• Engaging Highgate advisory should have been done in an agreement with with original financial advisor Lazard.
• Engage local PR consultants for future engagements.
• Debt cannot be solved by an advisory company.
An Economist says the engaging of Highgate Advisory Limited to provide communication services in the debt management process should have been done in a comprehensive agreement with the original financial advisor Lazard Freres.
In an interview with Money FM, Trevor Hambayi says at the time Lazard was hired, there was need to know who it’s legal and communication consultants would be.
“This arrangement should have been pushed for Lazard to be able to implement and tell us who their communication is going to be and who their legal expert is going to be,” he said.
“We needed this issue two months ago when we started negotiations with the bond holders to ensure that it was effective.”
Mr. Hambayi further added that there is need to engage local consultants who are Public Relations (PR) experts to be part of Highgate so that they create capacity for future engagements.
“Allowing them to be able to benefit in terms of empowering them from the contract amounts that we seem to be paying,” he said.
Mr. Hambayi added that the issue of debt cannot be solved by an advisory company but has to be dealt with by ourselves.
“The key issue is that we need to deal with the issues around corruption, abuse of office, over pricing of infrastructure development and then cut our budget so that it conforms to our domestic revenue,” he said.
Government has hired Highgate Advisory Limited of the United Kingdom (UK) to handle communications over the country’s debt for the next six months.
