THE STABROEK SURRENDER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Independent Accountability Journalism  ·  Guyana

EDITORIAL

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part IV of IV  ·  Pollute As Much As You Want

Pollute As Much As You Want, Provided You Can Pay For It

Guyana was promised zero flaring at the Stabroek Block. Instead, ExxonMobil has burned off more than a billion cubic feet of gas into the Atlantic sky, paid a fraction of what independent analysts say the pollution is worth, and won in court when Guyanese citizens tried to force a stricter permit. This is the enforcement gap at the heart of Guyana’s oil era — and the final installment of this series.

Parts I through III of this series traced the arithmetic of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), the stability clause that froze that arithmetic beyond Parliament’s reach, and the decommissioning liability Guyana is quietly pre-funding with no guarantee the money will still exist when it is needed. Part IV closes the series by asking a simpler question: when the Contractor breaks its own environmental promises, what actually happens?

The answer, on the public record, is: not very much

The Promise: Zero Flaring

When the Government of Guyana approved the environmental permit for the Liza Phase 1 project, it did so on the strength of a specific commitment. ExxonMobil’s own environmental impact assessment represented that the project could achieve zero non-routine gas flaring — that associated gas produced alongside crude oil would be captured and reinjected into the wells rather than burned off into the atmosphere. The Minister of Natural Resources at the time stated unequivocally that under no circumstances would there be flaring of the gas.

“That promise did not survive first production. Faulty compression equipment aboard the Liza Destiny FPSO caused ExxonMobil to begin flaring within weeks of the field coming online in December 2019, and it has continued in one form or another ever since.”

What the Satellite Data Shows

Independent verification, rather than company self-reporting, has driven most of what the public knows about the scale of the problem. Satellite monitoring compiled through the Every Last Drop project using SkyTruth data, cross-referenced with figures from the environmental rights organization Arayara Institute, documented 1,298 separate flaring events at the Stabroek Block between 2019 and 2023 alone, releasing an estimated à 1.32 million tons of CO2 — comparable to the annual emissions of roughly 287,000 cars. The analysis found the block’s flaring had made Guyana the second-largest gas-flaring emitter in the entire Amazon basin, trailing only Ecuador.

By July 2021, the Government’s own figures put cumulative flared gas at more than 15.1 billion cubic feet. That volume represents energy roughly equivalent to Guyana’s entire national electricity consumption for a year, burned into the sky rather than captured.

The Permit Was Weakened, Not Enforced

The regulatory response to this pattern was not tightening. It was loosening. In April 2021, environmental activists including Sherlina Nageer, using satellite evidence they had gathered independently, formally alerted the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the scale of ongoing flaring. Within a month of that complaint, the EPA revised ExxonMobil’s environmental permit — not to strengthen the zero-flaring requirement, but to extend the allowable flaring period from three consecutive days to sixty.

– The Permit Modification (as reported by multiple independent outlets)

 

Following a 2021 activist complaint documenting extensive non-routine flaring, the EPA revised EEPGL’s environmental permit to extend the allowable continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days, without conducting a fresh Environmental Impact Assessment.

Citizens challenged the legality of that modification in court, arguing that a permit change of this magnitude, made without a new environmental impact review, was unlawful. In 2023, Chief Justice Roxanne George ruled in ExxonMobil’s favour, finding that it had not been proven the modified permit was causing additional adverse environmental effects, and that nothing in Guyanese law prevented the issuance of a modified permit on those terms.

“The government is basically saying: pollute as much as you want, provided you can pay for it.”

That assessment came from Dr. Vincent Adams, the former Head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a thirty-year veteran of the US Department of Energy, responding to the court’s ruling. Dr. Adams has been a recurring, credible critic of the regulatory posture Guyana’s institutions have taken toward ExxonMobil throughout this series’ reporting, and his assessment of the flaring permit fits the broader pattern: technically lawful concessions, made in response to the Contractor’s operational failures, that leave the public paying the environmental cost while the Contractor pays a fee calibrated well below the damage.

The Fines Do Not Match the Harm

Guyana calculates flaring penalties under the Polluter Pays Principle set out in its 1996 Environmental Protection Act. The rate has increased over time — from US$30 per tonne of CO2-equivalent under the original permit, to US$45, and now to US$50 under the renewed five-year Liza 1 permit issued in 2025. By late 2021, the EPA confirmed it had collected approximately G$930 million, or roughly US$4.5 million, in cumulative flaring payments from ExxonMobil.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that figure hard to square with the scale of the pollution. Using a benchmark rate of US$75 per tonne — a level IEEFA characterized as more realistic — the organization calculated ExxonMobil should have paid closer to US$26 million for the flaring recorded through mid-2021: roughly six times what it had actually paid. ExxonMobil separately paid an US$8.4 million penalty in 2022, a sum that registers as a rounding error against a company that recorded tens of billions of dollars in global annual profit in the same period.

For comparison, when ExxonMobil flared gas on American soil, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice fined the company US$2.5 million in 2017 and required a further US$300 million outlay for pollution-control technology at its domestic facilities. Guyana’s cumulative flaring collections, spread across years and multiple incidents, remain a fraction of what US regulators extracted for a single enforcement action.

A Pattern Consistent With the Rest of the Series

Read against Parts I through III, the flaring record is not an isolated environmental footnote. It is the same structural imbalance this series has documented in the fiscal terms, the stability clause, and the decommissioning liability, now visible in environmental enforcement:

A Contractor whose commitments were not met, a regulator whose response was to relax the rule rather than enforce it, a judiciary that found the relaxation lawful, and a public that bears the atmospheric and reputational cost while the financial penalty remains, by independent estimate, a fraction of the damage.

The scale of what is now at stake is only growing. Stabroek Block output surpassed 918,000 barrels per day in February 2026, with the consortium targeting 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030 and ExxonMobil now seeking environmental authorization for a further 35-well exploration campaign running through 2033. Guyana’s environmental regulator has, for the first time, requested a cumulative impact study covering that new campaign alongside all other offshore activity — a modest but real acknowledgment that project-by-project review has not been sufficient. Whether that acknowledgment translates into enforcement, rather than another accommodation, is the question this series leaves the public, and the Government, to answer.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

In concluding this series, we are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Department of Energy:

  1. What is the current cumulative total, in both Guyana dollars and US dollars, that ExxonMobil and its partners have paid in flaring penalties since December 2019, broken down by year and incident?
  2. What analysis, if any, did the EPA conduct before extending the permitted continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days in 2021, and will that analysis be published?
  3. Does the Government consider the current US$50-per-tonne flaring penalty rate to reflect the actual environmental and climate cost of the emissions, and if not, what rate would it consider adequate?
  4. In light of the cumulative impact study now being requested for the proposed 35-well exploration campaign, will the EPA apply the same cumulative standard retroactively to the flaring record of the currently producing FPSOs?

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial.

