Archive for category: Accountability

592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

A Decibel Meter Is Not a Deterrent: The Kingston Seawall Pilot and the Enforcement Guyana Keeps Skipping

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OPINION BY : Staff Writer –August 2026

The Kingston Seawall now has decibel-meter signs, blinking out real-time noise readings as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest effort to confront the nuisance that has long tormented nearby residents, disturbed public spaces, and tested the patience of citizens who simply want peace after dark.

On its face, the initiative is sensible. Noise is not imaginary. It is measurable. And it is entirely reasonable for operators, patrons and the public to know when the sound they are producing has crossed from entertainment into intrusion.

But Guyana has reached the stage where the public must ask a harder question: is the Government building an enforcement system—or merely installing another public display of official concern?

A decibel sign cannot issue a warning. It cannot stop a reckless operator from turning a public space into a private nightclub. It cannot seize equipment, suspend an authorization, prosecute a repeat offender, or comfort a family whose children cannot sleep because someone has decided that their profits outrank the public’s right to peace.

A meter can measure the problem. It cannot solve it.

The law already exists

This is what makes the latest announcement so troubling. The country is not suffering because nobody has ever heard of noise regulation. Guyana already has noise-management rules. There are permissible limits. There are Environmental Authorization requirements. There are penalties. There is an Environmental Protection Agency. There is a Guyana Police Force.

So why is excessive noise still treated in far too many places as a mere inconvenience—something for citizens to endure, complain about repeatedly, and ultimately surrender to?

The answer lies not in the absence of laws, but in the absence of dependable enforcement.

Too often, the public is told to report noise. Then the report is made. The music continues. The police may or may not arrive. The operator may lower the volume for ten minutes, then turn it back up once the patrol vehicle disappears around the corner. The residents are left with the same disturbance, the same exhaustion, and the same sinking realization that the law seems firm only on paper.

That is not regulation. That is a ritual of complaint without remedy.

EPA and police: Who does what?

The EPA’s role should be clear: establish the lawful standard, monitor and document breaches, regulate environmentally authorized operations, impose compliance conditions, and take administrative or legal action against repeat offenders.

The police role should be equally clear: respond quickly where public peace is being disturbed, require the offending activity to be reduced or stopped, identify those responsible, preserve the peace, and support prosecution where an offence has been committed.

Neither agency can perform the other’s role alone. The EPA may have the technical capacity to measure noise, but it does not have the everyday street-level presence required to stop an escalating nuisance at midnight. The police may have the power to intervene on the ground, but they need reliable standards, certified readings, and a clear regulatory basis for action.

That is why the partnership matters. But collaboration must mean more than both agencies appearing in the same press release.

It must mean one functioning chain of accountability:

Alert. Response. Measurement. Warning. Order. Follow-up. Sanction.

If that chain breaks after the meter records the noise, then the entire exercise becomes little more than a taxpayer-funded electronic witness—watching the breach occur, displaying the breach in public, and doing nothing meaningful to stop it.

The missing public answers

The EPA and the National Data Management Authority must now provide the public with more than polished language about “education,” “awareness,” and “voluntary compliance.”

Those are admirable words. But they become empty words when they are used to soften the consequences for persistent offenders while residents continue to suffer.

The public deserves direct answers:

⇒ What is the precise noise limit at the Kingston Seawall during the day and at night?

⇒ Is that limit displayed beside the real-time reading so that people can understand whether the noise is lawful or excessive?

⇒ How long must a sound level remain above the threshold before the EPA and police are alerted?

⇒ Who receives that alert, and what response time is expected?

⇒ What happens when an operator refuses to comply?

⇒ How many warnings will be issued before enforcement begins?

⇒ Will repeat offenders face permit conditions, suspension, closure, charges, or prosecution?

⇒ Will the agencies publish monthly data showing alerts, inspections, complaints, warnings, repeat offenders, and cases brought before the courts?

⇒ What did the system cost to buy, install, maintain, calibrate, connect, monitor, and staff?

These are not hostile questions. They are the ordinary questions taxpayers are entitled to ask whenever public money is spent and public authority is exercised.

Voluntary compliance has limits

There is room for education. A first-time operator may not understand the applicable standard. A public display can encourage prompt adjustment. A reasonable warning can correct conduct without turning every nuisance into a confrontation.

But voluntary compliance is a beginning, not an enforcement policy.

The man who has already ignored residents, ignored warnings, ignored the law, and ignored repeated complaints does not need another educational opportunity. He needs consequences.

The business that profits from disturbing an entire neighborhood should not be allowed to treat a modest warning as a cost-free operating expense. The promoter who advertises a night of noise, congestion and disorder should not be permitted to hide behind the excuse that nobody told him the music was too loud while a decibel meter glows in plain sight.

The right of one operator to make money ends where the public’s right to sleep, study, work, recover, worship and live in peace begins.

Value for money, not technology theatre

No sensible person should oppose the use of technology to improve regulation. Real-time monitoring can be useful. Data can expose patterns. Sensors can identify repeat hotspots. Public signs can make operators more accountable. A properly designed system could make enforcement faster, fairer and less dependent on who knows whom.

But technology is only value for money when it produces measurable public benefit.

The EPA must therefore show whether the investment leads to fewer sustained breaches, fewer complaints, faster responses, stronger compliance and meaningful action against repeat offenders. If the Government cannot demonstrate those results, then the question will be unavoidable: what exactly did the taxpayer purchase—noise control, or another shiny symbol of concern?

Guyana has had enough of governance by announcement. Enough of initiatives that are launched with fanfare, photographed for publicity, and then quietly left to gather dust while the underlying problem remains untouched.

The seawall does not need a decorative scoreboard for disorder. It needs a system that works.

The public must not be the enforcement arm

Residents should not be forced to become nocturnal evidence-gatherers—recording videos from their homes, begging for intervention, making repeated calls, confronting operators at personal risk, and then being told to “report the matter” again next weekend.

That is an abdication of state responsibility.

Citizens pay taxes for agencies to regulate. They pay taxes for police to enforce the law. They should not be required to beg for the peace and quiet that the law already promises them. Let the decibel signs remain. Let the sensors collect the data. Let operators see, in real time, the point at which their activity becomes unlawful or unreasonable.

But let there be no confusion: the real test is what happens after the number turns red.

If the alert brings a rapid response; if the response produces compliance; if repeat offenders are identified and punished; if the data are published and the costs are justified—then the EPA and the police would have built something useful.

If not, the public will be left staring at another digital monument to a familiar Guyanese failure: a Government capable of measuring the nuisance, but unwilling to enforce against it.

—The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 GECOM’s Non-Answer: How a “Conclusive Statement” Ducked the One Question It Was Asked

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ANALYSISY BY : Editor– AUGUST,2026   

The Elections Commission Secretariat says it has no authority to rule on the Article 161(3)(b) impasse. But its own abstention is not neutral — it is a default ruling for indefinite tenure, and neither camp in the underlying constitutional debate has supplied a mechanism to fill the gap it leaves open.

The Guyana Elections Commission’s Secretariat yesterday issued what it plainly intended as a closing word on two festering disputes — the standoff over opposition-nominated Commissioners under Article 161(3)(b), and the parallel fight over opposition scrutineers. On the Commissioner question, GECOM said it has no legal authority to determine the validity of nominations made by the Leader of the Opposition, and that it cannot intervene in, adjudicate upon, or resolve any impasse involving persons he has nominated.

That is not a conclusion. It is a recusal — and recusal, in a standoff where one side already holds the seats, is not a neutral act. It is a ruling for the status quo, issued without GECOM having to own it as one.

THE THEORY GECOM DECLINED TO TOUCH

The constitutional debate GECOM stepped around has a name and a leading proponent: University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember, whose position is that “the Leader of the Opposition” in Article 161(3)(b) denotes an office, not a person. Wherever the phrase appears in the Constitution, it refers to whoever presently holds that office — which means the advice power the clause vests is a live, current power, not one frozen in the hands of whoever exercised it last. On this reading, three Commissioners nominated by a predecessor Opposition Leader, for a parliamentary opposition configuration that no longer exists, cannot be taken to represent a bloc that never nominated them.

Bissember’s rebuttal to the “life tenure” argument is careful, and worth stating precisely. Article 161(6) imports the removal protections of Article 225 — a Commissioner “shall not be removed therefrom or suspended from the functions thereof” absent cause such as infirmity or misconduct. Defenders of the sitting Commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin, and Desmond Trotman, all APNU-nominated — cite this as an ironclad shield. Bissember’s answer is that the question is not removal at all. It is expiry. The appointments were made within, and for, a specific opposition configuration; when that configuration was reconfigured by the 2025 election and produced a new Leader of the Opposition, the basis on which the appointments rested came to an end on its own terms. Article 225 governs cause-based removal. It was never built to answer whether a mandate has simply run its course.

Bissember offers a test to sharpen the point: reverse the 2025 result. Had the WIN-led coalition instead formed the government, with Bharrat Jagdeo or President Ali holding the office of Leader of the Opposition, few would seriously argue that Commissioners nominated by a PPP predecessor should remain in their seats once the office had passed to another party entirely.

If permanence is the rule, it has to hold in both directions — not just the direction that happens to keep the current occupants in place.

THE QUESTION BISSEMBER’S OWN LOGIC DOES NOT ANSWER

Push that reversed scenario one step further than Bissember does, and it stops being a rhetorical device and starts exposing a real structural hole.

If the 2025 outcome had gone the other way — Mohamed elected President, Jagdeo or Ali installed as Leader of the Opposition — what, on Bissember’s own reasoning, happens to Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman?

Would Norton still be saying “no vacancy ” exists here ?

They could not remain opposition Commissioners. Their mandate, by Bissember’s own account, would have expired the moment the office passed to a Leader who never nominated them and owes their appointment nothing. But they could not become government Commissioners either. Article 161(3)(a) vests the three government-side seats in the President’s own deliberate judgment — a wholly separate appointment power, textually and procedurally distinct from the advice mechanism in 161(3)(b). Nothing in the Constitution allows a sitting opposition-nominated Commissioner to migrate seats when the political wind changes. There is no clause that converts an opposition nominee into a presidential appointee by operation of law.

So in the reversed scenario, on the very logic that says their mandate expired, Alexander, Corbin and Trotman would hold no seat on the Commission at all — not the one they were nominated to, which has expired, and not the other one, which they were never appointed to and have no constitutional path into.

That is the right answer as a matter of principle. It is also the answer nobody currently arguing this dispute — not Bissember, not GECOM’s own Chairperson, not the Secretariat’s statement issued this past week  — has actually operationalized. Expiry-in-principle is not the same as a mechanism that empties the seat.

Attorney  Ralph Ramkarran has come closest to naming the gap honestly: he argues Commissioners in this position ought, as a moral imperative and a matter of standard political practice, to resign when the nominating office changes hands. That is candidly not a constitutional compulsion. It is an appeal to conscience, offered precisely because no one has found a provision that does the job automatically.

Into that gap steps the argument actually being run today by the sitting Commissioners and their defenders: there is no vacancy, and without a vacancy, there is nothing for the President to appoint anyone to — regardless of whose theory of Article 161(3)(b) is correct. It does not matter, on this account, whether Alexander’s mandate expired in principle in September 2025. He has not resigned. No court has ordered his removal. No constitutional amendment has intervened. The seat, mechanically, is occupied, and occupied seats do not create vacancies by force of academic argument.

This is the trap Bissember’s framework — for all its textual discipline — has not yet escaped, and the trap the reversed-election hypothetical makes undeniable: a theory of expiry without an accompanying mechanism of vacation is not a resolution. It is a description of a problem, dressed as an answer to it.

