The Owner in the Dock: Who the Barima Committal Actually Implicates

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The Owner in the Dock: Who the Barima Committal Actually Implicates

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026 

On September 9, 2026, Captain Kevin Price, Chief Mate Rondell Roberts, and Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson appeared virtually before Magistrate Ravindra Mohabir at the Charity Magistrate’s Court and were further remanded to prison. Prosecutors confirmed the evidence in the case has now been fully disclosed to the defence. Statements, if the defence elects to file them, are due October 19. Paper committal proceedings begin November 16.

It is tempting to read remand alongside full disclosure as a verdict already reached — proof the State believes it has the men who caused the deaths of 73 people. That reading gets the law wrong. Disclosure is a procedural threshold, not an evidentiary judgment; remand at this stage reflects the gravity of a murder charge, not a magistrate’s assessment of guilt. Committal, when it comes, is the first point at which sufficiency of evidence is actually tested. Nothing in Tuesday’s hearing settles that question, and this Board will not pretend otherwise.

But the premise does not need to be sound for the underlying accountability question to be. Strip the guilt-by-remand logic away and a harder, cleaner question remains: at the moment the State alleges these three men committed a crime rather than presided over an accident, all three were in the employ of the State. What follows from that — for the employer, not merely the employed?

TWO TRACKS, DELIBERATELY CONFUSED

The prosecution of Price, Roberts, and Granderson runs on one track: individual criminal responsibility, tested by evidence, decided by a court. Nothing this Board has published disputes the State’s right to bring that case or the DPP’s authority to advise it forward.

The second track — institutional and civil liability of the State as owner, employer, and regulator of the vessel — runs independently. It does not require a conviction. It does not require an acquittal. It does not require the murder theory to survive committal at all. It rests on a distinct and already well-documented set of facts this Board has been assembling since August: a defect-report paper trail spanning November 2025 to March 2026, urgent-marked mechanical and electrical failures acknowledged by the Shore Chief Engineer and left unresolved for months, and — most consequentially — a statutory framework that this Board has argued makes the State’s culpability a matter of law, not inference.

If the State charges its own employees with murder for what happened aboard a vessel it owned, regulated, and inspected, the charge sheet indicts the crew. It does not acquit the owner.

WHAT MILLINGTON ALREADY ESTABLISHED

Maritime scholar Robert C. Millington’s paper, “MV Barima and the Maritime Statute Book of Guyana,” reported by Kaieteur News, is not a moral argument for state responsibility. It is a legal one, built on the statute book itself, and this Board has covered its findings in detail. Two of them bear directly on the question raised by Tuesday’s hearing.

First: Section 3(3) of the Guyana Shipping Act deems MARAD’s Director the legal owner of state-registered vessels. This is not a metaphor for government responsibility — it is the positive law. The State is not merely the Transport and Harbours Department’s political overseer or Price, Roberts, and Granderson’s employer in the ordinary sense. Under Guyana’s own statute, the State is the vessel’s owner of record. Whatever duty of seaworthiness, maintenance, and safe operation the law imposes on a vessel owner, Section 3(3) places that duty on the State directly — not once removed through an employment relationship, but as the named legal owner.

Second: the “24-Metre Gap.” Regulation 5 of 2005’s stability and safety rules apply only to vessels under 24 metres; Regulation 6 of 2005’s cargo-ship rules explicitly exclude passenger ships. At approximately 40.26 metres, the Barima fell outside both regimes — subject to fewer statutory safety obligations than a small wooden vessel or a standard cargo ship. This was not a gap the crew created or could have closed. It was a legislative choice, unaddressed for decades, that left a vessel carrying more than 170 passengers with a lighter statutory safety burden than boats a fraction of its size.

Millington’s paper adds further structural findings this Board has previously detailed: no statutory pre-departure headcount or passenger-log duty, unlike SOLAS Chapter III Regulation 27; a casualty-inquiry regime Millington describes as non-functional, with the 1883 Act excluding State vessels from its reach entirely; and a penalty structure that fines submerging a load line more heavily than sending an unseaworthy vessel to sea. None of these are failures of individual seamanship. They are failures of the statute book; authored, and left unrepaired, by the State.

THE PAPER TRAIL THE DEFENCE NOW HOLDS

The prosecution’s disclosure this week means Price, Roberts, and Granderson’s lawyers now hold whatever evidentiary record the State has assembled against them. This Board has already published, independently, a documentary record the CoI itself has not yet accounted for in public: handwritten defect and repair reports dating from November 2025 through March 2026, several marked urgent, several acknowledged in writing by the Shore Chief Engineer days or weeks after they were filed, describing a generator out of service, a main-engine heat exchanger running 20 degrees above a comparison engine, a leaking exhaust venting into the engine room, and — as late as March 9, 2026, four months before the sinking — a captain’s own correspondence listing a leaking hatch pipe, a broken passenger toilet, and a damaged wheelhouse window still awaiting repair.

If the prosecution’s case rests in any part on the condition of the vessel that night, the defense now has standing to ask a question this Board has been asking since August: who received these reports, who had authority to fund and order the repairs, and why urgent-marked defects went unresolved for months under a chain of command that ran through MARAD and the Transport and Harbours Department — not through the bridge.

WHAT THIS BOARD IS NOT ARGUING

This is not an argument that Price, Roberts, or Granderson are innocent, nor that they are guilty. That determination belongs to the committal process beginning November 16 and, if the matter proceeds, to trial. This Board takes no position on the strength of the prosecution’s evidence, which it has not seen.

It is an argument that the criminal case and the question of State liability are not substitutes for one another, and that the government’s silence on the second while it prosecutes the first is itself worth scrutiny. A State that names its Director of Maritime Administration the statutory owner of a vessel, staffs and regulates that vessel’s operation, receives urgent defect reports across eight months without resolving them, and then charges three of its own employees with murder for the vessel’s sinking, has not thereby discharged its own exposure. It has, if anything, sharpened the question of why the charge sheet stops where it does.

A STANDING DEMAND

This Board renews and consolidates its formal calls on this point:

That the Attorney General’s Chambers state on the public record whether the State, MARAD, or any official above the rank of the three currently charged is or has been under investigation in connection with the disaster.

That the Commission of Inquiry, whose mandate this Board has confirmed explicitly includes institutional failures, be asked directly whether it is examining Section 3(3) ownership liability and the 24-Metre Gap as causes, not merely as regulatory background.

That government clarify whether any civil claim against the State by victims’ families is being treated as foreclosed, deferred, or actively contemplated — and, per this Board’s prior reporting on the Transport and Harbors Act’s Section 23 limitation period, that the six-month clock said to run toward a January 2027 bar be suspended pending the CoI’s conclusions.

The men in the dock on September 9 answer for what the State alleges they did. The State has yet to answer for what its own statute book says it already was: the owner of the vessel that sank.

— The Board

 

 

Jagdeo runs to front, reads the riot act

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Jagdeo runs to front, reads the riot act

OPINIONS BY: GHK LALL September 2026

Great to see Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Vice President, taking control.  Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Regional Executive Officers, and assorted others summoned to a session with the new Minister for Virtue and against Vice
Dr. Jagdeo is the best man for that job.  He knows the territory, having long travelled it repeatedly in some fashion.  But when VP Jagdeo is compelled to leave his other priority duties to lecture ministers, PSs, REOs, and that odd lot, it inspires several strains of thought.  Try these published ones.