This concludes The Stabroek Surrender. Across four parts, this series has examined the fiscal terms, the stability clause that locked them in place, the decommissioning liability Guyana is pre-funding without safeguard, and the flaring record that has outpaced enforcement. ,The throughline is consistent: a Government that entered a defining national contract from a position of weakness, and has since treated every mechanism for correcting that weakness — renegotiation, arbitration exposure, financial safeguards, environmental enforcement — as a fixed cost of doing business rather than a lever available to a sovereign state. The 592Guardian will continue reporting on the audit void and the question of government complicity in a future series.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

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“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

OP-ED BY DR.VINCENT ADAMS

Laboratory analysis confirms contaminant concentrations in local water supplies at 630 times the safe regulatory limit, a finding that public health experts say makes Guyana Water Inc.’s recent statement appear irresponsible and dangerously dismissive.

Upon reading the July 5, 2026 edition of THE 592 GUARDIAN summarizing the Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC) 2025 findings on drinking water quality in Regions 4, 7 and 10, I was embarrassed and astounded by the Guyana Water Inc’s (GWI) statement reported in the July 3, 2026 Kaieteur News article that “Water quality issues flagged by PUC affect only taste, colour and appearance, not safety”.

True to the Govt’s code of conduct, GWI attempts to deceive the people, not only by leaving out the actual measurements that would make it impossible to back up their ludicrous claim, but also insultingly tells the people not to believe the coffee coloured water they see with their own eyes. This GWI statement is nothing but irresponsible, callous and dangerous to the people’s health.

This issue is close to home for yours truly, since I happen to be one of the 11 Engineers specially trained by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to establish and run the GWI (originally GUYWA) initiated in 1972; so, knows first-hand of the world class Water Authority handed over to the PPPC Govt in 1992, only to see it descend to this abbys of incompetence and neglect of its sacred mandate to provide reliable, clean and safe water to the public. Instead, the people are heartlessly advised that it is no big deal for them to drink water that is perilous to their health, while certainly not the same water consumed by Govt officials and their families.

In a normal country, it would have been an oxymoron for a country to be dubbed “the land of many waters” with “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” (Poet Samuel Coleridge).

The data analyses and facts – Human beings can survive without oil, electricity, etc., but never without water! A safe water supply is guided by scientifically developed safe standards and undoubtedly the most essential substance for the sustenance of human life. Consequently, let’s address the three contaminants highlighted by the PUC that falls out of the range of safe standards. They are: pH, turbidity and iron.

pH – The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with lower pH values corresponding to higher acidity. However, it is most important to note that the pH scale is logarithmic and not linear, meaning each unit change represents a 10-fold change in acidity. For example, a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 5, and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 6. This means that the 3.7 pH measured at Linden is 630 times more acidic than the World Health Organization (WHO) safe pH limit of 6.5.

Highly acidic water at 630 times the safe limit is corrosive and can dissolve toxic heavy metals such the copper and lead from the plumbing lines, which wind up in your drinking water. Ingesting these metals can cause serious health problems such as cancer, stroke, kidney disease, memory loss, high blood pressure, reduced bone density, etc. It is more toxic for children, as their growing bodies absorb these metals much quicker. Further, water with a high acidity has likely not gone through proper filtration and may still contain pollutants like pesticides and chemicals making the water unsafe to drink.

Turbidity – As clearly defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “Turbidity is a measure of the cloudiness of water, and the higher the levels the more particles (which carry the pollutants) are present. It is used to indicate water quality and filtration effectiveness (such as whether disease-causing organisms are present) and higher levels are associated with higher levels of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria.”

Notwithstanding that one doesn’t need a measurement to verify the obvious that coffee coloured water at Grove means extremely high turbidity, the actual measurement of 29 times the US EPA and WHO limits plainly points out the grave health risk of consuming such water that may indicate presence of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria. Substantively, owing to constant flooding, flood water with disease-causing microorganisms from latrines, septic tanks, manholes and pipes transporting raw city sewage, will most likely leak into the drinking water pipe network; thus, testing for the presence of these microorganisms must be conducted, especially during and after floods.

Iron – Though at a high level of 3.35 mg/l, or 11 times the WHO guideline, high iron content is not a major health concern, and high levels are expected from the upper of the two major aquifers supplying Georgetown and the East Coast of Demerara. However, high iron levels may create operational and cosmetic problems, staining plumbing fixtures, sinks, dishes, and laundry with a rust color; and can build up inside pipes, reducing water flow and clogging appliances like dishwashers and water heaters.

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

I hope this missive will implore the GWI to immediately do the right and responsible thing to apologetically retract their advice to consume such unsafe water, and to follow-up with urgent actions to satisfy its only mandate to provide the nation with mankind’s most precious substance and basic need for a safe water supply, especially in a nation with the highest GDP.

In the meantime, I humbly wish to dissuade the public from following GWI’s inexplicably advice that the water is safe, despite its irrefutable scientific indications of being hazardous to human health.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊OBJECTIVITY  JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

On Freddie Kissoon’s defense of the President’s farm — and what he leaves out about public trust

The Editorial Board   |   July , 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s latest column asks Guyanese to accept a strange inversion: that scrutiny of a sitting president’s expanding commercial farm is not accountability journalism but an imported Western prejudice, and that the proper comparison is a US senator’s index fund. It is worth taking the argument seriously enough to show precisely where it fails, because the failure is instructive — not just about the President’s farm, but about the model of public service some of Guyana’s most prominent commentators are now asking the country to accept.

THE CATEGORY ERROR AT THE CENTER OF THE ARGUMENT

Kissoon’s entire case rests on a single comparison: Western cabinet ministers and senators hold shares and stocks, so why shouldn’t a Guyanese president hold and expand a business? The comparison collapses on inspection, because it treats two entirely different things as identical.

A senator’s shareholding is passive capital. It sits in a portfolio, often in a blind trust precisely so the office-holder cannot direct it, and it generates no interaction with the daily machinery of the state that the senator does not also control through public, recorded votes.

An actively expanding agricultural estate is not passive capital. It requires land, financing, inputs, and market access — every one of which touches an apparatus the President himself sits atop: land allocation and titling, agricultural licensing and subsidy regimes, financial sector oversight, and public procurement.

 The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether a Head of State can expand a commercial enterprise while he alone controls the levers that determine whether that expansion succeeds, without the public being able to see whether those levers were touched.

That is not a cultural argument about the Global South versus the West. It is a structural one about where power and profit intersect, and it applies with equal force in Washington, London, or Georgetown. The reason Western democracies build disclosure regimes around exactly this intersection is not colonial condescension. It is because they learned, the hard way and often through scandal, that this is precisely the point where public office curdles into private enrichment.

The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether he can expand a commercial enterprise while alone controlling the levers that determine its success.

A CIVICS LESSON KISSOON SKIPPED

Kissoon invokes “almost every Cabinet Minister in the Western world” as though the comparison ends with the fact of outside income. It does not begin there — it begins with the machinery built around that income. US federal officials file public financial disclosures annually, itemizing assets, liabilities, and outside positions, reviewed by ethics offices with statutory teeth. Many jurisdictions require divestment or blind trusts for holdings that could be affected by official decisions. Ministers in the UK register interests in a public record any citizen can inspect. Recusal from decisions touching a personal financial interest is not a courtesy in these systems; it is frequently a legal obligation with consequences for breach.

None of this is a favour these democracies extend to their officials. It is the price those officials pay for the public’s continued trust — a trade-off, not an exemption.        Kissoon’s own aside about “open source data” gestures at exactly this without following it to its conclusion: the reason Western officials can hold outside interests with less public alarm is that the interest, its scale, and its interaction with official decisions are open to inspection by design. Remove the disclosure architecture and keep only the outside income, and you have not imported the Western model. You have taken the one part of it that benefits the office-holder and discarded the part that protects the public.

Guyana does have an Integrity Commission and an asset-declaration regime on paper. Whether that regime functions as a genuine check or as a formality that can be preempted or left unenforced is a separate question — and it is the operative one. A disclosure law that exists in statute but is not meaningfully enforced does not give a public official the protection of the Western model Kissoon invokes. It gives him the appearance of that protection while leaving the public with none of its substance.

WHAT PUBLIC SERVICE ACTUALLY IS

Kissoon’s column is, at bottom, a plea on behalf of officials who sacrifice their health and years to public life and deserve a secure retirement. That plea deserves a serious answer, not a dismissive one: a modest, publicly-funded pension for former Heads of State is a legitimate policy question, and reasonable people can debate its design.

But that is a different question entirely from whether a sitting president may grow a private commercial enterprise, in real time, while he holds the very authority that could make or break it.

Public office in a democracy is not entered into as a business opportunity deferred. It is a choice — freely made, never coerced — to place the machinery of the state at the service of the public rather than the office-holder’s private interests for the duration of the term. That is the whole of the bargain. An official who wanted to build a commercial empire unconstrained by conflict-of-interest scrutiny remained free, at every point before taking the oath of office, not to seek it. Having sought it, and having accepted the trust that comes with it, the obligation runs toward the public that conferred it — not toward a theory, borrowed or otherwise, that recasts personal enrichment in office as trailblazing.

This publication has reported separately, and in detail, on the specific financing and provenance questions surrounding the President’s Long Creek estate. This editorial does not restate that reporting. It responds to Kissoon’s argument on its own terms, because the argument — that scrutiny itself is the imported prejudice, and that expansion of commercial interests by a sitting Head of State is a matter of pride rather than disclosure — is one Guyanese should be wary of accepting regardless of what the underlying facts of any single case turn out to be.

Weaken the principle to defend one presidency, and it will not be there to constrain the next.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian

The Abandonment Gamble: Who Pays When Exxon Walks Away?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Independent Accountability Journalism ♦Guyana

EDITORIAL♦THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part III of IV.The Abandonment Gamble

The Abandonment Gamble: Who Pays When Exxon Walks Away?

Guyana is advancing billions of dollars to ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to fund decommissioning decades before a single well is capped — with no trust account, no escrow, and no enforceable guarantee the money will still exist when the bill comes due.

Part I of this series examined the arithmetic of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement (PSA); Part II examined how Article 32’s stability clause froze that arithmetic beyond the reach of any future Guyanese government.                                        Part III turns to a liability few Guyanese have been told to think about at all: what happens to the Stabroek Block’s platforms, pipelines and wellheads once the oil runs out, who pays to remove them, and whether the money set aside for that purpose will actually be there when it is needed.

The industry term is decommissioning, or abandonment: the process of safely plugging wells, dismantling platforms, and removing subsea infrastructure once a field stops producing. For an operation the size of the Stabroek Block — four FPSOs and counting, with more under construction — specialists estimate the eventual cost in the hundreds of millions to billions of US dollars. Under the 2016 PSA, Guyana is already paying for it. The question this editorial puts on the record is where that money is going, and whether it will still be there in twenty years.

How the Mechanism Works

Under Section 20.1(d)(gg) of the PSA and Section 3.1 of Annex C, the Accounting Procedure, ExxonMobil and its partners are permitted to tabulate a projected abandonment budget and begin recovering a portion of that budget through cost oil years — potentially decades — before decommissioning actually takes place. In other words, the Contractor does not wait until the wells are exhausted to start being repaid for the cost of eventually plugging them. It bills Guyana’s oil now, against a bill that may not come due until the 2040s or later.

PSA Section 20.1(d)(gg) and Annex C, Section 3.1 (as publicly reported)

The Contractor may establish a budget for abandonment costs and recover a portion of that budget as Recoverable Contract Costs in advance of the Petroleum Operations to which it relates, without a requirement that the recovered funds be set aside in a dedicated account for that purpose.

That last clause is the crux of the problem. Advance cost recovery for decommissioning is not, on its own, unusual in the international oil and gas industry. What is unusual — described by one American petroleum industry veteran as the most unusual provision he had encountered in any PSA he had reviewed — is that Guyana’s agreement contains no requirement that the money recovered for abandonment be placed in a trust account, an escrow, or any other ring-fenced instrument earmarked exclusively for decommissioning. The cash simply flows to the Contractor, indistinguishable from any other recovered cost, with nothing in the Agreement compelling ExxonMobil, Hess or CNOOC to preserve it for the purpose it was billed for.

What Independent Analysts Have Found

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), in a report authored by its then-director of financial analysis, Tom Sanzillo, quantified the exposure: Guyana is projected to advance more than G$666.1 billion — approximately US$3.2 billion — in cash to the oil companies, purportedly to cover future decommissioning costs, with no requirement that the companies set the money aside to guarantee it will be there when abandonment work actually begins.

Standard industry practice establishes that a trust account should be set up for a fossil fuel drilling and extraction project of this kind, one that can only be drawn upon to pay abandonment costs when they occur. Guyana’s agreement does not require that any such account be established.

— IEEFA, summarizing the Sanzillo decommissioning report

IEEFA’s warning was blunt: absent independent oversight of how the advanced funds are used, ExxonMobil and its partners have, in the organization’s words, a real opportunity to pocket the money — and if the companies were to sell their interests in the block before decommissioning is complete, passing the liability to a smaller, less capitalized successor, Guyanese taxpayers could be left to cover the shortfall themselves.

A University of Houston petroleum-accounting instructor, reviewing the same provisions for a separate analysis, reached a similar conclusion, noting that allowing cost recovery for abandonment twenty to thirty years before the funds are actually spent represents a significant financial benefit to the companies from a cash-flow and net-present-value standpoint, and stated plainly that it was the most unusual provision of its kind he had encountered in any production sharing agreement.

Guyana is paying today for a bill that will not come due for a generation — and trusting, on nothing but the word of three multinational companies, that the money will still be there.

The Change-of-Control Risk

This is not an abstract worry. The Stabroek consortium has already changed hands once at the corporate level: Chevron’s acquisition of Hess closed in 2025 only after an International Chamber of Commerce tribunal resolved a dispute between Exxon and CNOOC over rights of first refusal under the Joint Operating Agreement governing the block. Ownership of Guyana’s most consequential offshore asset is not static, and nothing in the publicly known terms of the PSA prevents a future sale of any partner’s interest to a smaller, thinner-capitalized operator less equipped to fund a multi-billion-dollar abandonment programme when the time comes.

Guyana’s Oil Czars.

Should that happen after the advanced decommissioning funds have already been recovered as cost oil, Guyana would be left in the position IEEFA warned of: having paid in advance for a service that a departed or under-capitalized operator may no longer be able to deliver, with no trust account to fall back on and no statutory lien to enforce.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Clause

Read alongside Part II of this series, the abandonment provisions complete a picture of a Government that structured away not only its fiscal upside but its long-term protections. Article 32’s stability clause means Guyana cannot unilaterally impose a decommissioning trust requirement after the fact without the Contractor’s consent and, per the logic already established, without potentially triggering a compensation claim for interfering with the Contractor’s position under the Agreement. The absence of ring-fencing was not an oversight later correctable by ordinary legislation — it was locked in alongside everything else in 2016, and it remains locked in today.

Guyana’s own 2023 Model Production Sharing Agreement for future deepwater licences includes a dedicated Article 41 on Abandonment, evidence that the Ministry of Natural Resources has since recognized the need for clearer decommissioning terms in contracts going forward. But that model applies only to new acreage. It does nothing to retrofit protection into the Stabroek Block, where the overwhelming majority of Guyana’s current and projected oil revenue — and liability — resides.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

We are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Department of Energy, and the Guyana Revenue Authority:

What is the current cumulative sum recovered by ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC as abandonment-related Recoverable Contract Costs under Section 20.1(d)(gg) and Annex C, Section 3.1, to date?
Has any portion of those recovered funds been placed in a trust account, escrow, or any instrument segregated from the Contractor’s general corporate assets? If not, why not, and does the Government intend to negotiate one?
In the event of a future sale of any partner’s interest in the Stabroek Block, what contractual mechanism, if any, requires the incoming party to assume full decommissioning liability and demonstrate the financial capacity to meet it?
Does the Government consider the absence of a decommissioning trust requirement in the 2016 PSA to be a defect correctable through negotiation with the Contractor, or does it consider Article 32 to place that correction permanently out of reach absent the Contractor’s consent

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial.

Part IV of The Stabroek Surrender will examine the flaring record at the Stabroek Block against the environmental standards the Government and the Contractor agreed to in 2016, and the enforcement gap between violation and consequence.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Long Creek Arithmetic

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism · Georgetown, Guyana

The Long Creek Arithmetic: Satellite Measurement Puts Ali’s Estate at 155 Acres — More Than Double What He Claimed on Facebook Live

President’s denial rests on assertion, not documents. Ours rests on Geospatial  Vector Data                                                      By the 592 Guardian Editorial Board · Georgetown · July 2026

President Irfaan Ali went on Facebook Live Thursday to dismiss questions about his Long Creek estate as settled business. He offered no acreage figure of his own beyond a denial — insisting only that the property is “not even half” the roughly 150 acres Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly claimed, which would place it under 75 acres. He offered no title, no survey, no lease schedule, and no answer to the one question that actually matters: how large is this operation, in fact?

We decided to answer it ourselves. Using satellite imagery centred on the estate’s coordinates — approximately 6°20’44″N, 58°1’W, off the Linden-Soesdyke Highway — this newsroom traced the visible cleared and developed footprint of the property: the poultry houses, shade houses, feedlots, access roads, ponds, and cultivated blocks that are plainly discernible from above. The resulting polygon measures 627,128.62 square metres, with a perimeter of 3,502.71 metres. That converts to 155.0 acres — a figure derived from a reproducible measurement tool, not from a press conference.

WHAT DEMERARA WAVES REPORTING ESTABLISHED

In reporting published Thursday afternoon, Denis Chabrol recorded Dr Ali maintaining that his farm was “not a discovery” and that Mr Mohamed had long known of its existence. The President disputed the size Mr Mohamed has claimed, saying it was “not even half” of that figure, but at no point in the remarks Chabrol reported did Dr Ali state what the actual acreage is. He also did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure Mr Mohamed has put forward, and he did not address the opposition’s calls — from WIN, APNU, and the AFC alike — for full public disclosure of his assets.

That combination is worth sitting with. A sitting president disputed a specific number without supplying an alternative one, declined to engage the disclosure question entirely, and asked the public to accept his account of scale on his word alone. This newsroom does not accept assertions in place of documentation, from any official, on any file.

THE MEASUREMENT

Our trace was conservative by design. We bounded only the cleared and operational area visible on current satellite imagery — the developed core of the estate — using Google Earth’s polygon-area tool rather than manual point-to-point distance estimates, which we tested first and discarded precisely because they cannot be defended without known bearings between measurement points. The polygon method requires no such assumption: it computes area directly from a traced boundary anchored to visible terrain features, and it is independently reproducible by anyone with access to the same imagery and coordinates.

Geospatial Vector Data points

Source

 Claimed Acreage

 Basis
President Ali (FB Live, July 9)

 Under 75 acres

 Verbal assertion; no figure, no documentation offered
Azruddin Mohamed

 ~150 acres

 Public statement to Demerara Waves
The 592 Guardian (satellite trace)

 155.0 acres

 Polygon-area measurement, cleared footprint, coord. ~6°20’44″N 58°1’W

Two things follow from this table. First, our independently measured figure is more than double the ceiling implied by the President’s own words — he said the property was under half of 150 acres, and our trace shows a developed footprint slightly above 150. Second, and more strikingly, our number essentially corroborates Mr Mohamed’s public figure, landing within roughly three percent of his ~150-acre estimate — a variance well inside the ordinary margin of tracing a cleared-field boundary by eye on satellite imagery. The President did not just understate the acreage. He understated it in the direction that happens to contradict the one figure already in the public record, while declining to offer any figure of his own that could be checked.

Exact measurements totalling 155 acres

WHAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

— The President did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure, but he also did not explain, beyond stating that loans were taken and profits reinvested, how that scale of financing and operation was assembled or documented.

— He did not address the calls by WIN, APNU, and the AFC for public disclosure of his full asset holdings — a call this newsroom regards as the more consequential of the two questions on the table.

— He referenced disclosures made to the Integrity Commission “in and out of government” without releasing those disclosures, or any documentation of them, to the public.

— He threatened to release the contents of a private text message from Mr Mohamed that he characterised as blackmail, but did not do so — a threat that itself belongs in the disclosure conversation, not as a substitute for it.

WHY THIS MATTERS

This is not a dispute over a rounding error. The gap between “under 75 acres” and a measured 155 is not the kind of gap that survives good-faith imprecision — it is the kind of gap that exists when a public official prefers a smaller number be believed than the one the land itself will show. Guyana’s citizens are entitled to know the scale of wealth accumulated by those who hold executive office, particularly when that wealth is accumulated contemporaneously with decisions over state land, leases, and the very highway corridor on which this estate sits. A verbal denial, however forcefully delivered on a livestream, is not disclosure. A traceable satellite measurement, published with its method and coordinates so that any reader can check it, is a starting point for one.

