Air Seychelles management team exercises right of reply through National Assembly |01 July 2021
During yesterday’s National Assembly sitting, Speaker Roger Mancienne read a letter he received earlier that day from Michael Berlouis, the outgoing chief financial officer of Air Seychelles, who was exercising his right of reply in relation to a statement made by the ministers, during the debate dated June 22.
As per the letter, the minister had stated that Air Seychelles lost at one point $142 million and which was unaccounted for. Part of the letter reads:
“As members of Air Seychelles’ executive management and the finance team, we are all responsible to ensure the proper management of the company’s financial resources. We have done this to the best of our abilities and experience, and have always been governed by a Board of Directors which included a majority of government-nominated directors, including a representative of the Ministry of Finance at all times. As per the Air Seychelles’ financial statements, the company’s total annual operating expenses from 2016 to 2018 were between $120 to $140 million. It is therefore completely impossible for $142 million to go unaccounted for during the same period, as this would imply that an entire year’s worth of cash was not spent on essential items required to maintain the day to day operations and pay staff.
In terms of internal finance and internal safeguards at Air Seychelles, there is a clear segregation between receipts and payments schemes, loading and authorisation of payments for any outgoing funds, which requires dual signatures at all times. To ensure independent controls, when invoices are raised, the revenue collected by a team is segregated from that of the bank reconciliation. Air Seychelles’ financial records including e-mails are kept electronically, independently of the Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Finance. These records, which cannot be deleted or altered by any staff member, are kept to the best of our knowledge to the satisfaction of the board and external auditors.
Between 2016 and 2018, Air Seychelles were allocated a total of $3.1 million of public funds, $1.5 million was committed in 2016 towards the cost of launching a direct weekly service to Beijing, while $1.6 million was provided in 2018, for the redundancy of 133 staff members. Over the last week we have provided all the supporting documentation related to the expenditure of the above funds to our Board of Directors and the Ministry of Finance has independently confirmed the amounts.
In terms of the benefit to the country and taxpayers, between 2016 and 2018 Air Seychelles paid over $22 million in direct tax and revenue contributions to the government of Seychelles, which included $6.8 million through income tax and Value Added Tax (VAT). Additionally, during this period, Air Seychelles carried 20 percent of the 1 million visitor arrivals to the Seychelles…”
Speaker Mancienne said that he chose not to read some paragraphs from the letter as he thought it not relevant to the Air Seychelles management team’s right of reply.