For starters, it reinforces that matters have really gone off the deep end in PPP management land.  Management land has metastasized into advanced corruption land, stage IV.  I use the vocabulary of cancer, with which I have much familiarity, to relay how unbelievably and undeniably bad corruption is in the PPP Govt.  For a former president, and Guyana’s Oil President, to separate from the nation’s riches, even for a moment, is all that Guyanese need to know about how far and self-destructive chronic corruption has become in the PPP Govt. 

Corruption inside the PPP.  Corruption around the PPP.  Corruption over and under and all over the PPP -government and party, most players and practitioners of the art of stewardship in times of gushing oil.

Then, for Excellency Jagdeo to go to the lengths he did with his high-powered and highflying (and high-skilled and high energy [think of those two]) audience conveys that there’s a huge, telling, and glaring deficit in the PPP Govt relative to corruption containment.  The other excellencies are not up to the job.  So, it falls on him to sound off (carefully), read the riot act (tactfully), and fill the void (cleverly).  Give a caution, but don’t give away too much.  Why expose the PPP unnecessarily?  Why serve up sacrificial lambs for the news hounds and others waiting to feast?  Those who should lead the way on corruption, and give the older, busier, Dr. Jagdeo a breather must be sluggish, self-centered, and have the strangest ideas about honesty, integrity, ethics, and the ethos of democratic and clean politics.

Dr. Jagdeo’s own words offer the best testimony of what he sees is in dire need of correction.  He was on the move and in the face of ministers, PSs and REOs about their “ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations while ensuring sound and efficient management of the public resources allocated and entrusted to their respective ministries, regions, and agencies.”  Ye gods!  When Jagdeo has to take off the gloves and throwdown a hissing cobra into the midst of his audience, it is time for a Guyanese expression on corruption.  Boat dun gaan ah falz.  Boat and passengers gone overboard.  They are expendable.  Jagdeo’s PPP is not.

I scratch my head.  When was the last time that Dr. Jagdeo, in any of his PPP leadership capacities, saw it fit to insist on “ensuring compliance with applicable law and regulations?”  It means that it is not happening at all.  Things gone downhill and taking the PPP into a dunghill.  Messy business, that is.  Or it is not happening anywhere close to the required minimum, if only to give the PPP Govt and Excellency Bharrat some wriggle room, a needed boost where in counts.  In the court of critical and now contemptuous public opinion.

Next, what Guyana’s 2nd Vice President did at the Arthur Chung Convention Center is not really his call.  In effect, to call a public PPP dressing down.  The 1st Vice President, General Mark Phillips, has the first claim on such a move and engagement, and only after the president has given his nod of approval.  What all of this emphasizes to me is that Bharrat Jagdeo grew tired of all the dropped balls, all the flagrant fouls, and all the unpardonable slippages, so he took the bit in his teeth, and commanded his audience to turn up.  Or else….  Now that’s the Jagdeo I like, propaganda value, maneuver, and whatever aside.

Wrapping up with a red ribbon.  Vice President Jagdeo had no choice but to deal in transparency and accountability.  Since, there is no other.  Ow bhaiya!  That’s showing who is still the real boss.  Blessed day.

Oil, Power and the Price of Silence

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Oil, Power and the Price of Silence

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— September 2026

Washington’s apparent Venezuelan oil gambit is a warning to Guyana: in the new Western Hemisphere energy contest, great powers will defend interests before principles. Guyana must welcome support but never confuse it with a guarantee. Its border, oil wealth and sovereign future cannot be left to the discretion of foreign governments whose alliances may change with the price of crude.

For too long, too many Guyanese have been encouraged to take comfort in the warmth of foreign statements, military exercises, diplomatic visits and the strategic interest now attached to our oil industry. Support matters. Partnerships matter. The international recognition of Guyana’s sovereignty matters. But none of these things removes the hard lesson of history: powerful countries do not conduct foreign policy as charities. They pursue advantage.

Today, Guyana is useful to Washington as an emerging oil producer, a democratic partner, a counterweight to Venezuelan instability and a strategically located state in a hemisphere being contested by the United States, China, Russia and other interests. That usefulness may strengthen Guyana’s hand. But usefulness is not the same thing as inviolability.

The reported U.S.-backed oil arrangement in Venezuela should therefore not be read in Georgetown as a simple victory for regional stability. It may indeed reduce the immediate danger of confrontation by giving Washington a commercial and strategic stake in a more stable Venezuela. A Venezuela tied to U.S. capital, U.S. markets and U.S. security calculations may have more to lose from provoking a crisis with Guyana.

But the same arrangement carries another possibility—one Guyana cannot afford to ignore.

If the United States becomes deeply invested in rehabilitating Venezuelan oil production, restoring Venezuelan export capacity and securing reliable access to Venezuelan crude, then Washington will acquire a powerful reason to keep Caracas cooperative. And when great powers seek cooperation, smaller states are often told to be “flexible,” “pragmatic,” “constructive,” or “mindful of regional peace.”

Those words can sound harmless. In the hands of diplomats, they can become instruments of pressure.

Guyana must never accept a situation in which its legitimate exercise of sovereignty is treated as an obstacle to someone else’s oil bargain. The Essequibo is not a regional irritant to be managed behind closed doors. It is Guyanese territory, administered by Guyana, inhabited by Guyanese, and protected by the law, history and the 1899 Arbitral Award.

There can be no energy bargain in Caracas or Washington that changes that fact.

This is why Guyana must remain alert to the danger of what may be called oil-for-silence diplomacy. Venezuela, facing economic distress and international isolation, has every incentive to use its oil reserves as leverage for political rehabilitation. It may seek investment, sanctions relief, diplomatic acceptance and access to markets. It may also seek to soften international resistance to its aggressive posture on Essequibo.

Guyana must ensure that those two matters are never allowed to merge.

Venezuela may receive investment. Its people may benefit from economic recovery. Its oil industry may be rebuilt. None of that is objectionable in itself. The Venezuelan people should not be condemned to permanent hardship, nor should Guyana desire instability across its western border.

But Venezuela cannot be permitted to monetise its oil while maintaining a claim to two-thirds of Guyana’s territory. It cannot seek the benefits of international partnership while threatening Guyana’s territorial integrity. It cannot demand respect for its sovereignty while refusing to respect ours.

That is the line Georgetown must draw—with clarity, consistency and courage.

The danger for Guyana is not only military. It is diplomatic and commercial. A revived Venezuelan oil sector could give Caracas new revenues, new confidence and new international influence. It could strengthen its ability to fund military activity, maintain naval operations, finance propaganda and sustain the fiction that Essequibo is somehow available for political negotiation.

That fiction must be destroyed every time it appears.

Guyana’s leaders must therefore resist the temptation to outsource national security to any foreign capital. The United States may be a valuable ally. So may Brazil, CARICOM, the Commonwealth, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and other democratic partners. But an ally is not an owner of Guyana’s destiny.

Nor can any government in Georgetown allow the country’s territorial integrity to become dependent on the mood, election cycle, oil price or commercial appetite of a foreign administration.

A country that has discovered vast petroleum wealth must understand that it has entered a harder world. Oil brings revenue, but it also attracts appetite. It draws corporations, governments, financiers, military planners and geopolitical competitors. It turns national waters into strategic territory and makes weak institutions a national-security threat.

Guyana’s response cannot be complacency disguised as diplomacy.

