A Pattern, Not Two Incidents: How MARAD and the GPF Are Both Exercising Authority Neither Was Given

A Pattern, Not Two Incidents: How MARAD and the GPF Are Both Exercising Authority Neither Was Given

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Two institutions. Two separate justifications. One boat, one man, and — on close reading — a single underlying pattern: agencies of the state substituting their own discretion for the authority the law actually assigns elsewhere.

The license. MARAD’s Friday statement all but ruled out granting Azruddin Mohamed a captain’s license, invoking his US sanctions designation and pending extradition proceedings as evidence of disqualifying “character.” As this newsroom has already established, that argument does not survive contact with the Department’s own governing statute. The Guyana Shipping Act 1998 draws a clean, repeated line between the Minister responsible for shipping — who alone holds the power to make regulations under section 51, including on the examination, certification and discipline of skippers — and MARAD itself, whose delegated powers under section 9 expressly exclude “the power to make orders and regulations.” Cancellation of a seafarer’s certificate is, per the Act’s own table of contents, a matter of “Cancellation, etc., of certificate by Minister” (s.110), following a court recommendation (s.109), with a statutory right of appeal (s.111). MARAD is not the Minister. No regulation made under s.51 naming foreign sanctions or indictment as a disqualifying condition has been cited by the Department, because none appears to exist on the public record. What MARAD announced as compliance was, on the statute’s own architecture, policy; dressed in the language of law it does not have the standing to write.

The vessel. Ten days after two of Mohamed’s vehicles and his boat were taken into custody at Leonora, no resolution is in sight. One vehicle, PAB 4000, is held over an engine-number discrepancy that a senior GRA official — by Mohamed’s account to Kiskadee Watch — described as a likely “simple fix” the tax authority itself was not even aware of until he raised it directly. The boat’s status is murkier still: Mohamed says he has not been told what, if anything, is required of him to secure its release. What he has received, repeatedly, is a commander’s verbal assurance that the matter would be addressed “today, tomorrow.”

Article 142 of the Constitution permits property to be held only under the authority of a written law, carving out a narrow exception for property retained for the purposes of an active investigation. That exception exists to enable legitimate police work — not to function as an unreviewed, self-renewing hold with no defined evidentiary objective and no judicial instrument authorizing its continuation. Ten days of “today, tomorrow” from a single commanding officer, with no charge laid, no stated release conditions, and no indication the matter has been placed before a magistrate, is not an investigation with an endpoint.

The throughline. Look at what MARAD and the GPF have in common in these two episodes, and the pattern stops looking like coincidence. In both cases, a state agency has reached for a discretionary, character-or-circumstance-based justification — “sanctioned character” on one hand, an open-ended “investigation” on the other; in place of a specific, citable legal instrument that would make its action lawful. In both cases, the authority actually needed to take the contested action belongs to a different institution entirely: a Ministerial regulation MARAD cannot write for itself; a judicial order the GPF has not sought.

This is the deeper accountability problem the Mohamed matter exposes, independent of any view on the man himself or the merits of the US case against him. When agencies routinely reach past the powers actually assigned to them; MARAD into Ministerial regulation-making, the GPF into functions the Constitution reserves for judicial review; the result is a governing pattern where discretion substitutes for law whenever the state finds a particular outcome convenient.

Formal questions this newsroom is putting to MARAD, the Guyana Police Force, and the Ministry responsible for shipping:

1. Under what regulation made pursuant to section 51(b) or 51(g) of the Guyana Shipping Act does MARAD assert authority to treat foreign sanctions or indictment status as disqualifying for a boat operator’s license — and has the Minister issued any such regulation, published or otherwise?
2. Under what specific statutory authority are Mohamed’s two vehicles and boat currently held, and has that authority been placed before a magistrate for review at any point during the ten days in custody?
3. What documentation, if any, does the GPF require to release the boat, and why has MARAD’s licensing refusal and the GPF’s continued custody of the same vessel not been reconciled into a single, transparent institutional position?
4. Can either agency produce a comparable case — another applicant, another seizure — handled under the same discretionary standard, to demonstrate this is a consistent rule rather than a standard applied to one man?

Until MARAD identifies the Ministerial instrument it claims to be enforcing, and until the GPF identifies the judicial instrument authorizing continued custody, both agencies are operating in the same territory: exercising power that belongs, by the law’s own design, to someone else.

— The Board