“Manufacture Here or Get Out”: Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

/0 Comments/in , /by

“Manufacture Here or Get Out”:Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

The 592 Guardian | Editorial  Analysis

President Irfaan Ali stood before an audience at the commissioning of two HAL 228 small regional aircrafts on Saturday and issued what he apparently believes is a commanding ultimatum to international manufacturers: invest in Guyana or lose access to its market.

 The declaration was delivered with the theatrical confidence of a head of state presiding over a diversified industrial economy. Guyana is not that economy. Not even close

The questions write themselves. Where is the power?

Before a single foreign manufacturer can be expected to anchor a factory on Guyanese soil, it must answer a foundational question: how will it run? Guyana Power and Light remains one of the most unreliable utilities in the hemisphere — a chronic embarrassment that predates this administration but has deepened under it.

The Gas-to-Energy project, sold as the transformative fix, remains behind schedule, over budget, and structurally dependent on a pipeline whose completion timeline has shifted so many times it no longer commands serious credibility. Residential consumers still endure load-shedding. Industrial users run generators as a matter of operational necessity, not contingency.

What ISO-certified food manufacturer — the sector Ali specifically invoked with the Banks DIH/Dominican Republic partnership — will commit capital to a plant that cannot guarantee three-shift electrical continuity? The president offered no answer because the question was never invited.

 What exactly are “the most aggressive fiscal incentives in the Caribbean”?

Ali’s claim that Guyana now offers the region’s most competitive manufacturing incentives is asserted, not demonstrated.

Which fiscal package? Published where? Independently audited by whom?

 The Investment Act, the various sector-specific concession frameworks, the discretionary waivers administered through Go-Invest — these exist on paper with variable enforcement and well-documented opacity in how they are applied. Companies that have navigated Guyana’s investment environment know that the headline incentive and the operational reality are frequently different documents.

The Dominican Republic, which Ali cites as his model partner, runs the Western Hemisphere’s most mature free zone architecture — decades of institutional build-out, transparent administration, and a track record that has attracted genuine multinational manufacturing commitments. Guyana has incentive language. That is not the same thing.

 Corruption and the cost of doing business

Any serious manufacturer conducting due diligence on a Guyana investment will consult Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the U.S. State Department’s Investment Climate Statement, and the lived experience of companies that have operated here.

What they will find is a procurement environment marked by opacity, a regulatory enforcement apparatus that is selectively deployed, and a pattern — documented across this publication’s coverage — in which contracts flow through relationships rather than competition.

The EKAA HRIM labor exploitation thread. The Wales Gas-to-Energy MOAP ghost-payroll pattern. The GGMC’s nine-year audit currency gap. The Guyana Lottery Company’s procurement opacity. These are not peripheral anomalies; they are systemic signals. A foreign manufacturer considering a multi-million dollar capital commitment reads them as country risk, not editorial grievance.

Ali’s ultimatum presupposes that Guyana is a prize worth competing for on his terms.

 For a manufacturer weighing political risk, regulatory unpredictability, infrastructure unreliability, and anti-money-laundering exposure, the calculus is considerably less flattering than the president imagines.

 The Trump parallel — and where it breaks down entirely

The rhetorical structure is indeed familiar: if you want our market, you build here. Trump deployed it against some of the world’s largest export economies, backed by the leverage of a $27 trillion consumer market, the world’s reserve currency, and two centuries of industrial infrastructure.

His ultimatums landed — unevenly and with significant economic self-damage — but they landed because the underlying market power was real.

 Guyana’s GDP, even at its oil-boom trajectory, does not purchase that leverage. The domestic consumer market is approximately 800,000 people. Regional manufacturers exporting to Guyana are not trembling at the prospect of losing access to a market that, in aggregate, represents a rounding error on their revenue statements.

Ali’s ultimatum carries the rhetorical architecture of economic nationalism without the economic mass to enforce it.

 What Trump had — and what makes the copycat framing accurate — is the instinct to perform strength as a substitute for structural analysis. The performance may satisfy a domestic audience. It does not rewrite the investment calculus of a Trinidadian food manufacturer or a Dominican agro-processor.

 The Banks DIH Partnership: A Showcase or a Warning?

The president’s flagship example deserves closer scrutiny. Banks DIH — a well-managed local conglomerate with real institutional capacity — is partnering with Dominican Republic firms for an agro-processing hub. That is a legitimate private sector development worth monitoring. But note what the president is actually describing: a local company doing the anchoring, with foreign firms as partners, under direct presidential pressure.

That is not a replicable foreign direct investment model. That is a showcase arrangement built on a relationship, announced at a political event, offered as proof of a policy thesis it does not actually validate.

 If the administration has a pipeline of similar arrangements — companies that have committed capital, applied for permits, broken ground — the public record should reflect it. Publish the Go-Invest data. Publish the manufacturing investment approvals for the past three years alongside their current operational status. Let the numbers carry the argument the president cannot carry with rhetoric.

 The questions Ali was never asked on Saturday:

  1. What is the current average industrial electricity tariff and guaranteed uptime SLA for manufacturing investors?
  2. How many manufacturing investment approvals issued in the last three years are now operational versus stalled or abandoned?
  3. What is the publicly available, independently audited account of how fiscal concessions are allocated and to whom?
  4. How does Guyana’s AML/CFT compliance rating affect the due diligence calculus of foreign manufacturers considering capital deployment here?
  5. What enforcement mechanism backs this ultimatum — and what legal authority governs it?

The president issued a demand. The infrastructure, the institutions, and the transparency record necessary to back that demand do not yet exist at the scale his rhetoric assumes.

That gap is not a policy footnote. It is the story.

 The 592 Guardian holds power accountable across Guyana’s governance, extractive industry, and civil rights landscape.

HELD TO RANSOM

/0 Comments/in , /by

Held to Ransom: How Political Failure Handed Guyana’s Energy Security to Private Power

When Leadership Fails: How Guyana Lost Control of Its Energy Sector

Guyana now finds itself in the untenable position of being effectively held hostage by two corporate entities, forced to choose between paying millions more each day or subjecting the nation to blackouts. This is not an accident. It is not a misfortune. It is the direct and foreseeable result of political decisions made at the highest levels of government.

Responsibility for this crisis rests squarely with the current administration and, in particular, with those entrusted with oversight of the energy sector and the execution of the Gas-to-Energy project. The President, who has taken personal ownership of this initiative, and the Minister responsible for energy and public utilities cannot now retreat into silence while the consequences unfold.

The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was presented to the nation as a transformational undertaking—one that would deliver reliable, affordable power and reduce dependence on costly stopgap measures. Instead, it has been plagued by delays, escalating costs, and a troubling lack of transparency. Years after its promised timelines, the project remains incomplete, with no credible, fixed delivery date.

This failure is not merely technical. It is managerial and political.

Critical national infrastructure was placed under the supervision of individuals whose primary qualification appears to have been political proximity rather than proven expertise in energy planning, project execution, or contract management. Competence was subordinated to loyalty. Oversight was weakened. And predictable risks were ignored.

The result is what Guyana is now experiencing: a government negotiating under duress, stripped of leverage, and exposed to demands it cannot reasonably refuse. When a country cannot allow a supplier to walk away without triggering a national crisis, it has already surrendered its bargaining power.

Karpowership’s demand for increased payments is therefore not the root problem—it is the symptom. The real issue is that the Government of Guyana created the conditions under which such a demand could be made with confidence.

The financial implications are severe. Millions of US dollars in additional annual costs for a single power vessel. Billions of Guyana dollars diverted from the treasury. And all of this occurring in a country now earning unprecedented revenues from its oil sector.