The country must strengthen its maritime surveillance, coast-guard capacity, defence readiness and protection of offshore installations. It must deepen relationships across the region and beyond, rather than placing its security future in the hands of one benefactor. It must remain firm before the International Court of Justice and reject every suggestion that the Essequibo controversy should be settled through political compromise.

Most importantly, Guyana must govern its own oil sector with greater transparency, competence and national purpose. A country cannot speak boldly about sovereignty abroad while surrendering too much authority over its national patrimony at home. The defence of Essequibo and the defence of Guyana’s oil wealth are not separate struggles. Both concern whether Guyanese will retain meaningful control over the land, waters and resources that define their future.

That is the real warning contained in Washington’s Venezuelan oil gambit.

The great powers will make their arrangements. Energy companies will pursue their profits. Venezuela will pursue its recovery and its interests. The question is whether Guyana will pursue its own with equal seriousness.

We must welcome friendship, but reject dependency. We must accept support, but refuse subordination. We must seek peace, but never at the price of silence.

No Venezuelan concession, no U.S. equity stake and no barrel of crude must ever become the currency for compromise over Essequibo.

 

 

When the Lights Go Out, So Does the Spin

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

When the Lights Go Out, So Does the Spin

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September 2026

For two long weeks, Guyanese households, businesses, schoolchildren, vendors, offices and communities have been forced to live with a familiar national affliction: uncertainty over whether electricity will be available when it is needed most

In the middle of blistering El Niño conditions, power failures have become more than an inconvenience. They have become a daily assault on ordinary life. Food spoils. Appliances are damaged. Small businesses lose sales. Families cannot sleep. Children cannot study. Water systems fail where pumps depend on electricity. Workers who depend on the internet, refrigeration, machinery or basic lighting find their income and productivity placed at the mercy of a network that repeatedly collapses.

And what has been GPL’s answer? Substation faults. Feeder trips. Emergency works. Analytics. Conservation.

The people are being asked to absorb technical explanations while sitting in darkness. They are being urged to reduce consumption during peak periods while many are simply trying to operate a fan, preserve food in a refrigerator, pump water into a tank, keep a small business open, or find relief from oppressive heat.

No reasonable person disputes the value of conservation. Efficient use of electricity is good policy in any country. But GPL’s message becomes offensive when it appears to shift responsibility toward customers at a time when the utility itself has failed to provide the basic service for which citizens pay.

This is where the public-relations machinery at GPL may finally meet its limit. The spin doctors can continue to issue polished statements about a “smarter grid,” “resilience,” “network analytics” and “long-term transformation.” But rhetoric cannot cool a house without power. It cannot restore a freezer full of spoiled food. It cannot reimburse a shopkeeper for a lost day’s trade. It cannot undo damage to a family’s appliances after repeated surges and outages.

At some point, every explanation begins to sound like an excuse.

The question now facing GPL is simple: what conceivable explanation remains when blackouts persist, generation remains inadequate, the transmission and distribution system remains fragile, and every new problem seems to be met with another announcement rather than a lasting solution?

The public is entitled to ask whether these recurring failures are isolated incidents or evidence of a system that is dangerously unprepared for the demands Guyana is placing upon it.

A “World-Class” Country Cannot Run on Excuses

The Government’s development narrative is ambitious. Guyana, we are told, is becoming a world-class destination for investment. It will diversify beyond oil. It will build industries. It will process raw materials. It will create jobs. It will become a regional center for commerce, services and manufacturing.

These are attractive promises .They are also impossible to fulfil without dependable,affordable and sufficient electricity

Manufacturing does not run on speeches. Factories cannot operate on press releases. Investors do not make multimillion-dollar decisions based on slogans about transformation while production lines, cold-storage facilities, data systems and machinery face the constant threat of outages.

A serious manufacturing economy requires electricity that is stable It requires confidence that a business can sign contracts, employ workers, meet export deadlines and keep machinery operational without being crippled by recurring blackouts.

Guyana is nowhere near that standard today.

It is one thing to aspire to become a manufacturing powerhouse. It is another to possess the energy foundation required to make that aspiration credible. While communities are losing power for hours and sometimes entire days, the country remains light-years away from presenting itself as an industrially reliable jurisdiction.

The energy reality is contradicting the development rhetoric.

The US $800 Million Question

Against this backdrop, GPL has announced an approximately US-$800 -million program to modernize the transmission and distribution network.

The company speaks of new 230-kilovolt transmission lines, new substations, additional 69-kilovolt infrastructure, approximately 350 kilometres of medium-voltage distribution network, feeder upgrades and a smart grid by 2030

There is nothing inherently wrong with these objectives. Guyana urgently needs investments in transmission and distribution. The country’s expanding population, construction boom, new commercial activity, oil-sector development and prospective industrial expansion will place greater strain on an already overstretched grid.

But the issue is not whether improvements are needed. The issue is whether the public has been given sufficient reason to trust that another massive infrastructure program will be prudently designed, competitively procured, properly supervised and delivered on time

US $800 million is not a routine expenditure. It is an enormous national commitment, particularly when compared with the costs repeatedly associated with the Wales gas-to-energy project. It raises an unavoidable question: are Guyanese being asked to accept yet another vast bill because the country failed to plan, maintain and expand its power system before it reached crisis point?

Even more troubling is the apparent request by the gas-to-energy contractors for an additional US $200million to complete the project. If that figure is accurate, the public must be told exactly why the additional money is needed, what work remains outstanding, who bears contractual responsibility for the increased cost, and what revised completion date is being proposed.

There must be no blank cheque.

It is not enough for officials to acknowledge a higher cost while declining to identify how long it will take to spend the additional money—or when Guyanese can finally expect the project’s promised benefits. Cost escalation without a revised, verifiable schedule is not a plan. It is an invitation to uncertainty.

The Failure of Accountability

The people of Guyana are tired of being told to wait.

They have waited for dependable generation. They have waited for upgrades to aged feeders and substations. They have waited for the gas-to-energy project. They have waited for lower electricity costs. They have waited for a modern grid. They have waited while millions and billions are announced, allocated, borrowed and spent.

Meanwhile, they continue to buy generators, inverters, batteries, fuel, surge protectors and replacement appliances out of their own pockets. These are hidden electricity costs imposed on citizens because the national utility has not delivered reliable service.

Every blackout transfers part of GPL’s failure onto the public.

It transfers costs to households that must replace food and damaged electronics. It transfers costs to business owners who lose inventory and revenue. It transfers costs to workers whose productivity depends on reliable connectivity. It transfers costs to patients, the elderly and families caring for vulnerable relatives in unbearable heat.

The Government and GPL cannot credibly claim that Guyana is advancing toward a high-income, industrial future while treating these hardships as routine inconveniences.

A modern country does not simply announce projects. It publishes the evidence that the projects will work.

What GPL Must Disclose

GPL must move beyond carefully managed press conferences and provide the public with a full, accessible account of its plans, finances and obligations.

At a minimum, the company and the Government should publish:

♦ A complete breakdown of the proposed US $800million grid-modernization program, including each project, its location, purpose, estimated cost, funding source and anticipated completion date.

♦ The engineering studies, demand forecasts and reliability assessments used to justify the program.

♦ The procurement method for each major component, including tender documents, bid evaluations, contract awards and beneficial ownership disclosures for major contractors.

♦ Annual reliability targets, including outage frequency, outage duration, feeder performance, restoration times and the number of customers affected.

♦ A public report on every major outage, identifying the cause, affected areas, duration, corrective work, prevention measures and responsibility where negligence is found.

