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President Joseph
Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly is shoveling money out of
the national treasury to family and friends through expensive
foreign junkets, aircraft rentals, vehicle acquisitions, and
irregular withdrawals from Haiti’s central bank, according to
Moïse Jean-Charles, a Senator representing Haiti’s North
department.
In a
recent speech he gave at a rally of the Lavalas Family party in
Brooklyn, NY and in an exclusive interview with Haïti Liberté,
Jean-Charles pointed to a host of inflated costs and official
expenses that he says are funneling millions of dollars from
public coffers to the First Family and its close friends.
“In
the past, when a Haitian president traveled abroad, the state
would pay him $5,000 per day for expenses,” Jean-Charles
told Haïti Liberté. “Now, President Martelly has quadrupled
that per diem to $20,000 a day. When his wife travels with him,
she gets $10,000 a day; if his children tag along, they get
$7,500 a day each; and for the other people in his entourage,
they get $4,000 a day.”
Jean-Charles said that the per diem expenses are
even higher
because Martelly “does not travel with 12 people, or with 15
people; he always travels with 30 people.”
It took President
Martelly five months to have a prime minister and a government
approved by the Parliament, during which time he made several
international trips to countries including Spain, the U.S., and
Chile.
At a
Dec. 18 rally to mark the 21st anniversary of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s historic first-round victory in Haiti’s
Dec. 16, 1990 presidential election, Senator Jean-Charles told
some 200 Lavalas Family partisans at St. Jerome church in
Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood that eight days after
Martelly’s May 14 inauguration “he had the governor of the
central bank give him five bulletproof cars, which cost the
Haitian state $2.5 million US.”
Two
weeks later, the central bank governor bought 60 Toyota Prado
SUVs “not for state officials, but for [Martelly’s] children,
for his wife, and for people living with him,” Jean-Charles
told the crowd.
The Senator also
chided the Martelly government for renting two helicopters from
a U.S. company for which Haiti pays $150,000 monthly.
Furthermore, Jean-Charles said, President Martelly has rented a
private jet for his travel which costs $1,700 per hour flown.
“These
are the type of costs being incurred by President Martelly, the
president of the poorest nation on the continent,” the
Senator said at the Dec. 18 rally.
Jean-Charles did not disclose to Haïti Liberté how he
learned the information he alleges, but he did say that his
sources range from documents to dismayed and disgruntled
government ministers.
Several ministers were particularly vexed to receive an invoice
from a company which worked closely with First Lady Sophia
Martelly sprucing up the ministries’ offices with unsolicited
Christmas decorations, Jean-Charles said. “There may be a
conflict of interest for the First Lady to be using this company
which is close to her, and charging up costs which are outside
of her authority,” he added.
Jean-Charles also questioned how the First Lady’s father,
Charles “Bébé” St. Rémy, was able “to go to the Central Bank
and release $30 million US on the grounds that he was going to
buy fertilizer for peasants” in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley,
the senator told the Brooklyn rally. “Where is the
fertilizer?”
Jean-Charles later told Haïti Liberté that he had
recently traveled to towns and rural sections around the
Artibonite and could find no evidence that any peasants there
had received any fertilizer from the funds which St. Rémy
withdrew.
President Martelly’s 18-year-old son, Sandro Martelly,
a musician and soccer enthusiast, was also
able to go to the Central Bank and have released 60 million gourdes (about $1.5 million US) for a “Presidency Cup” soccer
game this past December, the senator charged. “Does he have
the right to do that?” Jean-Charles asked.
“President
[René] Préval left $1.9 billion US” when he stepped down on
May 14, said Senator Jean-Charles. “That money should be in
circulation. But not one gourde remains. Where did that money
go?”
A
National Palace spokesman did not reply to Haiti Liberté’s
request for a response to Jean-Charles' charges.
Senator Moïse Jean-Charles first rose to national prominence as
the leader of the Milot Peasants Movement (MPM) during the
1980s. Later as the mayor of Milot, the northern city which was
home to Henri Christophe’s Sans Souci Palace and the Citadelle,
Jean-Charles became known for his fierce resistance to the coup
d’états of both 1991 and 2004 against Aristide. He later was
elected Senator under the banner of Préval’s party, since
Aristide’s Lavalas Family party was disqualified from electoral
participation.
“Martelly
always said that we were the ‘magouilleurs’ (unprincipled ones),
that we were incompetent,” Jean-Charles told the Brooklyn
rally. “But just look at what he’s given us today. It is a
real cesspool. We have to denounce these things.”
The
senator’s charges come at a time when other troubling matters
are coming to light. Last week, Martelly’s education advisor Dimitri Nau “admitted that none of the money collected
through a tax on international calls and money transfers is
being used towards education in Haiti” as Martelly had
claimed, according to the website Defend Haiti in a Jan. 3
dispatch.
Martelly launched the National Fund for Education (FNE) in May
2011 with the goal of collecting $8.5 million per month by
taxing all international phone calls in and out of Haiti at 5
cents per minute and all international money transfers which the
Haitian diaspora sends back to family members – Haiti’s largest
source of foreign revenue – at $1.50 per transfer.
“Since
the launch of the FNE, the estimated $60 million [US] expected
to be in the government's account for education have not been
found,” according to Defend Haiti. “In a meeting with the
Senate Finance Committee in December, the Governor of the Bank
of the Republic of Haiti [Charles Castel] said that $4.8 million
[US] were all the dollars in the FNE and that no withdrawals had
been made from the fund and that this only accounted for money
collected through the $1.50[US] fee on transfers.”
Castel’s figure of $4.8 million last month was contradicted by
Martelly’s former Education adviser, Gaston George Merisier, who
announced on Sep. 30 that the phone call and transfer tax had
raised some $28 million [US]. The FNE has been conceived of and
administered by Foreign Minister Laurent Lamothe without
parliamentary supervision.
The
Haitian government “has spent an unprecedented amount of
money on a campaign of misinformation,” reported Defend
Haiti. “Radio and television commercials, billboards, and
even the speeches of President Martelly have claimed that nearly
a million children are attending school for free.”
But Nau admitted that over
54% of the 903,000 students the government claims are going to
school for free were already attending Haiti’s free national
school system, and that their $2.50 to $5 annual registration
fee was paid for by the Clinton Foundation, not the FNE.
“The
other 400,000 students are benefitting from an ‘Education for
All’ program launched by the World Bank and other international
banks,” reported Defend Haiti.
Last
October in an interview with Radio Vision 2000, Senator Steven
Benoit said that the taxes being levied on international calls
and money transfers are “illegal.” He said
that only two state institutions were authorized to collect such
a tax: the General Directorate of
Taxes (DGI) and the General Customs Administration (AGD).
Senator Benoit has often joined Senator Moïse Jean-Charles in
accusing the Martelly government of corruption and financial
malfeasance. Last September, Jean-Charles criticized President
Martelly for paying $13,000 a night for his hotel when attending
the UN General Assembly.
“The chief of State could have gone to a less
expensive hotel as the representatives of Cuba and Venezuela
did,” the senator told the Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste |
