Bruce Tucker has “robbed” the people of St. Lucia again. In yet another major Cabinet conspiracy on the scale of the Tuxedo affair, he has been paid $52,595.92 for 99 days leave or a whopping $531.27 a day for each day he claimed he was on leave.
What else will Tucker and his Cabinet of Ministers not do? If it is true that Tucker received an estimated 8 million dollars from the Taiwanese (1 million dollars a year for five years plus a bonus of three million as a reward for establishing diplomatic relations with Taiwan), then why should he put more pressure on the public purse? Is it his intention to squeeze the purse dry before exiting office?
When he moved his office to the Baywalk Mall, he deprived the NIC of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while at the same time imposing a bill of a whopping $1.4 million/year on taxpayers for rental for his new office at the Baywalk Mall.
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| BAYWALK MALL |
When we thought it was the end, Tucker - like Ali Baba - struck again with another Tuxedo-type act of malfeasance.
Many workers in the public service have been forced to proceed on pre-retirement leave to avoid payment in lieu of leave. Invariably, they are told that government can’t afford to make these payments; hence, they are left with no option but pre-retirement leave.
Yet, Minister Bousquet - who seldom spends any time in his office - is being paid a whopping $531.27 a day for 99 working days leave. He is hardly in office because he is either on an airplane (as he himself admitted in the House of Assembly during a budget debate) or he is on the ground campaigning in the Choiseul/Saltibus constituency - especially since Lorne was announced as the SLP candidate.
What drives King and his cabinet to those levels of malfeasance? Why have they not learned from the Tuxedo affair?
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| CORONORY BYPASS SURGERY |
Meanwhile, in the absence of universal health care or similar medical support programmes, constituents who are afflicted by similar life-threatening medical conditions are condemned to death because medical care for those conditions is cost-prohibitive. In fact only last week, a mother from Choiseul had to personally foot a bill of $40,000 (BB$30,000+) for her son who underwent urgent major heart surgery in Barbados. In addition, she also has to foot a bill of $2,000 payable to the St. Jude’s Hospital.
While that poor mother has been left to fend for herself, the District Rep with all his millions simply "reached out" to the national treasury and walked out with over $50,000 "by default" to facilitate the payment of his medical bills. The lady is now left with the burden of desperately trying raising more money to meet the cost of her outstanding bills.
But above all, the entire episode makes a powerful statement about the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Public Service. We know that the PM is "all things to all men"; but we are also puzzled that Spider took such a memo before Cabinet.
He's received $8 million from the Taiwanese in the last 5 years? That's all you know about. What about the countless bribes and extorted payments he's squeezed out of investors in order to facilitate approval of their projects? If you know how much money has passed through this guy's hands it would make your head pop. But don't let it surprise you that for all this, he still struggles financially because of his depraved and degenerate lifestyle, which includes wanton womanizing and siring of children all over the place -- as well the less known fact that the man addicted to very expensive gambling. No sooner does he lay his hands on a big pile of money than he heads to Las Vegas where he quickly blows it in the casinos and other aspects of the fast-past high-rolling life. His need for loads of cash is therefore unending and insatiable.
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