♦ A full accounting of spending already made on generation, substations, transmission and distribution improvements.

♦ The contractual status of the Wales gas-to-energy project, including the reported request for an additional (US\$200) million, the explanation for any cost increase, outstanding work and a revised delivery date.

♦ A clear explanation of who will pay for escalating costs: taxpayers, GPL customers, the Natural Resource Fund, future borrowers or some combination of all four.

Without that disclosure, the public is entitled to view grand new figures with skepticism.

No More Darkness, No More Diversions

The current crisis should be the proverbial straw that breaks the back of GPL’s culture of excuses.

The utility cannot keep cycling through the same formula: a blackout, an explanation, an apology, an announcement, a promise of future works, and then another blackout. Guyanese deserve a utility that anticipates faults, maintains infrastructure, communicates honestly, restores service rapidly and accepts accountability when it fails.

There are only so many times a nation can be told that the future will be brighter while the present remains dark.

If Guyana truly intends to become a manufacturing powerhouse, it must first become a country in which electricity is not a gamble. It must build generation capacity before demand overwhelms supply, reinforce the network before feeders fail, hold contractors accountable before costs balloon and publish the facts before asking citizens to trust another billion-dollar promise.

The country’s ambitions cannot be powered by spin. They must be powered by electricity.

—The Board

 

Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

OPINION BY: – Staff Writer – September 2026

Following our report on the fraud allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and its Director of Projects and Construction, Hardeep Singh — and the company’s earlier denial, issued through Modular Build Guyana and carried by INews — Singh has now issued a personal statement responding directly to the allegations. We have reviewed that statement in full. We stand by our original reporting. And in the course of examining Singh’s response, we have uncovered a second, independent body of evidence he did not address, and which we do not believe he anticipated would surface: a parallel, contracted, government-backed housing project in Barbados that is, as of this writing, five months past its own stated deadline; with no completed home to show for it.

What Singh actually said

In a formal statement issued on social media, Singh rejected the allegations reported in our original piece in categorical terms:

“I categorically deny allegations that I have defrauded clients of GYD $145 million, misappropriated client funds, deliberately taken money without intending to perform contracted works, or ‘fled’ Guyana to escape responsibility.”

He specifically rejected the characterization of his absence from Guyana as evidence of flight: “I am a British national involved in international business activities and travel internationally. My presence outside Guyana should not be misrepresented as evidence of guilt or an attempt to evade legitimate obligations.” He said he would cooperate with any formal police inquiry, stating he takes “any legitimate police enquiry extremely seriously,” and objected to the allegations being treated as established fact merely because complaints had been filed:

“What I will not accept is the existence of a complaint being portrayed publicly as proof that the allegations contained within that complaint are true.”,

On the substance of the four Guyanese clients’ claims, Singh did not dispute that the projects were delayed or incomplete. He disputed only the characterization of that outcome as fraud: “I will not claim that every Modular Builds project has proceeded without difficulty. There have been delays, commercial pressures and disputes… But accepting that projects have experienced difficulties is fundamentally different from accepting an allegation that I entered those contracts intending to steal clients’ money. I reject that allegation.” He said the $145 million figure improperly aggregates four separate contracts into a single sum, and that Modular Builds holds documentation — expenditure records, procurement records, construction activity — capable of demonstrating work was actually undertaken on each project, which he says is available for independent professional assessment. He gave an undertaking that works would be resume in it’s  entirety from Sept 15. We await confirmation of the resumption and will publish same . 

What the statement does not say

Read closely, Singh’s statement is narrower than its categorical language suggests. He denies intent to defraud. He does not dispute the underlying facts our original reporting relied on: that four clients paid a combined $145 million, and that none of the four projects was completed to anything close to its contracted scope. A statement that concedes delay and dispute while denying only the characterization of that delay as deliberate is not a rebuttal of what was reported — it is an argument about how to interpret it.

Nor does Singh say where he currently is, when he last had direct contact with the four affected clients, or why — if the documentation he describes exists and demonstrates good-faith performance — it has not yet been produced to the clients themselves, to Kaieteur News, or to this newsroom. “Documentation capable of demonstrating expenditure” is a claim that evidence exists. It is not evidence.

Most notably, Singh’s statement addresses only the Guyana allegations. It says nothing about Modular Builds’ operations outside Guyana. We do not believe that omission was strategic. We believe it is because, until now, the Barbados side of Modular Builds’ record has not been examined publicly. It is being examined now.

The Barbados contract Singh’s statement does not mention

In November 2025, Modular Builds Guyana; at the time barely two months old on Barbados’s corporate register; was awarded a contract by that country’s state housing agency, HOPE Inc., to build 86 steel-framed homes at Fustic Gardens, St Lucy. The award drew immediate scrutiny: Opposition Senator Ryan Walters publicly questioned how a company almost nobody in Barbados had heard of, including some state officials, had secured a large government housing contract within weeks of its registration. HOPE’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Williamson, defended the process as “a rigorous tendering process” fully compliant with Chief Procurement Office regulations, and told Barbados Today the first phase — ten houses — would be complete by April 2026.

That deadline has now passed by five months. As of this newsroom’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own promotional website this month, the company’s published Barbados project photographs show no completed or handed-over home. What they show is a single structure at steel-frame stage — roof sheeting only recently begun — and an aerial image of the wider Fustic Gardens site showing multiple foundation slabs laid but no additional structures raised beyond that single frame. This is the company’s own chosen evidence of its progress, published on a platform it controls and updates at will.

For an operation whose entire public pitch rests on speed — homes built in seven days in Guyana, “14-day turnkey” builds advertised repeatedly across its own marketing — the absence of a single finished unit to showcase, months past a public deadline its own CEO’s counterpart announced, is not a detail. It is the story.

A pattern Barbados’s own auditors have already documented — with a different company

Modular Builds’ difficulties in Barbados do not exist in isolation from that country’s institutional history. A 2025 Barbados Audit Office special report into HOPE Inc.‘s building programmes documents an earlier, separate arrangement with an unnamed Guyanese supplier of prefabricated hardwood houses, contracted under a different HOPE programme in May 2023. The findings are stark: a $3.5 million advance paid to the Guyanese company with no contract, performance bond, or advance-payment bond in place at the time of payment; HOPE’s own due diligence flagging that the company had no prior contracts exceeding US$100,000 and liabilities exceeding its assets — a company HOPE’s own investigators considered a credit risk before a dollar changed hands; a performance bond that lapsed after the company failed to secure a replacement from any Barbadian financial institution; and, of 350 contracted housing units, only 60 ever delivered, several incomplete. HOPE’s own board voted to terminate the arrangement in November 2023. The audit found no evidence the responsible ministry ever acted on that recommendation.

We want to be precise about what we are, and are not, asserting. We have not established that the unnamed Guyanese hardwood-house supplier in the 2023 audit and Modular Builds Guyana Inc. are the same company. The two arrangements involve different HOPE programmes, different construction methods, and were struck roughly two years apart. What the audit establishes independently of that question is this: Barbados’s state housing agency has an official, audited record of advancing significant public money to Guyanese contractors without the bonding or verified capacity to justify it — and the Fustic Gardens contract, on the evidence of Modular Builds’ own published record, now appears to be following a strikingly similar trajectory, whoever ultimately built each.