We invite the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, or any competent authority to publish the actual lease schedule and surveyed acreage for this property. Until that happens, the public record now includes a reproducible independent measurement — and it does not support the President’s account.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Title Convicts the Argument

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

The Title Convicts the Argument

Vincent Alexander’s Semantic Gymnastics Cannot Obscure What His Own Designation Confesses

THE ARGUMENT, STATED PLAINLY

Vincent Alexander appeared on Politics 101 this week to deliver what he clearly intended as a constitutionally grounded defense of his continued tenure as an opposition-nominated GECOM Commissioner. He drew a distinction — framed in the language of legal interpretation — between a political ‘representative’ and a constitutional ‘nominee.’ A representative, he argued, serves a party’s interest and is not his own. A nominee, by contrast, is simply an appropriate person placed into office, unbound to any political principal.

On its face, the distinction has a kernel of doctrinal legitimacy. The post-2001 constitutional framework did deliberately transform GECOM from a temporary, election-cycle body into a permanent institution, and the architecture of that framework does vest commissioners with certain insulation from recall. The Guardian does not dispute those textual facts.

What we dispute — emphatically — is the conclusion Alexander draws from them: that he is therefore not accountable to, or in any meaningful sense the creature of, the parliamentary opposition that placed him there. That claim does not survive contact with the  words printed beside his name every time he sits at the GECOM table.

He is not called the ‘Constitutional Commissioner.’ He is called the ‘Opposition Commissioner.’ His title is his confession.

WHEN THE LABEL COLLAPSES THE ARGUMENT

Alexander’s semantic framework requires us to believe that the word‘ nominee’ is constitutionally sterile — that it describes a process of selection without carrying any residual meaning about the selector’s intent or the selectee’s expected orientation.

This is an argument that could only be made by someone who has already decided where he wishes to land.

Consider what we actually know. Alexander was not surfaced through a merit-based public process. He was not identified by an independent panel, a civil society search committee, or any body with a mandate to find the most appropriate person irrespective of political affiliation. He was put forward by the parliamentary opposition precisely because he was trusted to reflect opposition interests at the Commission table.

That is not an allegation. That is a description of how Guyana’s constitutional bargain operates in practice

The framers of the 2001 reforms understood this. The structure of a three-plus-three nominated commission, with a seventh member chosen by the President from a list proposed by the opposition, is not designed to produce six political eunuchs and one referee. It is designed to produce a body in which partisan interests are represented, balanced, and ultimately transcended through institutional process. ‘Nominee’ does not mean ‘apolitical.’

It means ‘placed there with trust, now expected to exercise independent judgment within the institution.’ Those are very different things.

Alexander is collapsing the second part of that formulation — the expectation of independence — into a denial of the first part, the political origin of his appointment. He is using the independence he is supposed to exercise as a shield against the accountability he is supposed to bear.

That is not constitutional fidelity. That is sophistry.

THE VETTING PROCESS HE INVOKES IS THE PROCESS THAT CONDEMNS HIM

Alexander made a telling concession, whether or not he recognized it as such. He acknowledged that his appointment involved a qualification test, a vetting process. He invokes this to suggest that the quality of his selection insulates him from the authority of those who selected him.

But this argument runs directly into its own logic. If he passed a vetting process administered by the parliamentary opposition — a process designed to determine whether he was aligned, trusted, and appropriate for the role from their perspective — then the vetting process itself confirms that he was appointed as an opposition actor.

He cannot now invoke the rigor of that process to escape the political character of what it produced.

PERMANENCY IS NOT IMMUNITY

Let us grant Alexander the constitutional point on tenure. He is correct that the modern GECOM framework does not include a recall mechanism triggered by a change in opposition leadership. The constitution’s removal provisions are narrow: medical incapacity, resignation, or proven misconduct. A political transition at the level of the parliamentary opposition does not automatically create a vacancy.

But there is a profound difference between ‘cannot be removed by political fiat’ and ‘is not politically accountable in any sense.’ The Guardian is not arguing that a new opposition leader can simply ring Alexander and instruct him to clear his desk. We are arguing that Alexander’s claim to be untethered from the opposition — to be a free constitutional actor serving only the national interest — is a fiction that his own conduct, his own title, and the circumstances of his own appointment all contradict.

Permanency of tenure is a structural protection designed to insulate the institution from short-term political manipulation. It is not a philosophical statement about the nature of the commissioner’s identity.

Alexander has converted a procedural safeguard into an ontological claim.                            He is not merely saying he cannot be removed. He is saying he was never really an opposition commissioner in any meaningful sense.                     That second claim is not supported by the constitution, by the history of his appointment, or by the English language.

Permanency of tenure protects the institution. It does not launder the politics out of the man.

THE JAMAICA MODEL: VIRTUE SIGNALLING OR GENUINE REFORM?

It is worth noting that Alexander himself acknowledged, in the same broadcast, that the current GECOM structure has repeatedly succumbed to ‘parochial party politics.’ He is correct. The commission has been gridlocked, manipulated, and reduced — in his own words — to producing partisan arbiters rather than independent constitutional actors.

His proposed solution is the Jamaican model: balanced partisan representation alongside independent civil society experts, with consensus-driven leadership requiring mutual consent from both political and civil society members to elect a chairperson and Chief Elections Officer.

The Guardian has no objection to this reform agenda on its merits. But we register the irony with full force.

Alexander is proposing structural reforms specifically designed to prevent the kind of partisan capture he has spent this broadcast denying exists.

If opposition commissioners are truly independent nominees with no obligation to their political principals, there is no partisan capture problem to solve. The fact that he sees a problem — and that his solution requires building in structural mechanisms to counteract political dominance — confirms that the political character of commissioner appointments is exactly as real as his critics suggest.

You cannot simultaneously argue that you are free of political obligation and that the system needs to be redesigned because political obligation is corroding it. Alexander is making both arguments in the same sitting.

That is not intellectual coherence. That is a man constructing the most convenient argument available for each moment of a difficult conversation.

THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Vincent Alexander is an intelligent, experienced electoral administrator. His years of service at GECOM are not in dispute, and his command of procedural and constitutional detail is genuine. None of that is the point.

The point is this: he was appointed by the parliamentary opposition because they trusted him to be their man at the table. He has served in that capacity, under that title, for years. When the political winds shifted and that same opposition signalled that his time should end, he reached for a constitutional argument that transforms his political appointment into a transcendent act of constitutional stewardship.

That argument is not available to him — not because the constitution does not protect commissioner tenure, but because the protection the constitution offers is procedural, not philosophical. It tells us how he can be removed. It does not tell us that his appointment was without political character, that his title means nothing, or that the opposition’s trust in him at the moment of selection carries no weight when examining his continued conduct.

