The first tranche of funding to Montserrat from the United Kingdom government was delayed this financial year because the 2024-2025 Budget was delivered late.
Premier Joseph Farrell made the admission in response to a question from Opposition member Donaldson Romeo in the Montserrat Legislative Assembly on 25 June.
Romeo asked the premier, who is also minister of finance, why the funds were delivered late and whether it caused a delay in the payment of services.
“This was due to the unavoidable late passing of our budget,” Farrell said, “which created issues in the internal processes, both for the Government of Montserrat and the United Kingdom.”
However, in this case, the Public Finance Management Act allows for a third of the previous year’s budget total to be made available to ministries, the premier added.
“The Ministry of Finance ensured that during that provisional budgetary period, adequate funding was available to all, at all times, to meet all necessary payments,” Farrell said.
Not made public
Romeo then asked why the premier had not made a public announcement about the delay in funding.
“I’m asking why didn’t you explain to the public that there was a problem because there seems to be many people complaining about a delay in payments,” he said.
In response, the premier asked why the Opposition member had not called the ministry for further information before bringing the issue to parliament.
“From the Ministry of Finance’s standpoint, there was no late payments. If the ministry departments were paying late, it has nothing to do Ministry of Finance,” Farrell said.
Opposition leader Paul Lewis first raised the issue on ZJB Radio on 5 June, when he said the first tranche of funding from the United Kingdom had still not arrived.
An arrangement for short term financing of recurrent programmes and obligations that would normally cover this period appears to not have taken place this year, he said.
The opposition leader at the time called on the minister of finance for answers and said his silence on the matter was “unacceptable”.