GECOM’S ABSTENTION IS NOT NEUTRAL

This is precisely the terrain GECOM’s Secretariat chose to avoid entirely, framing its non-answer as a jurisdictional limit rather than a substantive position. The Commission says it cannot adjudicate the impasse. It does not say why an “impasse” exists in the first place, or acknowledge that its own inaction is what allows one side of that impasse — the incumbent, APNU-nominated Commissioners — to remain in place indefinitely, by default, without GECOM ever having to defend that outcome as correct.

This is not a hypothetical asymmetry. It is the operating reality right now. The Commission’s own Chairperson, Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh, has previously taken a position closer to Bissember’s — that the Commission could not properly reconstitute itself on the opposition side until a new Leader of the Opposition was named and had submitted fresh nominees. The Secretariat’s statement yesterday does not engage that position, endorse it, or explain why it no longer governs. It simply declares the entire question outside GECOM’s remit.

A constitutional commission that will not say who is validly seated on it, while continuing to pay and convene those already seated, has not stayed neutral. It has chosen an outcome and called it an absence of one., 

THE SAME PATTERN, PLAYING OUT AGAIN ON SCRUTINEERS

The Secretariat’s statement did something similar, in miniature, on the scrutineer question. GECOM confirmed it is currently remunerating 69 scrutineers appointed by APNU+AFC, while WIN has separately submitted its own list of nominees for opposition scrutineer positions. The Secretariat was careful to say the existing arrangement should not be read as a determination that WIN is not entitled to representation — while simultaneously conceding that the Commission will, at some point, have to make a determination on the matter. It has not made one. In the meantime, the arrangement inherited from the prior opposition configuration continues to be funded and operated, exactly as with the Commissioners.

The Secretariat did rule on one narrower point: the Chief Election Officer has no independent authority to alter the existing scrutineer arrangement or implement WIN’s list unilaterally, because the CEO is, notwithstanding anything in any written law, subject to the direction and control of the Commission itself. That is a correct statement of the chain of authority. But it does not resolve anything — it simply relocates the unanswered question from the CEO’s desk to the Commission’s, where it has now sat, unresolved, through two separate public disputes on two separate questions, both governed by the same underlying constitutional logic about who a change in the Opposition Leader’s office actually displaces.

WHAT A CONCLUSIVE STATEMENT WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

GECOM did not conclude the Article 161(3)(b) impasse yesterday. It described its own unwillingness to conclude it, and it did so in language crafted to sound procedural rather than consequential. But the consequence is real: every day the Secretariat treats this as a matter for the Opposition Leader and the President alone to sort out between themselves, Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman continue to sit as Commissioners on nominations from an opposition configuration that, on a serious and carefully argued constitutional reading, ceased to exist in September 2025.

Resolving this properly requires more than GECOM restating its own limits. It requires either the courts to settle whether Article 161(3)(b) contains an implied mechanism of expiry, Parliament to legislate one where the Constitution is silent, or the Commission itself — not merely its Secretariat — to take up the question it insists it cannot touch.

Until one of those things happens, GECOM’s Wednesday statement will stand not as a resolution, but as a record of the moment the Commission chose institutional convenience over the constitutional question actually before it.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Sigma File: A Bangladesh Shell, a Billion-Dollar Water Contract,and the President’s Brother

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By: Staff Writer — The 592 Guardian– August 2026

On October 6, 2022, a company called Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc was born in Guyana. Its Certificate of Incorporation, filed with the Registrar of Companies, lists Company No. 13572. Its sole director, secretary, and incorporator was a single man: M. Tamjeed Rahmaan, of 225 F New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown.

Seven days later, on October 13, 2022, that one-man company signed a contract with the Government of Guyana worth GYD $3,697,274,857 — nearly US$17.7 million — to design, supply, and install water treatment facilities across three communities in Region Four.

Sigma Engineers had no prior operating history in Guyana. It had existed, on paper, for a week.

