A Cherry-Picked Contractor

 A Cherry-Picked Contractor

BOARD EDITORIAL

What Paul Koole’s Record Means for the MV Barima Salvage

August, 2026

The Government of Guyana did not simply fail to run an open, competitive process for the recovery of the MV Barima. It went further: while publicly opening a bidding exercise to reassure grieving families that the process would be transparent, it had already privately invited a specific Dutch firm — Koole Onshore and Koole Offshore (KMS) — to submit a salvage proposal.

That much was established by Kaieteur News’s reporting on the no-bid invitation. What Kaieteur has now added, and what The 592 Guardian holds to be the single most damning piece of evidence produced in this entire tragedy, is who that firm is.

Paul Koole founder and owner of KMS

Paul Koole, the founder and owner of KMS and its extensive constellation of related entities, was arrested by Italian police in 2019 and held in custody following an Interpol alert originating from Nigeria, where he faced an embezzlement matter. His lawyer at the time called the arrest incomprehensible. Kaieteur’s research further documents a decade of entanglement — administrative battles with the Dutch state, trademark litigation with BMW, U.S. federal court discovery disputes, and a Dutch Supreme Court ruling that a financing structure tied to the broader Koole corporate family constituted deliberate tax abuse.

This is not a single blemish on an otherwise clean record. It is a pattern, documented across multiple jurisdictions and multiple courts, of a corporate operator whose dealings repeatedly attract the scrutiny of law enforcement, regulators, and rival counsel.

A government that wanted a clean recovery would have run a clean process. Instead it hand-picked, in secret, an operator with a rap sheet that spans three continents.

THE NO-BID INVITATION, RESTATED

Set aside for a moment who KMS is, and look only at how it was engaged. Kaieteur News reported that the Dutch firm was invited to submit a salvage proposal for the MV Barima days before any official publicly opened a competitive bidding process. That sequencing is not incidental. A bidding process opened after the preferred vendor has already been approached is not a bidding process — it is a formality staged for public consumption, run in parallel with a decision that had, in substance, already been made. This newsroom and others focused, understandably, on that procurement irregularity in isolation. It is now clear we were looking at only the first layer of the story.

WHO THE GOVERNMENT CHOSE

KMS is headquartered in the Netherlands and has recently established a base in Suriname specifically to mobilise staff and resources into Guyana. It has previously completed casualty-removal contracts for this government on the Demerara River — meaning the relationship predates the Barima disaster and predates this procurement entirely. That prior relationship is precisely what should trouble the public: it suggests a standing, informal channel between this administration and Koole’s operation, one comfortable enough to bypass competitive process when a new job arises.

The record on Paul Koole personally is not a matter of dispute or rumour. It is documented by a media outlet in his own country, Netherlands-based AT5, which reported his 2019 arrest and detention in Italy under an Interpol alert tied to a Nigerian embezzlement matter. Kaieteur’s research adds the wider corporate picture: the 2023 Fremantle Highway salvage, in which Koole purchased a fire-gutted vehicle carrier for a symbolic €1 and then fought the Dutch Environmental and Transport Inspectorate over whether the wreck was a vessel or hazardous waste, ultimately prevailing only after his own company’s initial legal filing was thrown out of the wrong court; the BMW trademark injunction that followed, which found decisively against Koole’s commercial handling of the salvaged cargo; and the Hoge Raad’s ruling that a financing vehicle connected to the Koole Tanktransport family of companies existed for no purpose other than artificially reducing Dutch tax liability.

None of this makes Koole unique in the high-risk, high-reward world of maritime salvage, an industry that inherently attracts aggressive operators willing to gamble on distressed assets. What it does establish, cumulatively, is that this is an operator with a documented history of skirting regulatory boundaries, litigating aggressively against oversight bodies, and structuring transactions to minimise legal and financial exposure.

That is precisely the profile a government should want nowhere near a vessel that is, right now, both a mass grave and a body of physical evidence in an active Commission of Inquiry.

TIMELINE: THE PATTERN BEHIND THE NAME

WHAT IS AT STAKE IF THIS COMPANY GETS THE MANDATE

The MV Barima is not an ordinary wreck. It is the resting place of victims still unrecovered, and it is the single most important physical exhibit available to the Commission of Inquiry now examining why more than a hundred people died. Whoever raises that vessel controls, in the first instance, what the public and the Commission ever get to see of it — how it is handled, what is documented before it is moved, what condition its structure and cargo are in when it reaches shore, and what account of that process the public receives.

Handing that mandate, through a process already established to have bypassed open competition, to an operator with a documented history of contesting regulatory classification, litigating jurisdiction to his own advantage, and structuring outcomes to his commercial benefit, is not a technical procurement question.

It is a decision about who controls the evidence. A firm that has spent a decade fighting the Dutch state over what counts as hazardous waste, what counts as a vessel, and what counts as a fair price is not a neutral custodian for the physical remains of a disaster that this administration has every political incentive to see resolved quietly and quickly.

Whatever evidence is on that ferry does not surface by accident. It surfaces because the process demands it — or it does not surface at all

THE ADMINISTRATION’S EXPOSURE

This finding does not sit apart from the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented since the disaster: the undisclosed professional link between two Commission of Inquiry appointees; a Safety and Compliance Audit Team stacked with an official who has publicly dismissed those same conflicts as immaterial; a Commission Secretary appointed through a family channel traced to the same small island as the President’s own ancestry; a declaration of consent circulated to grieving families before any genuine consultation process began.

Each of these, on its own, could be argued away as coincidence, poor optics, or bureaucratic convenience. Together, and now joined by a no-bid invitation to a salvage contractor with an Interpol arrest and a Supreme Court tax-abuse finding on his record, they describe something else: an administration that, at every point of discretion available to it since July 18, has chosen the option that keeps control closest to itself and scrutiny furthest away.

We do not assert, because we cannot yet prove, that this administration selected KMS knowing precisely what Koole’s record contained. We do assert, on the documented facts now before the public, that it had every obligation to know, and that a competitive, transparent process — the kind government publicly claimed to be running — would have surfaced this record before any contract was signed, not after a newspaper found it.

The failure to run that process is the failure that matters. Everything Kaieteur has now uncovered about Paul Koole is what a due-diligence process exists to catch. Guyana did not have one. Or it had one only for show.

WHAT THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS

• The Government of Guyana immediately suspend the private invitation extended to Koole Onshore and Koole Offshore (KMS) pending full public disclosure of how and when that invitation was made, and by whom.
• The competitive bidding process, if it is to retain any credibility, be re-run with full public visibility of all applicants, their ownership structures, and their litigation and regulatory history.
• The Commission of Inquiry be given a formal, binding role in approving any salvage contractor, given that the vessel constitutes evidence directly relevant to the Commission’s mandate.
• The Attorney General’s Chambers and the Ministry of Public Works publicly confirm or deny any prior contractual or informal relationship with KMS or Paul Koole predating the MV Barima disaster, including the Demerara River casualty-removal work referenced in Kaieteur’s reporting.
• Any salvage contract entered into for the MV Barima include independently verified, publicly disclosed chain-of-custody protocols governing the recovery, documentation, and preservation of the vessel, its cargo, and any remains, before the vessel is moved or altered in any way.

— The Board