This is not development. It is waste.

It is also, unmistakably, a misuse of public funds. Taxpayer resources are being deployed not to expand capacity or improve efficiency, but to compensate for delays, miscalculations, and poor governance. Citizens are effectively paying a premium for the government’s failure to deliver on its own promises.

Equally concerning is the continued lack of transparency. Key officials, including the President and the responsible minister, have offered no clear public accounting of the situation. No detailed explanation of the contractual breakdown. No roadmap for resolution. In any functioning democracy, such silence in the face of a national vulnerability would be unacceptable.

This is not simply about one contract or one project. It is about a pattern of governance in which political control overrides institutional strength, and where accountability is treated as optional rather than essential.

Guyana’s growing oil wealth was meant to insulate the nation from precisely this kind of vulnerability. Instead, it has coincided with a governance approach that has weakened planning, diluted expertise, and concentrated decision-making without adequate scrutiny.

The country is now paying the price.

If there is to be any meaningful course correction, it must begin with acknowledgment. Not deflection, not silence, but clear acceptance of responsibility at the highest levels. It must be followed by transparency, professionalization of key sectors, and a firm commitment to ensuring that national projects are managed by those with the competence to deliver.

Anything less will guarantee that this episode is not the last of its kind.

Guyana cannot afford to be a nation rich in resources but poor in governance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 ,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN|ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

JUNE 2026 —BY: GHK LALL

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

The Guyana Development Bank (GDB) has generated much excitement.  Not yet fully airborne, but still stirring considerable interest.  Guyanese sit, wait, smile.  They are ready.  One set anticipates what’s in it for them.  To get them off the bottom. 

Other Guyanese (guess who?) have their plans ready on how to milk this bank till it geh sickly and paglee.  For those who need clarity, rest easy.  Coming up shortly.

 The key players have already been handpicked.  Ready to rumble.  The PPP had a handful of names to choose from to move the GDB up the ladder, along the way.  There’s the way, truth, and life of Jesus.  Not the PPP way, regrettably.         

The PPP Govt has its own way.   Radically different.  In substance, results.  To condition Guyanese hopefuls, I conclude that senior positions-GDB chair, deputy chair, and CEO are as good as filled.  Done deals.  Before that GDB bill becomes law.  What’s there to debate?  There’s a seven-seat majority.  Who cares what the other sides, any Guyanese, think?  Including those who think less of the PPP’s standards of staffing?  Overseers and officers, for example.  Seven seats provide that electricity-sparking confidence [and disdain].

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps

Known thieves are prized by the PPP Govt.  The logic is majestic.  Whoever teef caan taak.  The best are party loyalists who prosper when matters are upside down, shrouded in secrecy. 

Try this example.  The PPP loves overseers, commissioners, bank watchmen, senior bank officers who see a dog, hear a dog, know it’s a dog, but sell it as a duck or a donkey.

  Whoever heard a dog that sounds or looks like one of those creatures?  Best of all, are those who know how to keep their mouths shut, whatever the crimes committed.  It’s better when they’re part of the white-collar crimewave waiting inside that new bank.  With such trusted personnel seated, secrets stay secret.  Trouble is contained.  What happened in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.  Substitute GDB for local color.

With $40 billion around, there’s plenty for PPP boys and girls to play around with, have fun.  There’s a guarantee, two to be accurate.  Freedom House has their back.  And Office of the President has its own magistracy and rubberstamp ready

Nah maan! Nat dese peeple.  Dem is good PPP people.  Look how much ting deh duh fuh de paaty.  Can’t abandon them.  Cannot, will not, throw them under the bus.  Not with all those sharks waiting to rip them to pieces.  It’s basic democracy: taking care of one’s own is taking care of business.  They are due first bites at the fruits of victory and policy.  So, what if they mess up, make their hands fast?  Stuff happens.  Nobody is perfect.

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps.

 The government is quick thinking: help to fix the loan documents.  Fix is preferred.  For other people: wrong color, wrong hairstyle, and wrong relationships, the GDB is just as warm and hospitable.  Welcome, sir, madam.  Take a number.  Have a seat.  Just a little wait.  The staff is out to lunch, in a meeting, gone golfing, or off to Congress.  Free seats.  Free updates.  Few could be so classless or tasteless to want more.  Wait until they hear ‘this loan application is receiving the highest consideration.  The bull just began.  No money, no love.  No $3 million loan.  Those kinds of Guyanese are on their own.  Stage is set.  Law ready. 

The games begin.  The chair’s in place.  I think that the whole kit and kaboodle (PPP kin)-chiefs and cooks are like corruption Oreos. 

Devilishly pious on the outside, wickedly devious inside.  A bank with a shank.

THE CURRENCY OF A COUNTRY’S SOUL

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Currency of a Country’s Soul

The Story of a Currency and Its  People

When Guyana gained its independence in 1966, it did so with a currency and a dream. The one-dollar bill was never just paper. It was a modest symbol of a people stepping out of colonial shadows and into the bright, uncertain language of self-rule. It bore, silently but surely, the hopes of a generation that believed independence would mean more than a flag and an anthem — that it would mean bread on the table, dignity in work, and a future measured not by survival, but by progress.

Sixty years later, that same bill feels like a relic from another moral universe.

The story of the Guyana dollar is the story of a nation learning, painfully, that sovereignty alone does not guarantee strength. At independence, the exchange rate stood at about G$1.71 to US$1. Today it hovers around G$209 to US$1. What began as a respectable national symbol has been worn down by decades of inflation, mismanagement, policy drift, and economic vulnerability. But to speak only of exchange rates is to tell only half the story.

A currency falls because a country’s foundations have been weakened; and when money loses value, the people who live by wages, savings, and fixed incomes are the first to feel the wound.

This is where the history becomes less technical and more tragic.

For ordinary Guyanese, devaluation was never an abstract chart in an office. It was the rising price of rice, flour, medicine, fuel, rent. It was a salary that arrived on time but bought less than it did last month. It was the slow humiliation of watching effort lose its reward. Over time, the money in the pocket stopped reflecting the dignity of the labor behind it. The national promise narrowed. The horizon shrank. Families adapted not by thriving, but by enduring.

And that endurance, though admirable, should not be mistaken for justice.

A people can be made hardy by hardship, but they should not be forced to mistake hardship for destiny. Much of Guyana’s decline in value was not inevitable. It was shaped by leadership choices — by the absence of foresight, the failure of discipline, the habit of postponing difficult reforms, and the too-familiar tendency to place political survival above national stewardship.

When leadership is selfless, it builds institutions that protect the citizen from economic ruin. When leadership is timid, extractive, or vain, it leaves the citizen to absorb the cost of failure in silence.

 

So, the decline of the Guyana dollar is also the decline of a social contract.

That may be the hardest truth of all. Because when a currency is devalued over decades, it is not only the state that loses credibility. The people begin to lose confidence too — in systems, in promises, in the idea that tomorrow might be better than today.

The national mood darkens. Social status erodes. Hope grows cautious. Aspiration becomes expensive. And a country once birthed in optimism begins to resemble, in unsettling ways, the very vulnerability from which it sought escape.

Today, Guyana stands in a strange contradiction: a country with extraordinary resource wealth, yet one still haunted by the habits and inequalities of its past. Oil has changed the macroeconomic story, but it has not automatically healed the social one. The danger now is that the nation mistakes rising headline wealth for genuine national renewal, while inequality, mistrust, and uneven development continue beneath the surface. Without accountable and selfless leadership, even prosperity can become another chapter in the same old story.