Today, that contract has grown to nearly GYD $4 billion. Its Guyana registered address is the same building that houses Gaico Construction, one of the most favored contractors of the Irfaan Ali administration. Its Bangladesh-based parent company faces an unresolved corruption case in its home country, filed by that country’s Anti-Corruption Commission, naming the same men who founded the firm that now builds Guyana’s public water infrastructure. And the President’s own brother, Mohamed Aqtar Ali, sits inside the company as a paid consultant — a fact Sigma disclosed only after being publicly accused, and only in the barest possible terms.

This is the paper trail.

I. Seven Days

The corporate filings are unambiguous. Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc — Company No. 13572 — was incorporated under Guyana’s Companies Act on October 6, 2022. The Notice of Directors and Notice of Secretary, both dated the same day, list one name for every statutory role: M. Tamjeed Rahmaan. Director. Secretary. Incorporator. All at once, all one man, at a residential address in North Cummingsburg.

 

There is nothing illegal about a single-director company. But single-director companies do not, as a rule, win nine-figure state infrastructure contracts within days of coming into existence — unless something about that company’s backing was already known to the people awarding the contract.

The contract in question — GWI 2022/43430, “Procurement of Plant Design, Supply and Installation of Water Treatment Facilities,” tendered as International Competitive Bid No. GWI-GoG-W067-2022 through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board — was a genuine, publicly advertised tender. Bids closed August 9, 2022. Sigma was awarded Lot 3: water treatment plants for Caledonia, Cummings Lodge, and Bachelor’s Adventure, all in Region Four.

The agreement was signed October 13, 2022. Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc had been a legal entity in Guyana for exactly one week.

 

The listed “official address” for the contractor on that agreement is not in Georgetown at all. It is 239–240 Madrasa Road, Tazpur, Ashulia, Savar, Dhaka-1341, Bangladesh — the compound address of Sigma Group, the Bangladeshi engineering conglomerate founded in 1985 by three men: Syed Arshed Reza, Md. Mizanur Rahman, and Syed Md. Kamal. The Guyana entity, in other words, was never really a Guyanese company transacting with a foreign parent. It was, from day one, a local shell wearing the paperwork of incorporation, with the actual contracting party’s real address printed in black and white on the government’s own contract.

II.The Bill Keeps Growing, the Deadlines Keep Slipping

The original contract price was GYD $3,697,274,857. By February 2024, Addendum 2 raised it to GYD $3,951,992,986 — an increase of G$254,718,129 under “Variation Order No. 1.”

The increase was not evenly spread. Two of the three plants actually came in under their original estimates: Caledonia’s price fell by roughly $53.1 million, Cummings Lodge’s by roughly $58.4 million. The entire net increase, and then some, was loaded onto a single plant — Bachelor’s Adventure — which rose by $366.2 million.

The project’s own contractual terms called for completion within 24 months: effective November 10, 2022, with a project end date of November 9, 2024.

None of the three plants met that deadline.

Caledonia was commissioned in January 2025 — roughly two months late.

Cummings Lodge was commissioned October 19, 2025, with President Ali personally in attendance — nearly a year late.

Bachelor’s Adventure, the plant that absorbed almost the entire cost increase, has no confirmed commissioning date in the public record as of this writing — more than 20 months past its own original deadline.

The plant that cost the most extra money is also the plant that has taken the longest, with no public accounting yet for why.

III. A Recruitment Licence That Recruited No One

In February 2024 — the same month the GWI contract’s price was being revised upward — a separate story surfaced. A letter from Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, dated February 5, 2024, authorized Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc to recruit healthcare workers from Bangladesh, reportedly for as many as 500 positions.

The Ministry’s public explanation, when the letter leaked, was that the authorization was issued at Sigma’s own request, framed as a regulatory safeguard against trafficking and improper labor processing amid a genuine health-sector staffing crisis. The Private Sector Commission had been lobbying government for help with skills shortages across health, construction, engineering, and services.

The government later confirmed something else: not a single healthcare worker was ever actually recruited through this authorization. Guyana’s medical shortages continued to be addressed through existing bilateral arrangements, chiefly Cuban medical personnel.

