Attorney-General and Acting Prime Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum yesterday said having a culture of honesty  would allow the nation to function a lot better.

He stressed this to TISI members and student leaders of the Sangam SKM College, Nadi.

“We discovered in 2006, the World Bank did an assessment and the report came out in 2007 revealed that one third of the value of Fiji’s GDP which is at the moment about $10 billion is in the black market. In other words we do not account for that so about $3 billion in Fiji is not accounted for,” Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said.

He said: “People don’t pay taxes, people pay cash under the table or someone selling the house in Fiji gets the money paid off shore; these are the kinds of things happening.

“So if all these people were honest we can imagine the amount of taxes we could collect. When we collect more taxes, it means we are able to build more roads, better hospitals – Nadi needs a  much bigger hospital, we need more doctors, we need more schools, health centres.”

He said there were people in Fiji who still didn’t have electricity, piped water and used wells that were almost dry.

“So if we are able to collect more taxes, we are able to take out more services to these people. It is simply a question of doing the right thing.”

The TISI Sangam Fiji, secretary general, Damend Gounder, said the theme of the seminar was an inspiration from what Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said in Parliament some months ago – “Fiji needs to develop a culture of honesty.”

Edited by Jonathan Bryce

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