Minister of Home Affairs Oscar Mira has been through a withering three weeks. Ever since he made that cyberbullying complaint against Alberto August, he's been mocked by memes, pilloried in Facebook posts and battered by revelations of family businesses getting public contracts. Tonight, he's speaking up.
The press got 10 minutes with Mira today at a police event and we asked him about the contract his family members got to supply the BDF while he was Minister of State for Defence:
Oscar Mira, Minister of Home Affairs
"I don't know if there if ongoing public criticism. let me just make clear that I sit on no procurement committee. As a minister of state and as a minister, I have never been on any one of those procurement committees, those are led by the Ministry of Finance, I have no say, I have no influence and I have never in my ministry or any other ministry tried to influence the decision of that committee. They have a job to do and they have done their job professionally."
Reporter:
"How is it that several of your family members are able to and were able to benefit from lucrative contracts?"
Oscar Mira, Minister of Home Affairs
"Tenders are published in the newspaper. Any interested person can apply and pay for that tender. They then go through a lengthy process. I had no say, I was not part of those committees. If they did so then they did on their own, not with my influence or with anything to do with me. Anybody who reads the newspaper and wants to be a supplier to the ministry can go ahead and do that. It is a long process, it's a process that I have no say, it is a process that happens in every ministry of the government and as such I was not a member of that committee or that process."
Reporter:
"How is it in your view not a conflict of interest?"
Oscar Mira, Minister of Home Affairs
"I do not ask nor did I ask any one who applied, there are many people who have applied, that is just one company that applied, I was not a part of it, I don't even know how many people applied. It is not me who makes decisions. It is a committee who sits together and makes the decision of who gets contracts. Those are done, as I said before, by buying a tender package and going through the requisite, whatever it is that you need to, to supply. And I had nothing to do with that."