So a license was issued, in the health sector, at a company’s own request — and it produced nothing. Meanwhile, that same company’s engineering contract, in an entirely different sector, continued to operate using labour that appears — on the evidence below — to have come from the same country the healthcare authorization was meant to cover.

IV. Who Is Actually Building Guyana’s Water Plants?

In late 2024, Guyana Water Incorporated posted photographs to its own official Facebook page of GWI’s CEO, Shaik Baksh, posing with the construction crew at the New Cummings Lodge Water Treatment Plant.

The post’s caption is direct: “The New Cummings Lodge Water Treatment Plant was constructed by Sigma Engineering Ltd at a cost of GYD $1.3 billion, with a team comprising of several Guyanese staff.”

The $1.3 billion figure in that caption lines up closely with the $1,304,444,724 total contract price recorded for Cummings Lodge in the project’s own change-order documentation — confirming this photograph documents the same plant tracked in the contract paper trail above.

The photograph itself shows more than two dozen workers in matching Sigma-branded uniforms, standing behind Baksh as he shakes hands with another man in a dark suit. Every visible member of that crew — with the sole exception of Baksh and one other man in Western business attire — appears South Asian.

GWI’s own caption asserts the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” Nobody visibly identifiable as Guyanese appears in the photograph GWI selected to illustrate that claim.

A second set of photographs, obtained separately, shows a similarly large Sigma crew — again uniformly South Asian in appearance — posed in front of completed water storage tanks at what appears to be the same or a comparable Region Four site. Two men in business suits are pictured with the group.

Taken together, these are not opposition talking points. One set of images comes from GWI’s own institutional Facebook page, captioned by GWI itself, with GWI’s own CEO physically present and smiling for the camera. If the workforce building a billion-dollar public water plant was substantially foreign, GWI’s own communications team photographed it, published it, and then wrote a caption claiming otherwise.

V. The Legal Question GWI’s Photo Raises

Guyana’s work permit regime, administered through the Ministry of Home Affairs, requires labour market testing: an employer seeking to bring in foreign workers must demonstrate that the positions cannot be filled by Guyanese nationals. Guyana’s Local Content Act further identifies 40 ring-fenced sub-sectors — including engineering, consulting, and professional/technical services — where local hiring and content requirements apply, and the government has stated publicly that it is stepping up enforcement against companies “rotating foreign workers to circumvent local hiring obligations or evading local content mandates.”

It should be noted precisely: Guyana’s Local Content Certificate regime, administered by the Local Content Secretariat under the Ministry of Natural Resources, is scoped specifically to the petroleum sector — it does not directly govern a water-utility contract like Sigma’s GWI agreement. The applicable framework here is the general work permit and labor market testing process, not the oil-and-gas-specific LCC.

That distinction does not weaken the underlying question — it sharpens it. Sigma’s only publicly documented authorization to import foreign labour was the February 2024 Ministry of Foreign Affairs letter — and that letter covered healthcare workers, not construction or engineering labour, and produced zero actual recruits.

If the workforce photographed at the Cummings Lodge plant was substantially Bangladeshi, as GWI’s own photograph suggests, the relevant question is straightforward: under what authorization, and with what labour market testing, did that workforce enter and work in Guyana? No public record answers that question. GWI’s own caption — asserting Guyanese participation that its own photograph does not show — does not answer it either.

VI . The Bangladesh File

Sigma Group’s roots run to 1985, when Syed Arshed Reza, Md. Mizanur Rahman, and Syed Md. Kamal founded Sigma Engineers as a partnership of three engineers in Dhaka. The firm grew into Bangladesh’s dominant water infrastructure contractor — deep tube wells, water treatment plants, later power generation and heavy civil works. It has a legitimate, audited financing history: World Bank-linked IPFF facility records show Sigma Engineers Ltd received commercial bank loans in 2016–17 for water treatment plants in the Comilla and Adamjee export processing zones, audited without qualification.

But the same company’s leadership also faces an unresolved corruption case in its home country.