Why this matters to the Guyana allegations

Singh’s defense, distilled, is that delay and dispute are not proof of fraud, and that a company can fall behind on a contract without intending to defraud anyone. That is true as a general proposition. It is harder to sustain when the same company, operating under the same brand, marketing the same speed-built promise, is simultaneously running months behind on a second, entirely separate, government-backed contract in a second country — with nothing publicly shown for it. One late project might be commercial misfortune. A company with two major contracts in two countries, both stalled, both past their stated deadlines, invites a different question than the one Singh’s statement answers: not whether any single failure proves intent, but whether Modular Builds currently has the operational capacity to deliver on its contracts anywhere at all.

Singh has said he welcomes scrutiny and stands ready to cooperate with any formal inquiry. We take him at his word, and we extend the same invitation his statement extends to others: we welcome a direct, specific response — from Singh, from Modular Builds, or from HOPE Inc. — addressing the current status of the Fustic Gardens contract, the reason for its delay, and a firm date by which the outstanding homes, in Guyana and in Barbados, will actually be completed.

Until that response comes, the documentation he says exists remains, as he himself put it of the allegations against him, a claim rather than a proof.

—The Board

 

THE REVOLVING DOOR: WHEN “SACRED TRUST” BECOMES A RERUN

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THE REVOLVING DOOR: WHEN “SACRED TRUST” BECOMES A RERUN

ACCOUNTABILITY & INVESTIGATIVE COMMENTARY

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Sixteen weeks after a purge conducted in its name, the government’s own appointee is now the one being sued for the offence “sacred trust” was supposed to end.

On September 7, Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo convened Ministers, every Permanent Secretary, every Regional Executive Officer, and the accounting officers of the state’s semi-autonomous agencies at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. The subject was accountability: procurement transactions, government payment systems, the disclosure of information to the public. Compliance would be tracked. Breaches, the assembled officials were told, would carry consequences.

Govt Ministers schooled on Governance?

Read on its own, this sounds like governance. Read against the record, it sounds like a rerun.

THE SAME SCRIPT, FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

On May 14, 2026, President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Jagdeo convened a nearly identical meeting at the Office of the President — Cabinet members, incoming Regional Executive Officers, Permanent Secretaries, and officials of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board.

That meeting produced more than talk. It produced a purge: all ten regional administrations received new or reassigned REOs, several sitting officers were removed outright, and the exercise was reported at the time, plainly, as a reshuffle carried out behind closed doors.

President Ali told the incoming officers that “sacred trust” accompanies public office. He warned that procurement breaches; including officials’ involvement with multiple companies or circumventing transparency laws — would mean immediate removal. Vice President Jagdeo added that every dollar of public expenditure must be measured strictly against its contribution to national development and citizen welfare. Artificial intelligence, the government said, would be deployed to monitor procurement in real time.

It was, in other words, exactly the speech Jagdeo delivered again on September 7.

The cast was the same. The warnings were the same. The only thing missing the second time around was any accounting of what had happened to the first mandate in the sixteen weeks between.

A SELECTION PROCESS, NOT A HIRING PROCESS

It is worth being precise about what actually happened in May, because the government’s own framing invites a mistake. These were not appointments drawn from a competitive, merit-vetted civil service pipeline. They were political selections, made directly by the President and Vice President in a closed session, with no published criteria and no disclosed rationale for who was chosen over whom.

The public was told who the new officers were. It was never told why those particular people, and not others, were judged fit to hold what the President himself was, in the same breath, calling a sacred trust.

The one public objection on record came from APNU’s Terrence Campbell, who questioned at the time whether the dismissals had been handled with fairness and due process. It went nowhere. No lawsuit followed. No grievance was lodged with the Guyana Public Service Union. No matter was referred to the Public Service Commission, the constitutional body actually vested with authority over such appointments. This stands in contrast to a comparable case in 2020, when the termination of a Permanent Secretary drew a formal union challenge on precisely those constitutional grounds. This time, an objection was raised in public and answered with silence — which is to say, the safeguard did not merely fail. It was never invoked.

“Sacred trust” was declared, not demonstrated. What follows is a test of whether it meant anything at all.

THE CASE THAT BREAKS THE ARGUMENT

If the May reshuffle was, as the government insisted, a genuine correction — new people, held to a new standard, replacing officers who had failed that standard — then the clearest test of that claim is what the replacements actually did once installed.

Region Ten offers that test, and it fails.

Dr. Gregory Harris was named Regional Executive Officer for Region Ten in the May reshuffle, replacing Dwight John. John’s tenure had already produced the precise failure the “sacred trust” language was meant to foreclose: at an October 2025 statutory meeting, with the Regional Chairman vote tied, John suspended the process and deferred it to ministerial discretion rather than allow the council to resolve it — leaving Region Ten as the only administrative region in the country without an elected chairman following the 2025 regional elections.

Harris was supposed to end that impasse. He has instead continued it. On August 20, 2026, WIN’s nine elected Region Ten councillors served a formal Pre-Action Notice giving Harris forty-eight hours to reconvene the council meeting. He did not. Two days later, the councillors filed a Fixed Date Application in the High Court, naming Harris directly, to compel him to perform the same statutory duty his predecessor refused to perform. As of this writing, Region Ten remains without an elected Regional Chairman or Vice-Chairman — not under the officer the government removed, but under the one it chose to replace him.

This is not a matter of interpretation or motive. It is a matter of record: the replacement appointee is now the defendant in litigation over the exact conduct his appointment was supposed to correct.

WHAT THE SEQUENCE ACTUALLY SHOWS

None of this requires assuming that cronyism or nepotism drove the May selections, although the opacity of the process invites exactly that suspicion and does nothing to dispel it. The sequence stands on its own without needing a theory of motive attached to it:

A closed political process replaced a slate of public officers under the banner of accountability. The government attached specific, threatening language to the exercise — immediate removal for breaches, AI monitoring of procurement, every dollar measured against outcomes. At least one of the replacement officers has since been taken to the High Court for continuing, not correcting, the conduct that justified his predecessor’s removal. And sixteen weeks after the original mandate was announced, the Vice President stood in front of substantially the same audience and delivered substantially the same warning — with no public reckoning of what enforcement, if any, had occurred in the interim.

A government that must re-issue its own accountability mandate to the people it personally selected to carry it out, without ever explaining what became of the first mandate, is not demonstrating vigilance. It is demonstrating that the first mandate was never enforced — and that nothing structural has changed to ensure the second one will be either.

THE REAL VACANCY

Guyana’s public administration does not suffer from a shortage of proclamations about sacred trust, transparency, or consequences. It suffers from the absence of any mechanism, independent of the President and Vice President’s own discretion, that determines who is selected, who is removed, and what happens in between. Until that mechanism exists — open selection criteria, a functioning role for the Public Service Commission, and a public accounting of consequences actually applied — each new meeting at each new conference centre will do no more than restate the last one.

Region Ten’s empty chairmanship, four months into the officer chosen to fill it, is not an exception to that pattern. It is the pattern, in the one place where it happened to end up in court.

— The Board

 

The Same Playbook, Two Oil Coasts: What the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Warnings Say About Guyana’s Bargain

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592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA 

The Same Playbook, Two Oil Coasts: What the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Warnings Say About Guyana’s Bargain

Extractive Governance & Geopolitics

EDITORIAL BY:  Hem Kumar — September 2026

Two former U.S. energy officials have just published, under the Atlantic Council’s own letterhead, a four-part indictment of the administration’s Venezuela oil concession — and in doing so, they have handed Guyana a diagnostic checklist it should be applying to its own arrangements with Washington.

David Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough are not activists or opposition partisans. Goldwyn ran international energy affairs at the State Department; Clabough studies the sector for a living. When analysts of that pedigree question whether a U.S. government body has any legal standing to hold equity in a foreign nation’s constitutionally protected resources, whether an unelected government can bind its successors to a hundred-year bargain, and whether a captive-buyer arrangement actually serves the host country’s interests — those questions do not evaporate at the Essequibo River. They travel.

THE DEAL IN DISPUTE

The arrangement under scrutiny would hand a newly formed private company, fronted by a Venezuelan businessman under a Swiss money-laundering warrant, a hundred-year concession over seventeen oil fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a reported 55 percent of output, including an equity stake and a standing right to buy oil at cost — structured, transparently, to refill the depleted U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was signed not by Venezuela’s elected president, but by Delcy Rodríguez, head of an interim government whose legitimacy her own domestic opposition disputes.

Goldwyn and Clabough’s four questions are worth stating plainly, because each has a Guyanese analogue this paper has already been asking. Will the arrangement reassure investors who have stayed on the sidelines, or does its opacity deepen their caution? Does it rest on a legal foundation the host constitution can actually bear? Does it enjoy political durability across a change of government, in either country? And does it change anything on the ground, or merely relocate the extraction rights without solving the underlying capacity and governance deficits?

A specification for extracting a resource is the same document whether it is signed in Caracas or in Georgetown.

GUYANA’S VERSION OF THE SAME FOUR QUESTIONS

This publication has tracked, since August, the parallel positioning of American capital and security interests inside Guyana — the shift of Berbice deep-water port financing from early Chinese pre-feasibility interest toward Bechtel and Hess, the new air-domain-awareness and drone MoU signed alongside Deputy Secretary Landau’s economic pitch, and Washington’s own confirmed equity stake in the Venezuelan fields sitting a short flight from the Stabroek Block. None of that is identical to the Venezuela concession. But Goldwyn and Clabough’s underlying test — does the legal form of an arrangement survive scrutiny independent of who is offering it, or how urgently — applies with equal force to the Stabroek Production Sharing Agreement this paper has spent four installments examining.

The Stabroek Surrender series has already established that Guyana’s own 2016 PSA lacks ring-fencing between cost pools, meaning new discoveries such as Uaru and Whiptail can quietly re-enter the same undivided recovery pool that Exxon’s $55 billion in prior costs just emptied from. Ram’s Article 32.1 argument — that renegotiation requires only the operator’s consent, not legal impossibility — is a domestic version of Goldwyn and Clabough’s second question: is the legal foundation of the arrangement as fixed as the government insists, or is ‘sanctity of contract’ invoked selectively, extended to foreign operators and withheld from the audit deadlines and gas feasibility studies the same contract requires of the state?

THE POLITICAL-DURABILITY TEST, APPLIED AT HOME

The Atlantic Council piece’s third question — can an agreement signed by a government of contested legitimacy bind whatever government follows it — is not one Guyana can wave off as someone else’s problem. Guyana’s own executive has negotiated security and infrastructure arrangements with Washington (the air-domain-awareness MoU, the Berbice port shift, the third-country deportee framework) with limited parliamentary scrutiny and no public disclosure of full terms. The 13th Parliament has sat only four or five times in nearly 300 days. An arrangement negotiated in that vacuum inherits the same durability question Rodríguez’s Venezuelan concession faces: what happens to it when the political balance shifts, and who, precisely, agreed to be bound?

Goldwyn and Clabough’s fourth question — does the arrangement change the underlying reality, or simply relocate who profits from extraction without fixing what was broken — is perhaps the most transferable of all. Seventeen Venezuelan oil fields reportedly lack basic electricity, processing equipment, and pipeline connections; a hundred-year concession does not build that infrastructure by itself. Guyana’s own record of unbuilt promises — the solar programme accountability gap, the GWI sanitation mandate question, the Kimbia bean facility’s unverifiable anchor producer — should make Guyanese readers instinctively skeptical of any arrangement, foreign or domestic, whose headline figure substitutes for a delivery plan.

WHAT THIS PAPER WILL BE WATCHING

We do not print this comparison to suggest Guyana’s PSA and Venezuela’s concession are the same instrument — they are not, and the differences (an operating Guyanese state versus an interim Venezuelan one; a signed 2016 agreement versus a still-unfolding 2026 one) matter. What we intend is narrower and, we think, more useful: two credentialed former U.S. officials have just published, without any Guyana-specific intent, a due-diligence framework for evaluating exactly this kind of asymmetric bilateral bargain.

Guyanese civil society, Parliament, and the press should be running Guyana’s own arrangements with Washington through that same framework — not because the answers are foreordained, but because no one else is going to ask the questions for us.

— The Board

No Capacity, No Rules

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   No Capacity, No Rules

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– September 2026

The Amerindian Peoples Association says Guyana never consulted them on uranium exploration at Kurupung. A former head of the EPA says the country couldn’t safely oversee it even if it had.

“Guyana has no capacity whatsoever to oversee any area of uranium mining and long term monitoring.” — Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Executive Director

Two letters, a week apart, made the same demand from different directions.

The first came from the Amerindian Peoples Association and Indigenous leaders in Region Seven, addressed directly to Environmental Protection Agency Executive Director Khemraj Parsram. It asked the EPA to rescind the Environmental Management Plan for U92 Energy Corp.’s Kurupung uranium project, if one has already been issued, and to suspend review of any related applications until the affected community has been properly engaged. “It is highly demeaning for our people to have to be obtaining all information and communication on this potentially dangerous project, from the media,” the letter states.

The second, effectively, came from Dr. Vincent Adams — a former Executive Director of that same EPA, and, before that, the United States’ representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency on precisely this class of problem. Asked directly whether Guyana has the capacity to oversee uranium mining and its long-term aftermath, his answer left no room for qualification: “Guyana has no capacity whatsoever to oversee any area of uranium mining and long term monitoring.”

Read together, the two documents are not two separate objections. They are one argument, made twice, from a community asking to be heard and an expert confirming that even if they are, the state behind the listening has nothing to hear it with.

WHAT THE COMMUNITY IS ASKING FOR

The APA’s letter is procedural in the most literal sense — it invokes the actual text of the law. Part IV of the Environmental Protection Act requires a developer to disclose a project’s “possible effects on the environment,” and where those effects are unclear, requires the EPA to publish its reasoning in a daily newspaper on whether a full Environmental Impact Assessment is needed, with an explicit right for any affected person to appeal that decision to the Environmental Assessment Board.

None of that happened, according to the letter. No newspaper notice. No opportunity to engage. No opportunity to appeal. The community says it learned of the project’s advance from an August 7, 2026 Kaieteur News article in which the developer said drilling would begin in August “following receipt of the EPA’s approval of the environmental management plan” — a claim the letter formally asks Parsram to confirm or deny, because as far as the signatories know, no such approval has been made public.

The letter also surfaces a detail that has not, to this publication’s knowledge, been previously reported: it states that 55 miles of radioactively contaminated core samples from historical exploration work have been sitting in storage for decades, with no communication to the community about their presence, their condition, or the exposure risk they may pose to children, pregnant women, animals, and the rivers, creeks and farmland the community depends on. This publication has not independently verified the extent or current custody of that material, and is continuing to investigate — but the claim itself, from Indigenous leaders formally petitioning the national environmental regulator, is a matter of public record as of this letter.

