$1.06 Trillion and Counting: GO-Invest’s Numbers Tell Us What Came In, Not What Guyana Got Back

 $1.06 Trillion and Counting: GO-Invest’s Numbers Tell Us What Came In, Not What Guyana Got Back

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

A Trillion-Dollar Headline Without a Ledger of Costs

Dr Peter Ramsaroop, Chief Investment Officer of the Guyana Office for Investment, wants Guyanese to read $1.06 trillion in six years of facilitated investment as evidence of ‘broadening and deepening investor confidence.’ Perhaps it is.

But confidence measured how, and returned to whom, are questions the release never answers — because the figures GO-Invest chose to publish are the easy ones. The hard ones, the ones that would let a citizen or a legislator judge whether Guyana came out ahead, are missing entirely.

What we were given is a gross investment figure, split by nationality of capital — 73 per cent foreign, 20 per cent local, the remainder joint venture and diaspora — alongside a bare count of 189 facilitated projects. That is an input ledger. It records what walked in the door. It says nothing about what Guyana received in exchange for opening it, what it cost the Treasury to attract, or how much of it survived to become an operating business.

WHAT THE RELEASE OMITS

Committed is not disbursed. The release does not distinguish between capital committed on paper — an MOU, a signed agreement — and capital actually disbursed into the Guyanese economy. This is the single largest inflation risk in any investment-facilitation figure. A trillion-dollar headline built on ‘facilitated’ rather than ‘delivered’ capital is a pipeline number dressed as an outcome number. GO-Invest owes the public a disbursement rate, not a facilitation count.

Jobs, unquantified. The claim that local investors generated ‘about 49 per cent of the associated employment’ is a ratio with no denominator. Forty-nine per cent of how many jobs, at what wage bands, permanent or construction-phase? A percentage without a base figure is not a jobs metric. It is a talking point.

Concessions, unpriced. Nowhere does GO-Invest disclose the value of tax holidays, duty-free concessions, or fiscal incentives extended to secure these 189 projects. Guyana’s incentive regime — remission on capital goods, corporate tax holidays under sector-specific schemes — carries a real cost to the Treasury. Without that figure set against the $1.06 trillion headline, the public cannot calculate net fiscal benefit.

A trillion dollars in investment secured through a comparable sum in forgone revenue is not a trillion-dollar gain for the state.

Retained value and repatriation, absent. With 73 per cent of recorded investment foreign-sourced, the question of what share of returns is repatriated rather than reinvested is central — and entirely unaddressed. Gross inflow figures mean little if profit flows straight back out. GO-Invest’s release offers no retained-value estimate, leaving Guyanese to guess how much of this capital compounds locally.

Land allocation, unaccounted. State land granted on concessionary lease terms to secure investment is a cost the Treasury does not write a cheque for — which is precisely why it tends to go unreported. The release makes no mention of the acreage, valuation, or lease terms attached to the 189 projects. That omission should not be read as an oversight; it should be demanded as a disclosure.

Sectoral breakdown, absent. Mining, services, tourism, energy, ICT, agriculture and forestry are named, but no capital figure is attached to any of them. Bank of Guyana’s own FDI data — US$10.4 billion in 2024, US$8.43 billion in 2025 — is explicitly described as ‘largely associated with the oil and gas sector.’ Against that admission, GO-Invest’s sectoral list reads less like evidence of diversification and more like a caption.

Independent verification, unnamed. The release does not state whether these figures are audited by the Auditor General, reconciled against Guyana Revenue Authority tax receipts, or cross-checked with Bank of Guyana data — or whether they are simply self-reported by the agency whose performance they measure. An investment-facilitation agency grading its own facilitation is not accountability; it is marketing. The public is entitled to know the source of verification, if one exists.

Attrition, unreported. One hundred and eighty-nine is presented as a pure success count. No figure is offered for projects that stalled, withdrew, or lapsed after the agreement stage. A facilitation agency has every institutional incentive to publish only its survivors. The failure rate is exactly the number such an agency is least likely to volunteer — and exactly the number the public most needs.

A trillion-dollar figure without a cost column is not an account of Guyana’s investment climate. It is an advertisement for it.

THE PATTERN

This release fits a familiar shape in Guyana’s public communications on economic performance: precise, impressive aggregate figures, presented without the denominators, costs, or counterfactuals that would let anyone outside the agency judge whether the state’s side of the bargain — concessions, land, regulatory forbearance, forgone revenue — was worth what it bought. The export figures in the same release — 137 companies assisted into export markets, 112 connected with overseas buyers over four years — are countable and worth crediting. But ‘connected with a buyer’ is not ‘concluded a sale.’ Even GO-Invest’s strongest numbers stop one step short of the outcome they are used to imply.

WHAT WE ARE DEMANDING

The 592 Guardian calls on GO-Invest, the Ministry of Finance, and the Guyana Revenue Authority to jointly publish, project by project or at minimum sector by sector:

1. The value of tax holidays, duty concessions, and other fiscal incentives granted against the $1.06 trillion headline figure, with a resulting net-fiscal-benefit calculation.
2. A verified employment count by sector, distinguishing permanent from temporary positions and local from foreign hires, with the total base figure behind the 49 per cent claim.
3. Capital investment broken down by each of the eight named sectors, not aggregated — so the extent of genuine diversification beyond oil and gas can be independently assessed.
4. The operational status of the 189 projects: how many are producing, exporting, or paying taxes today, versus how many remain signed but undelivered, and the attrition rate among projects that did not survive to operation.
5. The value of state land allocated in connection with these projects, including lease terms and duration.
6. An estimate of repatriated versus retained returns on the 73 per cent foreign-sourced share.
7. Confirmation of the independent body, if any, verifying these figures against Auditor General, GRA, or Bank of Guyana records.

Until those numbers exist in public form, $1.06 trillion is a headline, not an account. Guyanese are entitled to know not merely what came in, but what it cost, what remains, and what was returned.

— The Board