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What happened to the Community Care funds?
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By David Eade
The former Supreme Leader, Peter Caruana, finds himself back in the dock again. This is not the dock of a court of law, this is the dock of public opinion.
On June 6 I asked in Panorama – Should Caruana be prosecuted? It wasn’t a politically motivated question: it was a legal issue. I asked two questions: should the former Chief Minister Peter Caruana be prosecuted for breaking the 1991 Nature Protection Act? And, why didn’t the Royal Gibraltar Police enforce that law from 1997 until the present GSLP Liberal Government was elected to office last November?
I closed my article thus: “In theory as Peter Caruana appears to have broken the law of Gibraltar as well as possibly influencing others not to enforce the law of Gibraltar then this is a matter that should be heard and ruled on in the courts of Gibraltar. Unless of course there is one law for the hoi polloi and another for former Chief Ministers.”
Well a month has gone by and the answers to these questions are none the clearer but I trust readers know me well enough to realise I am merely biding my time and have not given up on this issue.
No sooner was my article in print than a Panorama reader named Paul sent me this email: “I read today’s Should Caruana be prosecuted? with interest - and thank you, I enjoyed it - because I had previously asked the very same question but about a different matter.
“In the case of Community Care, my understanding is that it was (and is) a charity set up for the benefit of Gibraltar pensioners. I also believe that it had many millions of pounds in the bank when the GSD came into office. What I am not clear about is how Caruana managed to gain access to those funds and then spend them all. It may be that he was a trustee; in which case he has flagrantly breached that trust...”
Now Paul’s email has been gathering whatever electronic letters gather in my in box until this week when the Chief Minister Fabian Picardo raised the issue of Community Care in his budget speech. He called on the former Supreme Leader to give some answers – so whilst he is at it perhaps he can answer Paul’s questions too.
The fact is that in 1996 when the GSD led by Caruana came to power Community Care had adequate funds, it was independent and self sufficient. None of those three apply today. However in his New Year’s Message for 2010, just 14 years on, the former Supreme Leader told his people that Community Care represented “a financial time bomb ticking under our children and grandchildren in the future, for which they cannot have recourse to the UK.” So it had gone from being one of Gibraltar’s crown jewels to being a national liability.
One would hope that a New Year message from a national leader would be filled with hope for the 12 months to come yet Caruana chose to frighten Gibraltarians to death with talk of a ticking time bomb. More alarming still in his Budget speech of 2010 and 2011 he failed to defuse the said bomb. Let us hope it has a lengthy fuse.
The Chief Minister has called on the Leader of the Opposition, the said former Supreme Leader “to make public in his reply to my speech in support of this Bill in Parliament today, the Proposals he said he was going to introduce in 2010 and which he again referred to in 2011 and the reasoning behind them.”
Fair enough!
And whilst he is at it can he answer’s Paul questions too. How between 1996 and 2011 did he manage to run the Community Care scheme into the ground? And, how did he get hold of the money and what happened to it?
11-07-12
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