Yet there is still meaning in the old one-dollar bill. Indeed, there is warning in it.

It reminds us that nations are not measured only by what they produce, but by how they protect the worth of their people’s labor. It reminds us that economic decline always becomes social decline when the burden is left to fall on the poor, the ordinary, and the unprotected. And it reminds us that independence is not a completed act, but a continuing obligation — one that demands honesty, courage, and sacrifice from those entrusted with power.

The old bill, then, is not merely a collector’s item. It is a witness. It stands as a paper archive of promise, loss, and the unfinished work of nationhood. It asks a difficult question of the present: what is a country worth if its money dwindles, its people struggle, and its leaders mistake motion for progress?

The old one-dollar bill therefore speaks with unusual force. It tells us that currencies do not collapse in isolation, and societies do not decay by accident. When the national economy is mishandled, the people pay first, longest, and hardest. And when a country loses sight of the public good, even its symbols — its money, its institutions, its promise — begin to look like relics of a future it never fully realized.

A nation can be born in hope and still age in neglect. Guyana’s one-dollar bill tells us that plainly.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

 THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL 

On Wednesday, Beijing’s State Council Information Office released a new white paper on global governance, the latest articulation of Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative—a framework built on the language of extensive consultation, joint contribution, shared benefits, and a “community with a shared future for humanity.” The document claims the backing of nearly 160 countries and more than 60 in a formal “Group of Friends.”

It positions China as a defender of UN-centered multilateralism against a turbulent, unequal world order. 

Guyana is not named in the white paper. It does not need to be. Guyana is where the doctrine gets tested against contract law, customs waivers, and a riverbed. 

 A live laboratory, not a footnote 

Guyana was the first English-speaking Caribbean nation to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in 1972. Half a century later it is China’s largest trading partner in the Caribbean. Chinese investment into Guyana in 2024 alone totaled US$10.6 billion; bilateral trade has quadrupled since 2019. When Foreign Minister Hugh Todd travelled to Beijing last year and met his counterpart Wang Yi, the language on both sides was the same language now repeated in the white paper — shared future, mutual respect, multilateralism, support for the UN Charter. Guyana’s government has, on the record, endorsed China’s global governance vocabulary almost word for word. 

The question this editorial puts plainly: does the conduct of Chinese state-linked capital inside Guyana’s borders bear any resemblance to the principles Beijing has just spent a five-part white paper describing? 

The contractors writing their own terms 

Start with China Harbor Engineering Company. CHEC’s contract for work on Guyanese infrastructure — reported by the Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network — secured full payment of the contract price while being released from paying taxes, duties, royalties, and fees ordinarily owed to central or local government. The same contract reportedly stipulated that sixty percent of non-technical labor be Chinese nationals,with specialized positions reserved exclusively for Chinese citizens.

This is not a contractor adapting to local content law. This is a contractor writing around it — in a country whose own Local Content Act requires Guyanese nationals to fill the overwhelming majority of positions in comparable sectors. 

Then there is China Railway Construction Corporation, the joint-venture partner awarded the US$260 million contract to build the new Demerara River crossing. CRCC was expelled by the World Bank in 2019 — alongside its subsidiaries and 730 controlled affiliates — for submitting manipulated information in the award of a highway contract in the country of Georgia.

Guyana awarded it the largest transport infrastructure contract in the country’s history regardless.

Construction began without a completed environmental and social impact assessment. Guyanese environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly has warned that the absence of basic design information makes it impossible to assess the bridge’s effect on a river already carrying heavy sedimentation.

None of this required Beijing’s intervention. Georgetown signed it. 

CNOOC holds a twenty-five percent stake in the ExxonMobil-led Stabroek consortium, with $5.25 billion of its own capital committed — making the government’s repeated insistence that ExxonMobil’s audit disputes are a bilateral matter between Guyana and one American operator increasingly difficult to sustain. Bai Shan Lin’s logging record, Bosai Minerals’ manganese operations in Region Ten, and the slow transformation of Lethem into a Chinese-financed trading and transit hub round out a picture of saturation across timber, mining, hospitality, energy, and now cross-border logistics toward Brazil. 

The quarry fight nobody wanted to have on the record 

In May, truckers protesting a loss of income over sand and stone access forced Vice President Jagdeo onto the record. He insisted that none of the sixteen active quarries was Chinese-owned, that Chinese firms were merely contracted to operate them, and that none of the major housing programs on the East Coast used Chinese contractors. The public record does not support the ownership denial. Golden Rock Investment and Construction Co. — described in its own promotional materials and in NCN Guyana’s coverage as a Chinese company, with Managing Director Mike Wu unveiling the project at Guyana’s Building Expo — owns the quarry at Lanabali, Essequibo Islands-West Demerara, advertised as the country’s largest with a projected capacity of two to five million tons a year. And the Arisaru Mountain quarry in Region Ten, the actual site at the centre of the original trucker protests, has been identified in Kaieteur News’s reporting on Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill’s own response to those protests as a Chinese-owned quarry — the same report in which Edghill was defending the duty-free status of equipment operating inside it.

A Vice President cannot credibly deny Chinese ownership of the quarry sector while his own Minister of Public Works is on record managing the fallout from a quarry that reporting consistently identifies as Chinese-owned.

Jagdeo’s more honest line came earlier in the same remarks, where he volunteered the actual justification for why Chinese firms keep winning these awards: in his words, the Chinese may be able to do it faster and, in some cases, cheaper. That is a coherent economic argument.

It is not the argument in the white paper. The white paper sells partnership and shared benefit

 The Vice President, under pressure from his own truckers, sold speed and price — while denying an ownership pattern his own ministry had already been forced to manage in public.

 Self-certification, again 

This publication has spent the past several months documenting how Guyana’s extractive governance — gold, carbon credits, the EITI framework itself — collapses under the weight of self-certification without independent external verification. The same structural flaw governs the China file.

There is no independent registry of Chinese state-linked contracts in Guyana, no published evaluation criteria for the fourteen bidders who competed for the Demerara Bridge award, no public accounting of which contracts carry tax and royalty waivers, and no legislative mechanism requiring parliamentary ratification of contracts above a defined threshold. What exists instead is a closed loop: Beijing’s white paper affirms its own good conduct, and Georgetown’s diplomatic statements affirm Beijing’s affirmation. Nobody outside that loop is asked to verify anything. 

 What accountability requires 

A government that has publicly embraced the vocabulary of mutual respect and shared benefit owes the public the documents that would let citizens judge whether that vocabulary describes reality. The National Assembly should require disclosure of the full CHEC and CRCC contract terms, including labor quotas and fiscal waivers, currently known to the public only through investigative reporting rather than government publication. The Local Content Secretariat should be asked, on the record, whether the sixty percent non-technical labor provision attributed to CHEC was ever reviewed against the Local Content Act, and if not, why not. The Environmental Protection Agency should explain how a $260 million bridge across a sediment-heavy river proceeded without a completed impact assessment, and whether that omission would have been tolerated from any contractor not carrying the weight of a head-of-state relationship behind it.

And given CRCC’s documented blacklisting by the World Bank, the Public Procurement Commission owes the country a public explanation of how that history factored, or failed to factor, into the award. 

 None of this requires hostility toward China, toward Chinese workers, or toward the genuine economic opportunity that Chinese capital has brought to a country starved of infrastructure financing for decades. It requires the same thing this outlet has demanded of every other concentration of unaccountable power in Guyana: documents, named officials, and answers that don’t arrive pre-laundered through the language of friendship.

