Caption: Boram Hospital Board Chairman Allan Bird.
By MATTHEW VARI
THE stealing of K1.2 million from K2 million in funds given through the Prime Minister for the upgrading of Boram Hospital in the East Sepik Province clearly baffled the hospital Chairman Allan Bird during the week at a conference held in Port Moresby.
Referring to Post Courier’s front page story on the stealing of the parked hospital funds within the East Sepik Provincial Administration through a bogus claim to fix a toilet block - the chairman said that process to steal the funds had broken all records in terms of cheque processing time to disappear in a matter of a day.
“The thing I find incredible is at no point did anyone receive authorization from anybody in a position of authority to expend these funds. Secondly no one from the hospital authorized the use of these funds,” Mr Bird said.
“That decision was taken in secrecy in some secret place within the provincial administration, and I expect that the investigation will be swift and put them away.”
“If we can put Paul Tiensten away for 8 years, I am sure that we can send these people away for the same amount of time because they deserve to rot in jail because this was money they should not have touched.”
He referred to the situation being revealed to the board of the hospital about two weeks ago prior to the visit from the Minister for Health and HIV and AID, Michael Malabag.
“Prior to his arrival we had a board meeting that Friday, and it was during the board meeting that we were informed that this particularK2 million intended for work at the hospital had disappeared.”
“When these funds were allocated to Boram by the PM, there was no board in place so the funds were actually entrusted to the provincial administration never under the care of the hospital itself.”
“That was fine with us, but unknown to us during that period, certain individuals conspired together to remove those funds,” the chairman explained.
He said that while scoping was taking place on what was required to rehabilitate the hospital and its level of deterioration the funds were already being processed in December of 2014.
“While the scoping was going on we discovered that the funds were taken- now we were all shocked because we did not expect that to happen,” he added.
“I cant understand why people could do that because these are the same people who themselves have used the facilities at the hospital through their wives children and even relatives also access the hospital and they saw fit to remove these funds.”
“What has to be made clear is that as far as I am concerned as chairman of the hospital board- we never gave a contract to anyone to fix a toilet for that amount of money.”
He said that their powers allowed the board to only approve payments as high as K500,000 as per the authorization levels under the Public Finance Management Act.
“To date we have only issues contracts through the CEO that were worth less than a K100,000 for maintenance.”
“We have no powers to give a contract to anyone for K1.2 million, as far as we are aware the provincial administration never called a tender through the provincial tenders board to fix these same facilities.”
“There was no scope done, with no call from the hospital to use the funds and the fixing of this particular toilet. If we had done the scoping we would know that this particular toilet does not require K1.2 million to fix it.”
Bird said that they found out when they used part of the funds to buy a new X-ray machine to replace the existing machine in the hospital.
He presented a letter to the acting provincial administrator and documents showing that a total four cheques were drawn with two written to Pins Construction Limited with separate Internal Revenue Commission cheques for both given to the named company.
“We wrote a letter to the Acting Administrator to ask him to explain what happen to these funds- to date we have not received a response from the acting provincial administrator,” Bird pointed out.
“I have personally reported this to the governor of the province Grand Chief Sir Michael Someare who is also upset that this has happened- expressing his anger that people within the provincial administration are able to do this.”
“You can see the level of creativity they had to make sure the payment was made.”
The hospital new board was appointed 18 months ago and for almost two years the hospital didn’t have a board.
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