On October 21, 2020, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission filed a case against eleven people — eight engineers of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, and three Sigma Engineers Limited executives: Chairman Syed Arshed Reza, Managing Director Syed Md Kamal, and General Manager Abdus Salam. The allegation: the accused misappropriated Tk 34.42 crore — more than US$3 million at the time — through the procurement of water pumps for the Kashimpur Pump House Rehabilitation, under the Manu River Irrigation Project. BWDB engineers allegedly paid Sigma Tk 61.60 crore for pumps valued at Tk 34.42 crore less than that.

A single BWDB engineer had formed a one-member evaluation committee and recommended Sigma for the work without consulting outside experts. The underlying investigation had been running since 2019, a year before charges were filed — this was not a rushed or politically opportunistic filing.

Syed Arshed Reza and Syed Md Kamal are the same two men identified as founders of the Sigma Group entity now operating in Guyana.

No public record establishes the current status of that Bangladesh case —  whether it proceeded to trial, was dismissed, or remains pending

It should be treated, honestly, as an unresolved allegation against named individuals, not a proven or closed matter. But it is a documented fact that Sigma’s own leadership, in its home jurisdiction, is on record facing a criminal case alleging exactly the kind of single-evaluator, inflated-price contracting irregularity that Guyanese authorities do not appear to have asked about before handing that same leadership’s Guyana entity a nearly $4 billion water contract.

VII. 225 New Market Street

Sigma’s registered Guyana address — 225 New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown — is not an obscure residential lot. It is the headquarters of Gaico Construction & General Services Inc., one of the most consistently favoured contractors of the current administration. Gaico’s own public listings confirm the address as its head office, the “GAICO Construction Building.”

Gaico’s recent contract history speaks for itself: a $3.3 billion award for its lot of the New Parika Modern Port Facility in 2025 — the largest of three lots let — and a subcontracted role in the $865 million Belle Vue project, brought in by the original contractor after the fact in an arrangement that drew pointed questions from opposition MPs in Parliament this past February.

No evidence has yet surfaced of a direct joint venture, shared contract, or ownership link between Sigma and Gaico. The confirmed fact is narrower and still worth stating plainly: a Bangladesh-linked company that won a billion-dollar state contract one week after incorporation is registered at the same physical address as Guyana’s most prominently favoured domestic contractor.

Whether that reflects a formal business relationship, an accommodation arrangement, or something GWI and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs never thought to ask about, remains an open question — and one worth putting to both companies directly.

VIII. The President’s Brother, Undisclosed Until Accused

In August 2026, Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed publicly alleged that Sigma Engineers was connected to Mohamed Aqtar Ali — the brother of President Irfaan Ali — and challenged the company’s account of its own establishment and government contracts.

Sigma’s response, reported by HGP Nightly News, was to reject the allegations as “serious misrepresentations,” announce it had engaged legal counsel, and threaten “appropriate legal action.” In the same statement, Sigma confirmed — for the first time publicly — that Mohamed Aqtar Ali is engaged by Sigma Engineers Limited Incorporated in Guyana as a “senior technical consultant.” The company offered no further detail: no date of engagement, no description of his responsibilities, no terms of compensation. It stated only that he has “no affiliation” with Sigma’s Bangladesh entity.

The family relationship is not in dispute; it is a matter of public record. What is notable is the sequence: Sigma disclosed the President’s brother’s role inside the company only after being publicly accused of concealing it, and even then disclosed the barest fact of his employment without any of the specifics that would let the public assess what that role actually involves.

Sigma’s rebuttal also contains a claim that does not survive contact with the documents underlying this story. The company told HGP that, despite its October 2022 Guyana registration, its “first contract” in Guyana was not awarded until 2026 — roughly four years later — via national competitive bidding through NPTAB. The contract examined throughout this piece — GWI 2022/43430, Lot 3 — is dated October 13, 2022. It is not a 2026 contract. It is not Sigma’s first Guyana contract by four years’ delay; it is Sigma’s first Guyana contract, full stop, and it was signed one week after the company existed.

That is not a matter of interpretation. It is a conflict between what Sigma told the Guyanese public, under the shadow of a legal threat, and what the government’s own contract documents say.