Guyana Development Bank: Can be great, Can be grotesque

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ JUNE 2026

Guyana Development Bank: Can be great, Can be grotesque

The PPP Govt-initiated $40 billion Guyana Development Bank (Bank) can be great.  Ordinary Guyanese, poor but harboring inspired ideas, lack capital, but an opportunity beckons.  Opportunity to rise from where they are to what they envision could be, should be.  Again, compliments to the PPP Govt for this brainchild.  What has high potential for individual, family, and community prosperity?                         Let it never be said that I didn’t extol the government.

Much has been written about the Bank.  Its innate goodness, noble charter, inspiring character.  Gnawing concerns persist.  Still, no tainting to this offering by dealing in who defends for a dollar.  Or the rancidly partisan who behold only the worst.  I see potential for the worst malfeasances in this Bank.  I detect that it can be a lifeline to Guyanese who need the monetary boost.  Above bottom-house, beyond street corners, out of the economic lowlands so prone to floods of woes that there’s weeping.  Only weeping.

I stated my thinking, position.  Another is presented.  Three precedents offered.  Should suffice.                                         There is a Natural Resource Fund Act/Law.  I point not to loopholes.  I point to its demand for “transparency and accountability.”  Who argues with laws with such clauses embedded?  Plus, withdrawals used for “national development priorities.”  Music.  Easy listening.  Guyanese listened, heard.  From a Guyana Government official, that rarest of rarities: Guyana Scholar.  He disclosed how the billions (U.S.) withdrawn from the NRF were spent in three words: “national development priorities.”  Three words “transparency and accountability”, as enshrined in the NRF Law, begat three more: “national development priorities”, also incorporated in that same law.  No more.  Not a fourth word. 

If this is what Guyanese get for spending clarity from a Guyana Scholar, what prospects from Guyana’s handpicked political dunces? 

Not one dollar, not one million, not one billion, could be shared, relative to spending specifics.  Commingling conquering accountability.  The words of a law of Guyana taken and hurled into the face of citizens, by one of its reputed best.  It’s the raw reality of Guyana’s “accountability” for its largest savings account, pursuant to law.  What fate awaits the Guyana Development Bank?

Next, there’s a law birthed 14 years ago that empowers Guyanese to access unclassified, nonconfidential, non-national security information.

  The law rusts, rots.  Guyanese seeking access have been mostly dismissed.  Light slap.  Other petitioners got dismissed, then degraded.  The law is there.  The mechanism is there.  Where is the access to information sought, as the law provides?  From that second precedent, I move to the $40 billion Guyana Development Bank.  Would obscurity to protect be among the primary workings of this multibillion-dollar Bank?  Protect who and for what? 

Ignored today are favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism.  May those never dawn.

 Only the Bank’s honest duty, transparency, and accountability.  What road ahead for this Bank that could be a flagship of incorruptibility?  The identification of its controllers (likely already selected) should inform accordingly.

Last, there is the crime of statutory rape.  When underage children are abused, that’s statutory rape.  Official reports state that 584 statutory rapes were committed in the last five years (2020-25).  The law mandates the charge of statutory rape.  Children cannot consent.  Which rapists were charged?  How many of the 584 statutory rapists were even approached by the Guyana Police, other government institutions?  Dr. Vindya Persaud (Minister) and Dr. Clifton Hicken (Police Commissioner) are respectfully invited to help: how many charged?  Only the number.  Easy for a government grown fond of its own statistics.

For the PPP Govt, for PPP leaders, there are some questions.  Why are lawbreakers (statutory rapists) elevated to parliament as lawmakers?  Why are they not charged?  There’s One Guyana optics.  And a large constituency to be kept happy.  But, by God, at the price of parliamentary obscenity?  Even when children are assaulted, and one ending it all.  It calls for an extraordinarily obscene breed of political leaders to condone first, then reward.

Thus, three examples: Oil Fund billions, access to information, and statutory rapes, as contexts.  There are governing laws for each, like the Bank.  How different will the Guyana Development Bank be?  The people’s patrimony and prosperity, their peace of mind, jeopardized.  The lifeblood of democracy (information) blocked, poisoned, then extinguished.  Protection of Guyana’s young bartered for filthy political mileage.  Laws exist for all three areas. 

Yet there are these inarguable, destructive conditions in Guyana’s environment.  Now comes this $40 billion Guyana Development Bank.  It can be a boon for the poor and hopeful. 

Maybe a bonanza for the schemers, defrauders, that makeup over 90% of PPP governance, PPP stewardship, PPP morality and integrity.

 

Soon, Guyanese shall see.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Silent in Accra: Where Was Guyana When the Caribbean Made Its Case?

/0 Comments/in , /by

592GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Silent in Accra: Where Was Guyana When the Caribbean Made Its Case?

CARICOM unveiled an updated reparations manifesto this week before the world. Georgetown, host to the regional movement’s own headquarters, appears nowhere in the record of who showed up to defend it.

THE 592 GUARDIAN  |  EDITORIAL  |   JUNE 2026

Mia Mottley spent Thursday June 18th in Accra doing what Caribbean heads of government have increasingly had to do alone: making the moral and legal case for reparatory justice on a continental stage, with an updated manifesto in hand and a regional mandate behind her. The document she distributed at the Next Steps High-Level Consultative Conference sharpens CARICOM’s decade-old ten-point plan, adding explicit language on the gendered toll of the transatlantic trade — compensation for sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, recognition that roughly 30 percent of trafficked Africans were female — and a new commitment to repair for the genocide of Indigenous peoples who were already in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived.

It links climate justice to historical extraction. It demands money, not merely apology, from the European governments, monarchies, churches, corporations and families that profited.

 It is, by any measure, a significant moment for a movement Caribbean governments have pursued formally since 2013. President John Mahama of Ghana opened the gathering and announced three new international panels — on advisory strategy, cultural restitution and legal mechanism — to carry the agenda forward under a UN resolution, adopted in March, that for the first time in the General Assembly’s eighty-year history names the trafficking of enslaved Africans as humanity’s gravest crime. The published delegate lists from Accra carry the names one would expect: Mahama; Liberia’s Joseph Boakai; Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye; Namibia’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah; Mottley, speaking on CARICOM’s behalf; Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission; Wole Soyinka; Julius Garvey.

Nowhere in that record is President Irfaan Ali. Nowhere is Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo. Nowhere is a Guyanese foreign minister, a named special envoy, or any official delegation representing the Cooperative Republic at the most consequential reparations gathering that has ever been staged in a decade.

That silence is not a footnote. The CARICOM Reparations Commission’s own institutional home is Georgetown — its headquarters listed at a Camp Street address, its administrative apparatus built on Guyanese soil. Guyana was among the first CARICOM states to stand up a National Reparations Committee, in 2013, chaired for over a decade by Eric Phillips. And Ali himself has not been a stranger to reparations rhetoric on the international stage: at the African Prosperity Dialogue in Ghana in January 2024, he told African business and political leaders bluntly that the debate over whether reparations were owed was settled, that what remained was mechanism, and that the Caribbean could not afford to wait another century for payment to follow apology.

That was a head of state claiming a seat at the front of this fight. Eighteen months later, with the fight’s most significant diplomatic milestone unfolding in the same city, the seat appears empty.

 The Office of the President and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs owe the public a direct answer, not a press release engineered around the omission. Did Guyana send any delegation to Accra this week, at any level?

Did the government formally endorse, co-sign, or even receive advance text of Mottley’s updated manifesto on the Caribbean’s behalf — given that Ali chaired CARICOM as recently as 2024 and has personally staked rhetorical claim to this issue? Was Georgetown’s own National Reparations Committee consulted on the manifesto’s new provisions before they were distributed in Ghana, or did a regional document bearing Guyana’s institutional fingerprints get drafted and unveiled without the body that hosts the regional commission ever being in the room?