The 592 Guardian calls it plainly:  this is a man using legal vocabulary to do the work of political self-preservation. The constitution is being conscripted into a personal cause.                                                                                       Guyanese deserve commissioners who either serve their appointing authority with transparency and honest acknowledgment of that relationship, or who have genuinely transcended it through demonstrated independence over time.                                                What they do not deserve is a commissioner who claims independence as a convenience while his own designation tells a different story.

The title ‘Opposition Commissioner’ is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a description. And descriptions carry meaning — even when inconvenient.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Stability Trap: How Guyana Signed Away the Right to Govern Its Own Oil Sector

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Independent Accountability Journalism  ·  Guyana

EDITORIAL

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part II of IV  ·  The Stability Trap

The Stability Trap: How Guyana Signed Away the Right to Govern Its Own Oil Sector

Article 32 of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement did not just fix a fiscal formula. It froze the State’s sovereign authority in place, and handed a private arbitral tribunal in Washington the final word on whether Guyana may ever legislate, regulate, or tax its own resource sector again.

In Part I of this series, The 592 Guardian examined the arithmetic of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) — the 2% royalty, the Article 15.4 tax-payment mechanism under which the Government of Guyana, not the companies, discharges the Contractor’s income tax liability, and a cost-recovery ceiling that has allowed ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to post combined profits several multiples of Guyana’s own profit-oil share. Chartered Accountant Christopher Ram’s analysis, cited in Part I, established that on the Agreement’s own terms, the arithmetic of the deal was never close to a genuine 50-50 split.

Part II turns from arithmetic to architecture. However bad the money is, it can in principle be renegotiated — new governments, new parliaments, new public pressure can in theory revisit a bad bargain. Article 32 exists precisely to foreclose that possibility. It is titled, without euphemism, “Stability of Agreement,” and it is the mechanism by which the 2016 PSA converts a one-time fiscal concession into a permanent constitutional constraint.

What Article 32 Actually Does

The clause’s operative logic, confirmed across multiple public accounts of the Agreement’s text, is straightforward and severe. It prohibits the Government from unilaterally renegotiating, or in any manner seeking to “avoid, alter, or limit,” the conditions of the Agreement without the written consent of the Contractor — ExxonMobil Guyana Limited and its partners, Hess and CNOOC.

Article 32 — Stability of Agreement (as publicly described)

 Any alteration of the Agreement, or the imposition of new petroleum-related fiscal obligations, requires the written consent of the Contractor. The Government may not unilaterally renegotiate, avoid, alter, or limit the conditions of the Agreement.

The current PPP/C administration has treated this clause not as a source of shame but as a shield. Government officials have repeatedly cited Article 32 as the reason the 2016 terms cannot be revisited, arguing that contract sanctity must be honoured regardless of how the terms were arrived at. ExxonMobil Guyana’s own president has publicly confirmed the company’s unwillingness to consent to renegotiation, which is, of course, exactly the point of the clause: it was drafted so that the party who benefits from the status quo would never have to agree to change it.

This is the trap. A stability clause does not merely protect an investment from expropriation, which is a legitimate and common feature of resource contracts worldwide. This one goes further: it protects the entire fiscal architecture — the royalty rate, the tax-shifting mechanism, the cost-recovery ceiling, the absence of ring-fencing — from any future government action, indefinitely, unless Exxon and its partners agree otherwise. A government that signs such a clause is not protecting its investment climate. It is pre-emptively disarming its own legislature.

A government does not need to be corrupt to sign away its sovereignty. It only needs to be outmatched at the table — and to fail to tell the country what it gave up.

The Compensation Mechanism: Taxation Without Representation, in Reverse

Where Article 32 is silent on renegotiation, it is explicit on consequence. Public summaries of the Agreement’s fiscal-stability provisions confirm that if the Government does introduce a new law, regulation, or fiscal measure that adversely affects the Contractor’s economic position under the Agreement — a new environmental levy, a windfall tax, a change to the exchange-control regime — the Government is contractually obligated to compensate the Contractor for the adverse effect, restoring it to the same economic position it would have occupied had the change never been made.

In practice, this means the National Assembly retains the formal power to legislate, but not the practical power to legislate at Exxon’s expense. Any parliamentary act that touches the economics of the Stabroek Block becomes, under the PSA’s own terms, a compensable event — a bill the Guyanese taxpayer must eventually pay, on top of whatever tax or regulatory change was intended to raise revenue or correct an abuse in the first instance. The State is free to govern, provided it is willing to indemnify the party it is attempting to govern.

Whose Court Decides? ICSID, Washington, and the End of Guyanese Jurisdiction

The stability clause’s teeth are supplied by the Agreement’s arbitration provisions. Disputes arising under the PSA — including, per the logic above, a dispute over whether a new Guyanese law has triggered the compensation obligation — are not resolved in the High Court of Guyana or the Caribbean Court of Justice. They go to international arbitration, most likely under the auspices of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank-affiliated tribunal system headquartered in Washington, D.C.

This detail should not be glossed over as ordinary commercial boilerplate. ICSID arbitration is, by design, insulated from domestic judicial review. Contracting states cannot have ICSID awards second-guessed by their own courts on jurisdictional, procedural, or merits-based grounds; the Convention establishes what specialists in the field describe as a self-contained system in which the tribunal’s ruling is close to final. A Guyanese law passed by a democratically elected National Assembly, if challenged by the Contractor as a violation of Article 32, would ultimately be judged not by a Guyanese judge applying Guyanese constitutional principles, but by an arbitral panel applying the terms of a contract signed by an outgoing government in 2016.

This is the second half of the stability trap. The first half freezes the law. The second half removes the forum in which any dispute over that freeze would be argued from Georgetown to Washington.

Sovereign Immunity, Waived in Advance

The final component completes the structure. By entering into an arbitration agreement of this kind, the Government of Guyana is understood to have waived its sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction of the arbitral process — the same doctrine that would ordinarily allow a state to resist being hauled before a foreign or international tribunal without its case-by-case consent. Courts around the world, including the UK Supreme Court in its 2026 ruling on ICSID enforcement in the conjoined Spain and Zimbabwe cases, have continued to affirm that a state’s accession to arbitration under the ICSID framework functions as a clear and binding submission to that jurisdiction, whatever domestic political objections might later arise. The immunity is not lost through some future act of the Guyanese state; it was surrendered the day the PSA was signed, for every year the Agreement remains in force.

Guyana did not merely agree to arbitrate a dispute. It agreed, in 2016, on behalf of every subsequent Parliament and every subsequent generation of Guyanese voters, that it would not resist being ordered to pay.

What This Means for Guyana’s Democratic Governance

Strip away the legal terminology and the picture is unambiguous. A future Government of Guyana — responding to a spill, a labor abuse, a public health finding, a shift in global tax norms, or simply a mandate from voters to capture more value from the country’s own resource — cannot act without first calculating what it will owe ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC for the privilege of governing. And if a dispute arises over that calculation, it is not a Guyanese court, nor the CCJ, nor the National Assembly, that has the final say. It is an arbitral tribunal sitting under ICSID rules, applying a contract that a public increasingly regards as having surrendered more than it secured.