This is the same governance gap this publication documented in “No Consent, No Rules”: Kurupung’s 92.2 square kilometres are classified as state land, not titled Amerindian territory, so the Amerindian Act’s consent provisions never formally engage;  even though APA says the project sits on the ancestral territory of the Kapohn (Akawaio) and Pemon Peoples. What the EPA letter adds is that even the generic, non-Indigenous-specific safeguards written into the EPA Act — public notice, a chance to comment, a right to appeal — appear also not to have been followed.

The community was not excluded only from a consent standard tailored to Indigenous rights. It says it was excluded from the ordinary process owed to any Guyanese citizen.

WHAT THE EXPERT SAYS ABOUT WHETHER IT WOULD MATTER ANYWAY

Adams’s letter to EPA , and his answers to this publication’s questions, go further than procedure. His argument is that even a perfectly followed consultation process would sit on top of a regulatory system with no ability to actually manage what it is approving.

His authority to say so is not casual. Adams was selected by the IAEA to plan and chair its 2009 international conference on remediation of land contaminated by radioactive material — a gathering in Kazakhstan that drew over 300 professionals from more than 60 countries, alongside NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the UN Development Programme. He was later responsible, in the United States, for characterizing and cleaning up uranium mining sites nationally, work that required standing up three separate federal programs — the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and the Office of Legacy Management — to monitor engineered burial sites indefinitely. Guyana, he notes, was not among the countries the IAEA trained in the wake of that 2009 conference, “for obvious reasons”: it had no uranium industry to speak of at the time.

Asked what specifically is missing, Adams did not describe a country merely short of equipment. “Just having instruments whether properly calibrated or not doesn’t mean anything if you don’t understand what the instruments are telling you and how to respond,” he said. He was equally direct that the gap is not confined to government: U92 itself, he said, is a two-year-old company that “has also demonstrated no adequate knowledge nor experience in uranium operations” — leaving Guyana, in his assessment, in a position comparable to its relationship with ExxonMobil, dependent on the operator’s own representations about the very risks it is being asked to regulate.

Confirmed by this publication in earlier reporting: the performance bond currently held by the state against the Kurupung project is US$104,542. Adams said he was not previously aware of that figure, but called it “ludicrous” regardless of whether it is meant to cover exploration or eventual production. His reasoning centers on what happens if something goes wrong: unlike ExxonMobil, he said, U92 has no assets of scale to draw against in a major incident, which means the operative question is not what bond is adequate but who absorbs the cost if the company cannot. “Who covers the cost if a disaster occurs and they declare bankruptcy and walk away,” he asked, “leaving the Amerindian community with their livelihood that has been destroyed?”

Adams also confirmed, on the record, that no uranium or radioactive-minerals application of any kind reached the EPA during his own tenure as its Executive Director. Kurupung is not simply an under-resourced case. It is the first case of its kind the agency has ever had to handle

TWO DEMANDS, ONE ANSWER OWED

The APA has asked the EPA to rescind the environmental management plan and pause every related review until the community is properly consulted. Adams has asked, separately, that his own expertise be brought to bear on a project he says the government currently has no internal capacity to evaluate on its own terms.

Neither demand requires the other to be resolved first. A community’s right to be consulted before a uranium project advances on its ancestral land does not depend on whether the state is technically competent to regulate that project — and a regulator’s technical incompetence does not excuse it from the consultation the law already requires. But together, the two letters describe a project moving forward on a double absence: no meaningful engagement with the people whose land and water are at stake, and, by the account of the one Guyanese official who has actually chaired an international body on this exact hazard, no capacity to catch what that absence of engagement might miss.

The EPA has not yet responded publicly to either letter. This publication has asked Executive Director Parsram to confirm whether the Kurupung environmental management plan has been approved, and will update this report with any response received.

— The Board

The Donroe Doctrine: Crushing Communism by Handing the Oil to the Man Who Helped Loot It

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Donroe Doctrine: Crushing Communism by Handing the Oil to the Man Who Helped Loot It

OPINION BY:Hem Kumar September 2026

Washington calls it liberation. The ledger says otherwise — and Georgetown should be taking notes.

A Fox News column published this week asks Venezuela’s critics to accept a simple trade: the United States takes a generational — perhaps century-long; claim on 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, and in exchange, communism dies in the hemisphere. The argument is dressed in the language of liberation. Stripped of its rhetoric, it is a resource-transfer agreement, negotiated with an unelected interim government, defended in advance against the very objection it cannot answer: whose oil is this, and who authorized its sale?

The interim president who “confirmed the core terms” is not a democratic reformer parachuted in to clean house. She served as Vice President under Nicolás Maduro. She sat inside the same ruling apparatus the column spends a thousand words denouncing as a Cuban-captured kleptocracy. The essay wants readers to believe the rot was personal to Maduro and that removing him cleared the machine. It did not name who now runs the machine, or what she did inside it for years before inheriting the safe.

That is not incidental. It is the whole scheme. A regime figure signs away 17 strategic oil fields for a term measured in generations, under the cover of an emergency that her own government helped create, and the American press is asked to call this “crushing communism’s grip.” The grip is not being crushed. It is changing hands.

THE SEQUENCE TELLS THE STORY

The column itself lays out the plan in three phases: stabilization, recovery, transition. Read that order again. Contracts and capital come first. Elections come last — vaguely, conditionally, as something a “future democratic congress” might one day ratify. Not authorize. Ratify. The distinction matters: ratification is what a legislature does to bless a deal it had no part in negotiating. The oil is spoken for before a single Venezuelan casts a vote on the terms.

Even the essay’s own defenders admit the legal architecture doesn’t exist yet. There is no disclosed instrument — no published production-sharing agreement, no concession terms, no equity structure — only phrases like “a secured interest” and “strategic fields.” A $100 billion, multi-decade claim on a nation’s primary resource, negotiated in the dark, is not a foundation for democracy. It is the oldest pattern in extractive politics: the paperwork arrives after the asset is already gone.

And the safeguards the column calls for oil proceeds “fenced off from the old patronage machine and audited,” an “electoral calendar,” courts “not controlled by the ruling party” — are written as demands, not achievements. By the piece’s own admission, none of it exists yet. The deal is signed. The guardrails are a wish list appended afterward.

GUYANA HAS SEEN THIS FILM

Guyanese readers do not need a hypothetical to understand where this goes. This publication has spent months documenting it in “The Stabroek Surrender,” our series on the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement — a contract negotiated without competitive bidding, without ring-fencing between cost pools, without a decommissioning fund backed by parent-company guarantees, and defended today under the same phrase Washington and Caracas are now recycling: sanctity of contract.

Guyana’s own government has shown exactly how selective that sanctity is. President Ali argued for renegotiating the Stabroek PSA in 2020, before he held the office that could act on it. In 2026, holding that office, he refuses — while his administration has quietly missed audit deadlines and never conducted the gas feasibility study the contract itself requires. Sanctity of contract, in practice, is enforced against the public and waived for the operator. Christopher Ram’s Article 32.1 argument — that renegotiation requires only the counterparty’s consent, not some legal impossibility; remains unanswered by the government that invokes “sanctity” as though it were scripture rather than a choice.

