until we needed it.”
He said when the commission, under his watch got it’s allocations “we took what we needed based on a projection for a few months and the rest instead of leaving it idly in the banks we put it under the Abercrombie Fund which generated the most interest.”