This is not a hypothetical erosion of sovereignty. It is a structural one, written into the founding contract of Guyana’s oil era, and defended today by the very government that says it has no choice but to honour it.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

In keeping with this outlet’s accountability mandate, we are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Attorney General’s Chambers, and the Department of Energy:

  1. Has the Government of Guyana, at any point since 2020, sought or received legal advice quantifying the compensation exposure created by Article 32 for any proposed environmental, fiscal, or labour legislation? If so, will that advice be№”# published?
  2. Has ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, Hess, or CNOOC ever been asked for written consent to amend any term of the 2016 PSA, and if so, on what date, and with what result?
  3. What is the Government’s position on whether a dispute over Article 32 compensation would proceed to ICSID arbitration, and has any such claim, formal or informal, ever been raised by the Contractor?
  4. Given the Vice President’s public statements on the limits of Guyana’s ownership rights under the Agreement, does the Government consider Article 32 compatible with the sovereignty protections of the Constitution of Guyana?

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial

Part III of The Stabroek Surrender will examine the decommissioning liability structure embedded in the Agreement — the mechanism by which cash is advanced to the oil companies decades before it is needed for decommissioning, with no enforceable requirement that it be set aside.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Ali Farm -Fish, Fowl, and Foals -Pt IV

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The 592 Guardian◊Accountability Journalism◊ July 2026

The –Fish, Fowl, and Foals -Pt IV

Pres Ali has contributed to the broadening story of blackbelly sheep, prime cattle, land and a mindboggling array of other rich attractions.  I thank the president, commend him.  Now I share some words of my own on what’s part farm, part estate, part futuristic model, part politics, part commerce, and part of many unknowns.

First, on such a gargantuan development, the president may not be the only investor and overseer.  He may have company, a pantheon of illustrious names and personalities.  Who else among locals, who from foreign shores, have hand and interest in this business of shrimp, shrub, and so much more that captivates the mind?

Second, for a project of this monstrous expanse, much seed money and maintenance (operational) money had to go into it.  To get it going, to keep it going.  From the revelations, the millions multiplied by the hundreds, then rolled into the billions.  Those dollar numbers look plausible, even though on the lean and mean side.   From where that money came?  Who are the people with that kind of money?  Those are two of the first questions that stir.

For color, I recall how many regional and international kingmakers came to Guyana during that distressing 2019-20 time.  Some were already resident here.  Many Guyanese should recall how they involved themselves way beyond the dictates of protocol, etiquette, and accepted norms in Guyana’s politics and its domestic brawls.  Unprecedented and highly unusual, I assert.  Further, in the years since 2020, some past senior diplomatic presences have returned here in different capacities. 

Either as head of official delegations; or more stealthily.  Probably to sidestep local radars. 

Do they have any proximity, any type of association, to this Great Animal Farm deep inside the Linden Highway?  Were their involvements in the 2020 fiasco part of their initial down payments? 

With their own spreadsheets and calculators held in reserve.  Speaking for myself, I am convinced that this stunning animal farm, currently mentioned alongside his name only, is bigger than Guyana’s Pres Ali.

Third, it is surprising that there is a project with its grandiose sprawl, with all of its possibilities, is in full swing, and former president Bharrat Jagdeo is a seemingly disinterested and disengaged party.  Quite abnormal for a character of his proportions, I think.  And not to forget his history with projects of stature.

Fourth, all Guyana is aware of how big and committed Dr. Jagdeo and the PPP are on agriculture.  The sidelines and silence do not fit into the mold.  Not when there is a megaproject of this magnificence, and with agriculture and aquaculture all the rage.  Not having a say, and not knowing of this way so well-mapped out, does strike differently.  These are among the tips of the iceberg not yet sticking their noses above water.

Fifth, I recall that some blackbelly sheep were part of a country-to-country (Barbados to Guyana) transaction a few years back.  The blackbelly sheep reported on Pres Ali’s farm: are they from that flock or some other source?

Sixth, that mega-farm, a conglomerate by any reckoning, should have, as a matter of sound business practice, the export market in mind.  Quality products for quality people in quality places and at quality prices.  Scale is what matters.  I am thinking a port and an airstrip have to be part of the farm program to complete the circle.  And, considering the size of this great field of endeavor, I cannot help thinking of who, besides, President Ali, have set themselves up for some rich harvesting.  Guyanese do well to hold close to this formula: 25 X 2025 + 5.  I translate: Food security level by a stated deadline (now past), but with another half decade attached to accommodate delivery.

Last: what else could be in this Ali Animal Farm?  Plenty, I think.

Show Us the Receipts

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

EDITORIAL

Show Us the Receipts

The Long Creek estate, the financing gap, and a blackmail disclosure that came a day too late

July, 2026

The issue is no longer whether President Irfaan Ali owns the sprawling agricultural estate at Long Creek, along the Linden-Soesdyke Highway. He has acknowledged that he does. The real question, the only question that now matters, is how such a massive investment was financed.

A project reportedly featuring extensive livestock operations, aquaculture, poultry tunnels, greenhouses, orchards, heavy equipment and a 2.2-kilometre private access road inevitably invites public scrutiny. The President insists the farm was acquired before he took office, that his assets were declared to the Integrity Commission, and that no state resources were used in its development.

Those assurances, while procedurally important, are insufficient to settle growing public concern. In a democracy, transparency is the strongest antidote to suspicion, and it is the President himself who has now invited the comparison, pointing to what he has described as “a slew of loans” that financed the enterprise.

 The President should therefore voluntarily publish the documentary evidence: bank records ,loan agreements, receipts, and other financial instruments supporting the development of this enterprise. If everything was lawfully financed, full disclosure would silence speculation and reinforce public confidence in the integrity of the nation’s highest office. Declarations filed privately with the Integrity Commission are not a substitute for that disclosure; they are, by design, not open to public verification, and it is precisely that verification the public is now owed.

A FIASCO THAT HAS OUTGROWN ITS DENIALS

This is no longer a containable news cycle. It is morphing into a national controversy of  epic proportions. The Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, has called for the President’s resignation. Transparency International Guyana has taken the extraordinary step of issuing a formal statement, ceding control of any inquiry into the matter to external bodies to preserve its impartiality, and calling for an independent international probe into what it has described as potential conflicts of interest, misuse of public resources, and violations of the Public Integrity Act. That is not the language of a watchdog satisfied by a Facebook statement.

“Living high on the hog.”…..Cheddie Jagan

The President and his party, deploying tax-funded state media in the process, have responded largely by redirecting attention toward the Leader of the Opposition and his sources of income. That deflection overlooks an elementary distinction: the Leader of the Opposition was born into a business that grew, over decades, into a private commercial empire. He has never drawn a salary as a public employee, and by his own account donates his parliamentary earnings to those in need.

Whatever scrutiny his business affairs may separately deserve, it is not an answer to a question about how a sitting President financed a multi-billion-dollar agricultural estate on a public servant’s income. The two questions do not cancel each other out, and treating them as though they do is itself a form of evasion.