That is the actual lesson Venezuela offers Georgetown: not that foreign capital is inherently predatory, but that a resource contract signed under emergency conditions, defended with patriotic language, and shielded from renegotiation by officials who benefit from the status quo, does not stay temporary. It becomes permanent by design. Uaru, Whiptail and Hammerhead — $32.2 billion in new Guyanese projects — are entering the same undivided, unring-fenced cost pool that just finished absorbing $55 billion in recoverable costs before the state saw its promised 50% share. The infrastructure of Guyana’s own oil sector was built to make exactly the kind of “temporary emergency” arrangement Venezuela is being sold now.

THE TEST THAT MATTERS

Strip away the anti-communist framing and ask the only question that determines whether any resource deal — Caracas or Georgetown — serves the public: who can undo it, and on whose terms?

In Venezuela, the answer today is no one, until a congress that never negotiated the deal is asked to ratify it after the fact. In Guyana, the answer has been no one, for a decade, because “sanctity of contract” has been deployed to foreclose the very renegotiation the government itself once demanded.

A deal that cannot be reopened by the people who will live with its consequences is not liberation. It is custody. Whether the jailer wears the colors of Washington or Houston makes no difference to the country whose ground it comes from.

— The Board

The Orinoco Rush and the Stabroek Warning

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The Orinoco Rush and the Stabroek Warning

EDITORIAL BY: Editor— September 2026

How Venezuela’s unelected government is signing away a generation of oil before it has earned a mandate to sign anything — and why Georgetown should be watching its own contracts, not just Caracas’s

On September 2, 2026, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright stood in Miraflores Palace beside Delcy Rodríguez — Venezuela’s acting president, installed after the U.S. military removed Nicolás Maduro in January and a woman her own government’s chief diplomat once refused to call legitimate and announced a new round of oil agreements with Chevron and Eni. The same week, on the other side of the ledger, Colombia’s Gilinski family finalized its move to take majority control of NYSE-listed GeoPark Ltd., a Bogotá-based operator, in exchange for handing GeoPark a twenty-five-year Production Participation Contract over the Bare Block in Venezuela’s Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt — a field holding an estimated 15.7 billion barrels. Grupo Gilinski becomes GeoPark’s controlling shareholder, financed entirely in stock, at a moment when the contract, the government, and the country’s political future are all, by design, still unsettled.

Asked, at that same press conference, when Venezuelans might actually vote, Rodríguez offered no date — only that elections would come once the country is “ready,” on terms she alone would judge. It is worth sitting with the arithmetic. The oil contracts now being signed run for a quarter of a century.

The elections attached to them have no year, let alone a month. Sovereignty, on this timeline, is the thing to be arranged later. The wells are being arranged now.

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT BIND THE FUTURE IT DOESN’T REPRESENT

The legitimacy problem here is not our editorial invention; it is the stated position of the same administration cutting the deals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time of Rodríguez’s swearing-in that he did not consider her government legitimate, because Venezuela has never held a free and fair election under it. Eight months on, his own Energy Secretary is signing that government’s name to contracts that will outlast most of the people negotiating them. Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, reviewing the same deal, was blunter still, calling it an asset grab struck with a government that lacks the constitutional standing to make a commitment of that length — predicting, in his words, that “this announced deal will not stand.”

María Corina Machado; the exiled opposition leader whose candidate is widely understood to have won the stolen 2024 election — has made the same point from the other direction: the transition to democracy, she says, has not yet happened. Senator Ted Cruz, no critic of the deal’s economics, still calls Maduro’s successor government illegitimate and wants elections to move “rapidly.” Nobody serious is disputing that Rodríguez’s mandate is borrowed, not earned. The dispute is only over whether that should have stopped the drilling.

The order of operations is the argument. Stabilization, then resource contracts, then — eventually, undated — a vote. Everywhere that sequence appears, the contract is the part that actually happens on schedule.

 

A PATTERN THIS NEWSROOM HAS SEEN BEFORE

Readers of this newsroom’s Stabroek Surrender series will recognize the shape of this immediately, because we have spent four parts and a fifth in progress documenting its Guyanese cousin. In 2016, a government with a fraction of Rodríguez’s legitimacy problem — but facing its own institutional immaturity, an untested regulatory apparatus, and an electorate that had no meaningful opportunity to weigh in on fiscal terms before signature — locked Guyana into a Production Sharing Agreement whose stability clauses, cost-recovery ceiling, and absence of ring-fencing are still, a decade later, being defended by the current government as “sanctity of contract” — even as that same government freely concedes it did not fully enforce the audit and gas-utilization obligations inside that same contract. Sanctity, in Georgetown as in Caracas, has always been selective: binding when it protects the operator, negotiable when it inconveniences the state.

The Orinoco rush is that same mechanism running at higher speed and lower cover. Venezuela’s contracts are being signed under an outright unelected government, in full public view of officials who call that government illegitimate while signing its paperwork. Guyana’s was signed by an elected government under undisclosed terms that took years of freedom-of-information fights and independent legal analysis to surface. The end state — a resource base committed for a generation before the public that owns it had a genuine chance to negotiate the split — is the same end state. Only the packaging differs.

WHY THIS SHOULD WORRY GEORGETOWN, NOT JUST CARACAS

There are three concrete reasons this newsroom is treating the Orinoco pattern as a warning for Guyana rather than a foreign curiosity.

First, capital displaced from Venezuela’s newly reopened but still politically unstable fields does not evaporate — it reallocates regionally, and Guyana’s offshore basin, now producing under a fiscal regime already criticised as too generous, is the most obvious secondary destination for operators and financiers hedging against a Venezuelan deal that Hausmann and others expect could be renegotiated or voided by a future, legitimately elected Venezuelan government. A rush of new entrants chasing that hedge is a rush our own regulators, courts, and Parliament — sitting four to five times in 299 days, per this newsroom’s own reporting — are no better prepared to referee than they were in 2016.

Second, the Bare Block deal is a live demonstration of how quickly “transitional” arrangements calcify into permanent facts. No one signing the GeoPark-PDVSA contract expects Venezuela’s next elected government to have real leverage to unwind a twenty-five-year commitment already booked, financed, and trading on the NYSE. The same dynamic already applies to Guyana’s Stabroek Block: every cost-recovery dollar Uaru, Whiptail, and Hammerhead now draw from the same undivided pool that just finished repaying Exxon’s original $55 billion pushes the date of any real renegotiation further away, contract clause by contract clause, exactly as Christopher Ram has argued.

Third, and most directly: the rhetorical cover being used in Caracas — that the country needs foreign capital and technical capacity now, and that popular sovereignty can be reconciled with the contract later; is structurally identical to the cover President Ali has used to defend Guyana’s own refusal to reopen Stabroek’s terms. “We cannot scare off investment” and “elections will come when we are ready” are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Guyana does not need Venezuela’s coup and interim government to have Guyana’s legitimacy problem; it only needs to keep signing contracts on the logic that the public’s genuine, informed consent is a formality to be arranged once the ink is already dry.

THE STANDARD WE ARE APPLYING

This newsroom takes no position on whether removing Maduro was justified, nor on the broader geopolitics of the U.S. re-entry into Venezuelan oil. Our objection is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a government without a mandate to govern past the transition it was installed to manage has no mandate to sign contracts that outlive that transition by a quarter-century. The same standard applies whether the signature belongs to an acting president installed by foreign troops or an elected one who has simply declined, for years , to let the public see or revisit the terms it is bound by.

Contracts made in the dark — whether the darkness is a lack of votes or a lack of disclosure — carry the same defect. Guyana has one already. It does not need a second, and it should not need Caracas’s example to notice the pattern in its own harbor.

— The Board