There is a second, harder question the manifesto itself forces into view, and it is one this media-outlet believes Guyanese commentary has been too polite to ask directly.

The document’s new Indigenous-genocide provision demands repair for the people who were in the Caribbean before European arrival — a category that, in Guyana, sits in plain historical tension with the documented role of some Indigenous nations in helping Dutch and British colonial authorities hunt down Maroons and suppress the 1763 Berbice rebellion. Guyana already has its own domestic instrument addressing Indigenous rights, the Amerindian Act of 2006.

If the government is prepared to stand on an international platform and demand reparatory justice for Indigenous genocide from European capitals, it should be prepared to say, on the same record, what reparatory justice means for Indigenous and African descendants inside Guyana’s own borders — and whether the National Reparations Committee’s long-standing complaint, that it has received less support from its own government than from the wider region, has been resolved or simply outlasted by silence.

None of this diminishes what Mottley accomplished in Accra, or the weight of a UN resolution that took eighty years to arrive. It is precisely because the moment matters that Guyana’s absence from its record demands scrutiny rather than indifference. A government that postures forcefully on reparations in Ghana in 2024, hosts the regional commission’s headquarters in Georgetown, and then cannot be found in any dispatch from the movement’s defining 2026 gathering has a credibility gap to close.

This publication is now asking  the Office of the President and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the record of Guyana’s participation, if any, in the Accra conference. We will publish their answer, or their refusal to give one, in full.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, politics and extractive industry.

Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  EDITORIAL♦June 20, 2026

Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

Three days of silence ended not with an answer but with a policy memo. CJIAC’s press release confirms a prosthetic should never have been removed — and never once confirms, denies, or investigates whether Zaid Khan’s was.

The Cheddi Jagan International Airport Corporation has finally spoken, three days after Zaid Khan’s account of being ordered to remove his clothing and his prosthetic leg in a side room began circulating widely. What it produced is not a response to Khan. It is a recitation of the National Civil Aviation Security Program, dressed up as one.

Nowhere in CJIAC’s statement does the name Zaid Khan appear. Nowhere does the date June 17 appear. Nowhere is there an acknowledgment that a specific, named traveler made a specific, detailed allegation against specific members of staff.

 

The corporation answered a question nobody asked — what is the policy — while leaving untouched the question the entire country is asking: what happened to this man, and was it followed.

Read closely, the release is more revealing than its authors likely intended. It states that passengers facing a secondary screening alert must be offered a choice between a private screening room or a secondary screening machine, and it states without qualification that removal of a prosthetic device is never mandatory.

If that is CJIAC’s own standard, then Khan’s account — an officer in a side room instructing him to remove both his pants and his prosthetic — describes conduct that fell outside policy on its face. CJIAC has, in effect, confirmed the violation while declining to confirm that it occurred.

That is not clarification. It is a corporation citing the rulebook to avoid discussing the foul.

 Just as telling is what the statement asks of the public going forward: passengers with complaints should bring them to the Customer Relations Unit, through a phone line, a WhatsApp number, or an email address. This is the posture of a corporation that has not yet treated Khan’s account as a complaint requiring a response, despite it being public, specific, dated, and amplified for days.

A traveler does not need to refile a grievance the entire country has already read in order for an airport corporation to pull its own security footage from June 17 and look at it.

That CJIAC apparently has not done so — or has done so and declined to say what it found — is itself the story.

 The minister with responsibility for civil aviation followed the same script three days on: a statement that walked through existing protocol without engaging the specifics of what Khan says was done to him. Reciting the rules a second time, through a different office, does not multiply into an answer.

It only confirms that the instinct across this administration, when a disabled traveler alleges mistreatment by name, is to point at the manual rather than open the file.

None of this addresses the pattern Khan’s post has already surfaced — other travelers, including Muslim women, describing screening that singled out their attire. CJIAC’s release does not mention that pattern at all, which means it has not yet decided whether June 17 was an isolated lapse or a symptom. The public cannot tell the difference from a press release that never engages the incident in question.

This outfit does not require CJIAC to assume guilt before any review is complete. We require it to do what it told the public it would do: investigate where procedure has been breached, and say so. That means four things, plainly stated, not implied through boilerplate:

•Confirm or deny what occurred in that side room on June 17

•Disclose whether the officers involved have been identified and what, if anything, follows for them

•Commit to a public timeline for that review rather than an open-ended invitation to file a complaint 

•Address whether Khan’s account fits a broader pattern at the airport’s screening checkpoints.

 A press release that defines the rules without confirming whether they were broken is not transparency. It is choreography, and the traveling public — along with every investor this country is courting on the strength of its openness — deserves better than a non-answer dressed in institutional language.

We will keep asking until CJIAC, and the ministry standing behind it, answer the question actually in front of them.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Uranium Black Box: Three Jurisdictions, One Undisclosed Seller, and a Strategic Mineral Guyana Still Has No Policy For

/0 Comments/in /by
THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNABILITY♦INTEGRITY♦TRUTH               
June 2026

The Uranium Black Box: Three Jurisdictions, One Undisclosed Seller, and a Strategic Mineral Guyana Still Has No Policy. 

The 592 Guardian — Investigative

The Transaction the Press Release Didn’t Explain 

On June 1, 2026, U92 Energy Corp., a Toronto-listed junior explorer with a market capitalization of roughly C$13 million, announced that it had entered into a binding Asset Purchase Agreement to acquire “the complete historical technical and exploration dataset” relating to its Kurupung Uranium Project in Region Seven. The consideration: common shares with a deemed value of C$500,000, priced at the greater of C$0.40 per share or the fifteen-day volume-weighted average trading price.

What the release did not say — and what no subsequent wire pickup, investor-news rewrite, or Guyanese press follow-up appears to have asked — is who is selling the dataset?

 U92 already controls the Kurupung licenses. It acquired that control in 2025 by purchasing LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-incorporated company that indirectly holds the Guyanese exploration rights through a local subsidiary, LIA (Guyana) Inc. If U92 already owns the company that holds the licenses, the dataset transaction implies a separate party — someone other than LIA Industries — has been sitting on the geological, geochemical and geophysical records underpinning a 20.6-million-pound historical uranium resource estimate, and is only now being compensated for it.

Every public document reviewed for this piece is silent on that party’s identity. 

This is not a footnote. The dataset is the entire technical foundation of the project: drill records from over 129,000 meters of historical drilling, assay certificates, metallurgical test work, airborne and ground geophysical surveys, and the core data behind two NI 43-101 technical reports. Whoever held that archive controlled, until June 2026, the single most valuable asset in Guyana’s only uranium project — more valuable, arguably, than the prospecting licences themselves, since licences without the underlying data are an invitation to redrill from zero.

Ruling Out the Obvious Candidates

The natural assumption is that this dataset traces back to COGEMA, the French state uranium operator that ran Guyana’s first systematic uranium reconnaissance from 1979 to 1984. The National Development Strategy 1996 is unambiguous on this point:

COGEMA’s program — airborne spectrometric surveys across Kurupung, Morabisi, Aurora and Iwokrama, followed by ground geophysics, geological mapping, trenching, auger drilling, and diamond drilling with downhole radioactivity logging — found no deposits of economic value.

 That program predates the discovery of the Aricheng structures by a quarter-century and produced a negative result. It cannot be the dataset behind a 20.6-million-pound resource estimate, because COGEMA never defined a resource. If any COGEMA-era data survives in Guyanese archives at all, it would be background reconnaissance material, not the basis for U92’s current numbers. 