“If everything was lawfully financed, full disclosure would silence speculation and reinforce public confidence in the integrity of the nation’s highest office.”

THE TIMELINES DO NOT ALIGN

Several anomalies have surfaced around the question of when, precisely, this estate came into being. The President maintains the farm predates his elevation to office in 2020, though he has not named a year. As a student of agriculture, that claim invites a discerning eye. A farm operating for the better part of a decade, as the President’s defenders imply, would show it: established fruit trees with real canopy, mature root systems, orchards with visible age structure. Instead, footage and photographs circulating publicly show planting that appears, in several instances, to be under a year old — young trees, seedlings, and orchard rows still in early establishment.

Copy of original lease for 20 acs.-2011.A mere 14 % of what currently is now shown

The infrastructure tells a similar story. The access road serving the property is newly constructed, cleared and maintained, in visible contrast to neighbouring roads in the same vicinity that remain overgrown with weeds. Newly poured, weed-free roadway does not sit well beside a claim of decade-old provenance. So what, precisely, is being represented to the public? The statements and the visible evidence do not align, and that gap is now the substance of the story, not a footnote to it.

THE BLACKMAIL CLAIM THAT SURFACED TOO LATE

A further anomaly deserves its own scrutiny, separate from the financing question but no less serious. The President has stated that he was contacted with a threat — that recordings implicating him would be released unless the Government eased extradition proceedings sought by the United States against members of the Mohamed family — and that this contact came as early as Friday, July 3rd, days before the farm story broke publicly. If that account is accurate, it describes an attempt to interfere with a live extradition matter through coercion of a sitting Head of State. That is not a grievance to be aired on Facebook after the fact. It is a matter for law enforcement, and it should have been documented and reported as such at the time it occurred.

The public is owed an answer to a straightforward question:

was this alleged blackmail attempt reported to the Guyana Police Force when it was received, or at any point before it was disclosed publicly this week?

If it was reported, the President should say so, and say when. If it was not, Guyanese are entitled to ask why a sitting President sat on what he now describes as an attempt to corrupt a matter that is sub judice, disclosing it only once his own farm became the subject of public exposure. A blackmail threat reported to police upon receipt is evidence. A blackmail threat disclosed on Facebook, days later, once one’s own conduct is under fire, reads instead as a counter-narrative deployed on convenient timing.

The President cannot have it both ways: he cannot treat the matter as serious enough to invoke sub judice sensitivity around an active extradition case while simultaneously litigating it himself, unfiled and unevidenced beyond his own account, in a public statement.

Whichever it is, the sequence itself is now part of the record the public is entitled to interrogate.

THE STANDARD THE PRESIDENT SET HIMSELF

Transparency International Guyana was right to flag that timing matters here, and the pattern reinforces the concern rather than dispelling it. Each new disclosure — the scale of the estate, the age of its infrastructure, the existence of loans left unspecified, and now a law-enforcement question left unanswered — has surfaced reactively, under public pressure, rather than proactively, as the President’s own stated commitment to disclosure would require.

World –class indeed.

That pattern is, on its own, a matter of legitimate public interest, independent of whatever the underlying facts about financing eventually show.

 

The President has said the facts are capable of independent verification. The Guardian takes him at his word and renews the request made across this newsroom and beyond it: publish the loan agreements. Publish the bank records. Publish the capital and operating costs of the enterprise, exactly as he has indicated he is willing to do. Confirm, with dates, whether the alleged blackmail contact was reported to police when it was received. Anything short of that will not silence this story. It will confirm precisely what the silence has already begun to suggest.

— The Board

When Stipends and Garbage Trucks Aren’t Enough

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦TRANSPARENCY♦ OBJECTIVITY

When Stipends and Garbage Trucks Aren’t Enough— A Case of Political Patronage Masquerading as Capacity Building

Minister Priya Manickchand is right to flag the technical weaknesses of Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs). But her confession — that councillors “just don’t know what next to do” — should not be treated as a neutral administrative diagnosis. It is an admission of a far deeper political failure: decades of patronage politics that trade competence for loyalty and then attempt to paper over the consequences with money and equipment.

Let’s be clear about the sequence.

For years, political actors have selected local officials not for experience, integrity, or civic competence, but for their usefulness at election time and their willingness to follow orders.

Those actors then celebrate every donated garbage truck or salary increase as evidence of progress. But handing out trucks and stipends without insisting on merit, accountability, and clear institutional norms only deepens a cycle of dependency and dysfunction.

Training is necessary — no one disputes that. Standard operating procedures, clear written protocols, and refresher courses would undoubtedly help many councillors navigate by-laws, notice procedures, and statutory steps But training is a short-term, technocratic fix for what is fundamentally a political and cultural problem.

The minister’s proposal for SoPs will help those willing to learn; it will not replace the incentive structures that produced underqualified appointees in the first place.

Three uncomfortable truths follow.

– Material inputs don’t change incentives. A $50,000 stipend or a new truck increases resources but does nothing to alter why people were chosen. If selection remains driven by patronage, some councillors will view these resources as perks, not responsibilities.
– Knowledge without enforcement yields little. Teaching councillors how to issue notices or secure court orders is pointless if there are no consequences for chronic nonperformance, nor transparent performance metrics the public can review. Training that doesn’t link to sanctions or rewards will be treated as optional.
– Communication masks accountability gaps. Explaining statutory timeframes to frustrated residents is useful, but it can also function as an excuse. Saying “we followed the law” while failing to pursue cases, monitor contractors, or follow up on enforcement is not transparency — it’s a smokescreen.

If the Government genuinely wants functional local governance, it should combine capacity-building with structural reforms that change incentives and increase oversight:

◊ Merit-based recruitment and clear qualification standards for council candidates; require evidence of basic administrative training or community service before appointment or electio
◊ Transparent performance metrics: publish annual reports from each NDC with targets (garbage collection frequency, drainage maintenance timetables, resolution rates for complaints) and publicize audits.
◊ Conditional funding: tie a portion of subventions to demonstrated performance and compliance with SoPs; withhold or reduce funds for chronic noncompliance until remedial measures are verified.
◊ Independent local ombuds offices or hotlines that investigate complaints and refer gross negligence to higher authorities.
◊ Community participation mechanisms: empower citizen oversight committees with defined roles in monitoring projects and spending, and with a direct channel to escalate issues
◊ Political parties must be pressured to stop treating local posts as patronage spoils; civil-society campaigns and media accountability can spotlight abuses and force change

 Finally, a word to residents: don’t accept platitudes. Demand visible progress, insist on published timelines, and use the new stipends as leverage — these are public funds, not gifts to be squandered. If councillors receive better pay and equipment, they must also receive clearer obligations and public scrutiny.

Minister Manickchand’s outreach to 65 of 70 NDCs is a start, but acknowledgement without action becomes complicity. Training manuals and SOPs are useful tools, but they must be embedded in a broader strategy that roots out patronage, enforces standards, and rewards competence. Otherwise, we will keep recycling the same problem: more money, more trucks, and the same structural failures dressed up as reform.