Tonight, Former Minister of Home Affairs Oscar Mira remains benched from Cabinet - the fallout from hundreds of leaked Smart Stream entries exposing a systematic pattern of under-the-radar payments from the Ministry of Defence to his family's businesses.
While the Mira family is primarily known as vegetable vendors supplying rations to the BDF and Coast Guard. But the manner in which payments were made - 98% of them below $10,000 - shows a deliberate strategy to escape oversight from the Ministry of Finance - or the Contractor General.
Tonight, 7News can confirm that the 1,300 leaked transactions paid out to Jenny Mira, FAST Construction, MP Farms, and Stanley Mira net a combined grand total of $9.5 million. The undisputed top earner was MP Farms, pulling in $5.5 million alone.
Keep in mind, that 9.5-million-dollar price tag only accounts for the 1,300 Smart Stream entries leaked so far; the records indicate there are at least 500 more entries still hidden from public view. Of the known data, 1,249 payments were kept under $10,000, while a mere 28 ever crossed that regulatory line.
The data reveals that these family earnings peaked in 2025 - coinciding exactly with Mira's seven-month stint as the full Minister of Defence. Now, Mira can technically argue that he wasn't the accounting officer on record - that legal responsibility falls on the CEO. But sources tell 7News that the Minister maintained a heavy hand over the Ministry of Defence's procurement pipeline.
Jules Vasquez reports:
"Minister Mira is the decision maker", that's what a senior public officer told one Ministry of Defence supplier who had submitted an estimate to supply one of the armed forces and did not hear back on it.
Usually, the process of open tendering should be transparent and free from influence:
Francis Usher, CEO - Ministry of Defence
"There are several layers. We, in every open tendering process, we have a representative from the Ministry of Finance that sits on our evaluation committee. We have representation from the BDF and the Coast Guard - as the end users. We have an auditor that's on the on the tendering committee. And then, and I do not sit on it, neither does, the minister. When the evaluation is done, it's submitted for us to then just to sign off and send over to the Ministry of Finance for them to review the entire, documentation. So there are there are several layers of oversight that's conducted."
But, the ideal is very far from the real - and there are multiple ways to circumvent that procurement model. Sources tell us that traditional procurement processes were routinely sidestepped during Mira's tenure - an allegation which he denies.
June 17, 2026
Oscar Mira, Minister of Home Affairs
"I sit on no procurement committee. I had no say, I had no influence and I have never in my ministry or any other Ministry tired to influence the position of that committee."
But not everything goes to a committee - we have reviewed dozens of tenders provided to us and did not see any for boots or uniforms.
Typically boots like this cost $400 dollars each and an order like this contains as many as 1,000 units per shipment - that's a 400,000 dollar purchase - the size of acquisition which is required by law to be approved by the Contractor General. But, apparently they didn't get that approval.
These photos were taken in March of 2021 and in October of 2022, responding to a query about the supply of uniform items for 2021/2022 the Contractor General concluded grimly:
"Our records show that this matter was executed without the certification of review by the Office of the Contractor General."
Sources tell us that pattern of acquisition continued until 2025 - which would mean that there were likely hundreds of thousands of dollars in acquisitions that passed under the oversight radar and under the $10,000 threshold. Whether that was legal is a question that needs answering.
For clarity, Mira family businesses did not supply BDF uniforms, and the apparent absence of contracts to supply is most likely linked to others in the Ministry, not Oscar Mira. But there are many "known - unknowns" and we'll keep looking for answers.