The second candidate — raised by sources close to this investigation — is the Iranian technical mission housed at GGMC headquarters around 2005, connected to the 2009– 2010 announcement that Iran would provide a US$1.5 million grant to help Guyana “map mineral resources,” with then-President Bharrat Jagdeo stating that Iranian scientists would identify uranium deposits using updated technology.

This deserves scrutiny precisely because it has never been adequately explained, but the public record does not support it as the source of U92’s dataset either

 Then–Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon was explicit at the time that Iran’s offer was non-specific and not targeted at any particular mineral, uranium included. No technical report, drill log, or NI 43-101 filing anywhere in the Kurupung project’s documented history is attributed to an Iranian survey team.

And confusingly, contemporaneous Kaieteur News coverage from 2012 appears to conflate this Iranian initiative with “Prometheus” — but the only Prometheus operating in Guyana’s uranium sector was Prometheus Resources (Guyana) Inc., the wholly Canadian-owned subsidiary of U3O8 Corp, whose survey aircraft went missing over the Mazaruni in November 2008. That is not an Iranian company.

If the Guyanese press itself could not keep these two entirely separate ventures straight in real time, that confusion is itself a story about the quality of institutional and media oversight this sector has received — but it does not establish an Iranian provenance for the current dataset.

 The Actual Paper Trail 

The real chain of custody is documented, traceable, and entirely Canadian. U3O8 Corp, through Prometheus Resources (Guyana) Inc., began systematic exploration in the Roraima Basin around 2006–2007, obtained reconnaissance permits over roughly 1.3 million hectares, and by 2009 had filed the first NI 43-101 technical report — “A Technical Review of the Aricheng North and Aricheng South Uranium Deposits” — prepared by Alexander & Breede. A second report, covering Aricheng C and Aricheng West, followed in 2012 from Workman & Breede, both working under Watts, Griffis and McOuat Limited (WGM), the same Toronto consulting firm now under contract to U92 to reinterpret the historical drilling. By 2012, U3O8 Corp had defined the four-deposit, 20.6-million-pound historical estimate that every subsequent owner has cited verbatim — including U92 today. 

This is the dataset. It was generated by Canadian capital, Canadian consultants, and Canadian regulatory filings, drilled into Guyanese ground under reconnaissance and prospecting permits issued by GGMC.

The question the press should have asked in June is simple: between U3O8 Corp’s wind-down — the company sold its Argentina asset in 2021 and by then traded as a dormant shell on the TSX Venture Exchange — and U92’s 2025 acquisition of LIA Industries, who held legal and physical custody of the WGM era technical archive, and on what terms did it pass to whoever U92 just paid C$500,000 in shares?

Did it pass through Arafura Oeste Pte. Ltd. (LIA Industries’ name before December 2022)? Was it ever formally transferred to LIA Guyana when GGMC granted that company its Exclusive Prospecting Licenses in April 2024?

Or did a private holder — possibly connected to U3O8 Corp’s original principals — retain the archive separately from the license chain entirely, monetizing it only now that a buyer with share liquidity exists? Each of these scenarios has different implications for whether Guyana’s regulators ever had visibility into who actually possessed the country’s only uranium dataset, and for how long it sat outside any licensed entity’s hands.

Why the Shares-for-Data Structure Is the Tell

The 592 Guardian’s instinct on the financing structure is the correct one, and it deserves to be stated more sharply than “efficient structuring.”

 A company with a C$13 million market cap, conserving cash for an active 5,000-metre drill program, paying for its own foundational dataset in stock rather than cash, is not unusual capital markets behaviour for a TSX Venture issuer — but it is precisely the kind of transaction that is least scrutinized by regulators and most convenient for parties on either side who would rather not have the valuation tested against a cash market.

A cash sale invites questions about price discovery. A share-for-asset swap, settled at a deemed price with no independent fairness opinion disclosed publicly, lets both U92 and the unnamed vendor avoid that conversation entirely.

Guyana’s institutions — GGMC, the Ministry of Natural Resources — have no visible role in vetting this kind of internal corporate transaction, because Guyanese law treats it as a private matter between a TSXV-listed company and its counterparty, even though the underlying asset is data generated on Guyanese soil under Guyanese-issued licences about a strategic, nuclear-linked mineral.

The Governance Vacuum Beneath All of This

Guyana has never had a uranium-specific regulatory framework.  The 1996 National Development Strategy treats radioactive minerals as a sub-category of “other metals and minerals” — a single subsection, dwarfed by the chapter’s treatment of gold and bauxite. The Environmental Protection Agency’s only documented institutional interest in radioactive material concerns medical waste disposal, not exploration, extraction, or export of uranium ore.

There is no public evidence of a Guyanese nuclear material handling protocol, no export control regime referencing IAEA safeguards standards, and no parliamentary or Cabinet-level uranium policy statement on record.

Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat has confirmed that U92 is the only company in Guyana with a uranium project and that there are no current plans for additional ones — a statement that forecloses urgency on the government’s part precisely at the moment a foreign junior is consolidating both the licences and the underlying data archive for that sole project. 

This matters because the two prospecting licenses — GS14: L-1003/000/23 and GS14: L-1003/001/23 — expire April 18, 2027, with extensions available only to April 2029. A company under that clock has every commercial incentive to drill fast, file an updated resource estimate by year-end, and move toward extraction decisions before Guyana has built any of the institutional architecture — uranium-specific licensing conditions, safeguards-aligned export controls, beneficial-ownership disclosure requirements for strategic minerals — that would let the state negotiate from a position of technical parity rather than catching up after the fact.

What Should Be Asked, On the Record 

This is not a call for alarm about Guyana hosting uranium exploration — Australia, Canada, Namibia and Kazakhstan all host it under regimes ranging from strict federal oversight to heavy state participation.

It is a call for Guyana to have a regime, of either kind, before a third corporate restructuring in five years moves both the licenses and the foundational data further from public visibility.

The following questions are owed answers by GGMC and the Ministry of Natural Resources, not by U92’s investor relations desk: 
Who was the counterparty in the June 2026 Asset Purchase Agreement, and what was their prior legal relationship — if any — to U3O8 Corp, Prometheus Resources (Guyana) Inc., or LIA Industries? 
Did GGMC or any Guyanese regulator review or approve the custody arrangement for the WGM-era technical archive at any point between U3O8 Corp’s dormancy and U92’s 2025–2026 acquisitions? 
What due diligence, if any, did GGMC perform on LIA Industries’ Singaporeincorporation and its prior identity as Arafura Oeste Pte. Ltd. before granting Exclusive Prospecting Licences in April 2024? 
Does Cabinet consider a strategic, nuclear-linked mineral resource — one explicitly referenced as fuel for nuclear reactors in U92’s own disclosures — to fall under the same generic mining-act licensing track as gold or bauxite, or does it intend to develop a uranium-specific governance framework before the 2027 licence expiry forces extraction decisions under time pressure? 
Has any Guyanese institution independently verified the 20.6-million-pound historical resource estimate, given that NI 43-101 rules themselves caution that historical estimates “should not be relied upon” until a qualified person has done sufficient work to reclassify them? 

 Guyana is not sleepwalking into a uranium sector so much as it is standing still while the sector reorganises itself, twice over, in jurisdictions it cannot see into.

The dataset has changed hands. The licences have changed hands. The question of who controls the knowledge base underwriting Guyana’s only uranium project — and on whose authority that knowledge base has moved — remains, as of this writing, unanswered by anyone with the standing to answer it. 

