The Superior Court of Accounts of Haiti deplores, in a new report published on Monday, the fraudulent and often illegal management, by the various ministries and administrations, of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid offered by Venezuela between 2008 and 2016. Projects incurred without a needs assessment or even a cost estimate, repeated violations of public procurement standards: on more than 1000 pages, judges spare no institution.
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"The investment projects and contracts related to the PetroCaribe fund were not managed in accordance with the principles of efficiency and economy" , accuses the Court of Auditors. Set up on the initiative of former President Hugo Chavez, this program has enabled several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to benefit from loans from Venezuela as part of a mechanism for the delivery of oil on preferential terms. The six Haitian governments which have followed one another since 2008 have launched projects worth nearly two billion dollars without, most often, worrying about the basic principles of the management of public funds, accuses the audit.
The Haitian Court of Auditors also denounces the lack of cooperation from the institutions which prevented its investigative work. For example, the judges were unable to trace a single contract for the construction of an industrial park and 1,500 houses on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince: which was the most ambitious public urban development project initiated following the earthquake of 2010 stopped in 2014. More than 46 million dollars were however paid to a single company, Constructora ROFI SA, which belongs to the Dominican senator Félix Bautista, sanctioned for corruption by the American Treasury in June 2018.
In their previous report on the PetroCaribe fund, the judges had pinned the current President of the Republic Jovenel Moïse, accused of having been at the heart of a "embezzlement scheme" before taking office. Against the recommendations of the Court of Auditors and despite popular demonstrations organized since 2018, Haitian justice has yet to prosecute the dozens of former ministers and senior leaders involved in the PetroCaribe scandal.