Chairman of the board of directors of the Marketing and National Importing Board (MNIB) in Grenada, Henry Joseph, is downplaying reports that the statutory enterprise could be shut down.
In July, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell told a news conference that the operation of the MNIB is a financial burden on the government with senior officials from the Ministry of Finance indicating that consideration is being given to shutting its doors.
“I want to be very clear, that based on my preliminary briefing as it pertains to MNIB we may have to seriously consider ending the life of the MNIB and reconstituting either a new entity or an entity that really was meant to carry out the mandate of the MNIB,” said Mitchell, less than a month after leading his National Democratic Congress (NDC) to power.
“We are here to take decisions sometimes hard decisions, we simply cannot continue kicking the football down the road and expect that you can always come to the Government for bailout after bailout, after bailout with no turnaround in the fortunes of the entity, with no real plan to achieve the things that the MNIB was meant to do,” Mitchell said while disclosing that the MNIB is costing government millions of dollars (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) to continue the operations.
But Henry Joseph said the terms of reference for his tenure do not include a winding up or liquidation of the MNIB that was established in 1945 for the development of agriculture generally, and in particular, for providing an outlet to farmers for vegetables and fresh fruits in order to encourage the production of local food crops.
“Our role is not to wind up the operation, we did not receive such instructions, our terms of reference do not include that,” Joseph said of the new board of directors that had been appointed in August.
In March, the Integrity Commission said it had completed its investigation into allegations of financial impropriety and corruption at the MNIB between 2013 and 2018.
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