The 592 Guardian will continue this investigation and welcomes documentation from current or former personnel connected to GGMC’s mineral data archives, Prometheus Resources (Guyana) Inc., or LIA Industries.

EXPORTING ECOCIDE

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦INVESTIGATIVE REPORT♦ JUNE 2026

EXPORTING ECOCIDE

How Brazil’s Gold-Laundering Fraud Is Crossing Into the Guiana Shield — A Comparative Assessment of Guyana’s Exposure                                                                    Prepared for the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In June 2026, Greenpeace Brazil published Gold Laundering in the Amazon: Anatomy of a Fraud, a forensic account of how Brazil’s Garimpo Permit regime has been converted into a laundering instrument for gold stolen from Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units. Of 187 mining tenements the organization examined across Pará, Mato Grosso, and Rondônia, 98 showed irregularities consistent with fraud, together accounting for 25.3 tons of gold worth an estimated R$18.4 billion. The pattern Greenpeace documented was not a single bad actor but a structural feature of the permitting system itself: permits granted without independent geological verification, production volumes accepted on the word of the permit holder, and buyers shielded for a decade by a legal presumption of good faith that Brazil’s Supreme Court only struck down in 2025.

This assessment argues that the same structural conditions are already present in Guyana, and that Guyana is not a hypothetical extension of Brazil’s problem but a documented destination for it. The Guiana Shield is a single contiguous goldfield split across several jurisdictions with wildly uneven enforcement; when Brazil tightens its grip on illegal mining, capital, equipment, and personnel move to whichever neighboring jurisdiction offers the path of least resistance.

The clearest current illustration is the Marudi mining district in Region Nine, where a Special Mining Permit issued to a cooperative that no longer legally exists continues to generate gold sales, and where a Brazilian national recently sentenced to over twenty-two years for organizing illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory has been photographed with senior Guyanese officials.

This is a desk-based comparative assessment, built on public reporting, court records cited in the Brazilian and Guyanese press, regional research, and the Greenpeace report itself. It does not attempt the satellite-and-productivity audit Greenpeace conducted in Brazil, because that capability does not currently exist inside Guyanese civil society, and because the underlying GGMC and Guyana Gold Board declaration records such an audit would need are not realistically obtainable through Guyana’s domestic information-access channels — a constraint TIGI’s own experience with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process illustrates directly.

That gap is the basis for this brief’s central recommendation: that TIGI formally invite Greenpeace’s gold-forensics team to extend its methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, beginning with Marudi.                   

THE BRAZILIAN TEMPLATE: ANATOMY OF A FRAUD

Brazil’s Garimpo Permit, or Permissão de Lavra Garimpeira (PLG), was created in 1989 to bring small-scale, cooperative mining into a simplified legal regime. Over time, and especially after prior mineral-survey requirements were waived to speed the regularization of existing operations, the PLG became something else: a documentary shell. Because permit holders themselves declare how much gold a site is capable of producing, with no independent geological check, a PLG can certify almost any volume of gold as legitimately mined, regardless of what is actually happening on the ground.

Aircraft destroyed by Brazilians Inspectors

Greenpeace Brazil sorted the 98 irregular permits it found into two categories. Ghost garimpo mines, just under a third of the irregular permits but nearly half the declared tonnage, showed no mining activity whatsoever on satellite imagery or flyover — meaning the permit existed purely to supply a paper trail for gold mined somewhere else entirely, including inside Indigenous Lands.

Industrial-scale garimpo operations, the larger category by count, involved multiple permits held by the same cooperative or by linked titleholders, combined into operations far beyond the legal size limit for small-scale mining, with no visible boundary between tenements on the ground.

The buying side of this system was protected for a decade by a 2013 law presuming the legality and good faith of brokers who bought gold from PLG holders, provided the seller supplied basic paperwork. Brazil’s Supreme Court declared that presumption unconstitutional in March 2025, after finding it had functioned as a shield for exactly the laundering pattern Greenpeace later documented. Federal audit bodies reached similar conclusions: a 2025 audit found the national mining agency was not exercising its legal authority to require geological surveys, and a 2022 audit had already found the agency failed to enforce even basic documentation standards. Greenpeace’s recommendation to Brazilian regulators was correspondingly narrow and specific — require the surveys the law already allows for, and cancel permits that have generated royalty payments with no corresponding evidence of mining.   

ONE GOLDFIELD, SEVERAL JURISDICTIONS: THE LEAKAGE PROBLEM

“The Guiana Shield does not respect the borders drawn across it. The same greenstone geology that produces gold in Pará and Roraima continues, structurally uninterrupted, through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, and the population of small-scale miners working it has moved across those borders for over a century, following wherever enforcement is weakest and prices are highest.”

This is not speculation; it is measured. A 2025 study using deep-learning analysis of satellite imagery across Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana found a 995 percent increase in the number of active mine sites and a 1,411 percent increase in total mined area between 1995 and 2024 — figures that track closely with the 1,100 percent expansion of garimpo area Greenpeace documented across the Brazilian Amazon over a similar period.

Peer-reviewed research on the region’s deforestation patterns has identified the underlying mechanism directly: tighter enforcement in one Guiana Shield jurisdiction correlates with reduced mining-driven deforestation there, and a corresponding rise next door. French Guiana’s repression campaign after 2008 is the clearest documented case; Suriname and Guyana absorbed much of what it displaced.

Brazil has just run a larger version of the same experiment. Military and federal police operations against illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory pushed garimpeiro capital and labor into Venezuela and Guyana, a migration regional security researchers already describe as established fact rather than future risk. Guyana has hosted large populations of Brazilian miners before, with one historical estimate placing an enclave in the tens of thousands at the turn of the millennium during an earlier crackdown cycle in Venezuela.

“What is different this time is the scale of Guyana’s own gold sector, the volume of capital now attached to it, and the fact that the people arriving are not only artisanal miners displaced by enforcement but, in at least one documented case, the organizers of large-scale criminal operations themselves.”

 CASE STUDY: THE PERMIT THAT OUTLIVED ITS HOLDER

Mazoa Hill, in the Marudi mining district of Region Nine, is the clearest illustration available of how Brazil’s fraud pattern would look transplanted into Guyana’s permitting architecture.

Rodrigo de Mello with Min. Bharrat

In 2021, an agreement gave the Rupununi Miners Association Cooperative Society a Special Mining Permit covering a 400-hectare section inside a larger concession held by the Canadian company Golden Shield Resources, through its subsidiary Aurous Guyana. In May 2023, Guyana’s Ministry of Labour cancelled the RMA Cooperative’s registration following an inquiry under the Co-operative Societies ActAccording to reporting in March 2026, mining at Mazoa Hill has continued since, under a permit issued to a legal entity that, on paper, no longer exists. The Rupununi Miners Association disputes that this represents any irregularity, maintaining that operations continue under proper authorisation despite what it describes as administrative restructuring.

This is functionally the same defect Greenpeace identified in its ghost garimpo mine category: a licensing instrument detached from the legal or physical reality it is supposed to certify.

The difference is that Brazil’s ghost permits were typically disconnected from mining activity on the ground; Guyana’s case at Mazoa Hill is disconnected from the legal existence of the permit holder itself — arguably a starker version of the same regulatory failure.

Bruna Mello- sister of Rodrigo making payments to GGMC

The dispute over what is actually leaving the site has become public and unresolved. Opposition parliamentarians who visited Region Nine in early 2026 alleged that gold worth millions of US dollars is leaving Marudi daily; the GGMC’s Commissioner has publicly rejected claims of large-scale smuggling as lacking technical credibility, while the Rupununi Miners Association has called allegations of foreign control and illegal airstrips unsubstantiated.

Access to the site itself is restricted to those who comply with entry requirements set by the miners’ association, which means the dispute cannot currently be resolved by anyone simply going to look.

None of this is happening in a vacuum for the people who live there. Wapichan communities raised concerns about the original Marudi mining deal as early as 2021 and 2022, when a UN Special Rapporteur communication to Golden Shield Resources noted that affected Indigenous communities appeared to have been consulted only after the mining agreement had already been signed — a sequence inconsistent with international free, prior and informed consent standards.

Brazilian fugitive ,PPP benefactor ?

Subsequent testing identified Parabara village, the community closest to Marudi Mountain, as carrying the highest mercury contamination levels recorded among Indigenous communities studied in the region — a Guyanese parallel to the Fiocruz findings Greenpeace cites from the Munduruku Indigenous Land in Brazil, where the great majority of pregnant women tested carried mercury above safe thresholds.                                                                                     

THE CATARATAS VECTOR: WHEN THE RECORD CROSSES THE BORDER TOO

What makes Marudi more than a regulatory curiosity is the presence there, as recently as March 2026, of Rodrigo Martins de Mello, a Brazilian national known as Rodrigo Cataratas. A Brazilian federal court sentenced him in February 2026 to more than twenty-two years in prison for leading a criminal organisation that mined illegally inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory — the same protected territory Greenpeace’s Brazil report uses repeatedly to illustrate the human and environmental cost of garimpo expansion. Court documents cited in Guyanese press coverage describe a logistics network of at least twenty-three aircraft used to move miners, fuel, supplies, and extracted minerals into and out of Indigenous land.

de Mello with Minister Anand Persaud  while a fugitive in Brazil

Images circulating in early 2026 showed Cataratas alongside senior Guyanese government officials. The South Rupununi District Council, convening a meeting with the GGMC and the Rupununi Miners Association on 14 March, was told by miners present that Cataratas had been operating in the Marudi area and was assured he was no longer there. No independent confirmation of his departure has been offered. Toshaos at that meeting raised explicit concern about the prospect of Brazil’s criminal mining networks establishing themselves in the South Rupununi — language that suggests local Indigenous leadership already understands what this assessment is arguing in writing: that the same operators, not merely the same methods, can move between jurisdictions faster than oversight bodies can track them.                 

THE VERIFICATION GAP: WHY GUYANA CANNOT ANSWER ITS OWN QUESTION

Guyana’s gold-buying architecture differs from Brazil’s on paper. Where Brazil relied on numerous private broker-dealers shielded by a statutory presumption of good faith.

Guyana centralizes purchase through a single statutory buyer: under the Guyana Gold Board Act, no one may sell or buy gold from anyone other than the Board or its licensed agents. In principle, a monopsony buyer should be easier to audit than a fragmented private market.

In practice, the underlying vulnerability is the same one Greenpeace identified in Brazil. Declared origin and declared volume are accepted at the point of sale without independent geological verification against the size and history of the claim or permit involved. This is not a new concern for Guyana’s gold sector: a Ministry of Finance-linked audit document has previously recorded an episode in which gold believed to have originated in Guyana surfaced in Curaçao accompanied by electronic documentation from Guyanese sources, with the audit noting that recommended follow-up investigation did not appear to have been pursued by the responsible agencies.                         

The mechanism Greenpeace calls the second presumption of good faith, in other words, has a Guyanese precedent.

What Guyana currently lacks is the tool Greenpeace built to resolve exactly this kind of dispute: a productivity benchmark, expressed as gold declared per hectare of permitted area, cross-checked against satellite imagery and flyover validation, capable of distinguishing a permit that is producing the gold it declares from one that is laundering gold mined elsewhere. Applied to the live dispute over Marudi’s output, that methodology would not need access to contested domestic paperwork at all; it works from publicly available satellite data and the declared boundaries of the permit itself — precisely why it is the right tool for a jurisdiction where the underlying GGMC and GGB declaration records are not realistically obtainable through domestic information-access channels.   

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS: GYEITI’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Brazil’s federal audit bodies found that the agency responsible for granting and policing PLGs was not exercising the oversight authority the law already gave it. Guyana’s parallel institution for extractive-sector transparency, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process, has its own documented capture problem. In November 2025, TIGI publicly disputed the government’s appointment of a Civil Society Convenor for Guyana’s EITI process on the grounds that the appointee himself held seventeen mining licenses across roughly nineteen thousand five hundred acres in the Cuyuni Mining District, an arrangement TIGI characterized as incompatible with the independent civil-society oversight role the position is meant to perform.

Ecocide in real-time

The detail matters because it answers, in advance, an obvious objection to this assessment’s central recommendation  

Guyana cannot simply ask its own oversight architecture to investigate itself. By TIGI’s own public account, the body specifically designed to give civil society an independent check on extractive-sector data is, at present, occupied by an extractive-sector concession holder

WHY THIS NEEDS GREENPEACE

Greenpeace Brazil did not produce an opinion about gold laundering in the Amazon; it produced a method.  Royalty declarations benchmarked against permit area, cross-checked with satellite mosaics and validation flyovers, turned a contested political argument about smuggling into a falsifiable, hectare-by-hectare claim about what a piece of land could plausibly have produced. That method does not depend on subpoena power, or access to a mine site, or on cooperation from the agency being investigated. It depends on satellite coverage and public permit boundaries, both of which already exist for Guyana.

TIGI brings what Greenpeace’s Brazil team cannot supply on its own: domestic legitimacy, an anti-corruption mandate dating back to 2010 as Transparency International’s accredited national chapter, and existing relationships with the Indigenous representative bodies whose communities are living with the consequences at Marudi. Greenpeace brings the remote-sensing and forensic-accounting capacity that no Guyanese civil society organization currently has in-house, built and tested on a directly comparable case just across the border.

Neither organization can close Guyana’s verification gap alone. Together, they could turn Marudi from a dispute between an opposition party and a government commissioner into an independently documented fact.

  RECOMMENDATIONS

1.The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission should require verified production estimates or prior geological survey before granting or renewing Special Mining Permits and small-scale claims, rather than accepting self-declared productive potential — mirroring the authority Greenpeace recommended Brazil’s National Mining Agency actually use.
2.An independent body, ideally the Office of the Auditor General working with external technical support, should review permits and Special Mining Permits generating Guyana Gold Board declarations with no verifiable corresponding production, beginning with the Mazoa Hill SMP tied to a dissolved cooperative.
3.GYEITI’s Civil Society Convenor role should carry an enforceable conflict-of-interest bar against active concession holders, restoring the independent verification function the position was created to provide
4.TIGI should formally invite Greenpeace’s Brazil-based gold-forensics team to extend its satellite-and-productivity methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, starting with Marudi/Mazoa Hill, in partnership with the South Rupununi District Council and the Amerindian Peoples Association.
5.Guyana should pursue an independent, geochemically or satellite-grounded traceability mechanism for its gold sector, since self-certification by permit holders and a single statutory buyer of last resort cannot, on their own, substitute for ground-truthed verification.

Note on sourcing: this assessment is a desk-based comparative analysis drawing on public reporting, court records as cited in the press, NGO and academic studies, and the Greenpeace Brazil report. Claims still disputed by named parties — including the scale of gold leaving Marudi and the current whereabouts of Rodrigo Martins de Mello — are presented as disputed, not as established fact, and are flagged as such in the text and footnotes above.

End.