What Remains Unanswered

This investigation does not claim to have proven a conspiracy. It documents a paper trail, and the trail raises questions that neither Sigma, GWI, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has yet answered on the public record:

⇒ Why was a single-director company with no operating history awarded a nearly $4 billion state contract within seven days of its incorporation?

⇒What labour market testing, if any, was conducted before the workforce photographed at the Cummings Lodge plant — a workforce that appears substantially foreign — was brought into the country, given that the only publicly documented import authorization Sigma held was for healthcare workers, not engineering labour?

⇒ Why does GWI’s own published caption claim “several Guyanese staff” on a project photograph that shows none?

⇒ Did GWI or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs know, at the time of contracting or authorization, that Sigma’s named Bangladesh leadership faced an unresolved Anti-Corruption Commission case in their home country?

⇒ What is the nature of the relationship, if any, between Sigma’s Guyana registration and Gaico Construction, whose headquarters Sigma shares as its registered address?

⇒ What, specifically, does Mohamed Aqtar Ali do for Sigma Engineers, when did that engagement begin, and what is he paid?

Sigma has said it wants public discourse “based on accurate and verifiable information.” This piece is built from nothing else: a certificate of incorporation, a signed contract, a change order, a Ministry letter, a foreign anti-corruption filing, and photographs GWI published itself. The company, and the government agencies that contracted with it, now have the documents in front of them. The 592 Guardian has put the same questions to Sigma Engineers ♦GWI  the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and will publish any response in full.

The 592 Guardian will continue to track this story. Readers with additional documentation — contracts, work permit records, or employment data relevant to Sigma Engineers’ Guyana operations — are invited to contact the editor directly.

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

OPINION BY : Staff Writer– August 2026

The President’s picks for the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission each already hold a second post close enough to the first to demand an answer before confirmation, not after.

T wo of the President’s nominees to Guyana’s constitutional commissions arrive already carrying another job — and in both cases, the second job sits close enough to the first to raise the kind of question that ought to be answered before either appointment is finalised, not after.

Retired Justice Carl Singh has been proposed for reappointment to the Judicial Service Commission, the body that expired on July 13 and that the President is now moving to reconstitute under Article 198(2). Singh is a natural pick on paper — a former Chancellor of the Judiciary, credentialed and well known to the institution.

“He is also, at this moment, the sitting Chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission, appointed to that post by President Ali and sworn in alongside seventeen other commissioners in April 2024.”

The overlap is not cosmetic. The JSC’s own composition is built around the Chancellorship: by constitutional design, the Chancellor chairs the Commission, the Chief Justice sits on it, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission sits on it as well.

A retired Chancellor joining that body is not an outsider being added to an unrelated panel — he is stepping into the specific institutional lineage the JSC was built to run through. That alone might be unremarkable, given Singh’s background. What makes it worth a second look is that Singh simultaneously chairs the body Guyana convened specifically to review and recommend changes to the machinery of constitutional appointments — including, potentially, the very judicial appointment provisions the JSC operates under. One man sitting at the head of both the commission that might reform the rules and the commission that operates under them is not evidence of wrongdoing.

It is, at minimum, a structural question about whether reform recommendations touching judicial appointments can be seen as arriving independently of the people who currently sit inside that system.

The Constitutional Reform Commission has itself struggled for legitimacy on unrelated grounds — the Guyana Human Rights Association called for Singh and the full membership to resign last September, citing the commission’s inertia and the shifted political landscape since its 2024 swearing-in. Singh has publicly acknowledged the commission’s sluggish pace, attributing it to administrative delay rather than institutional design.

Whatever the merits of that defence, it does not touch the separate question raised by his JSC nomination: whether the same person should simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the body reviewing the constitutional order and a seat inside the judicial body that order currently produces.

The second nomination raises a cleaner conflict. Maurice Gajadhar has been proposed for the Public Service Commission, the body responsible under Article 200 for appointments, discipline and removal across Guyana’s public service. Gajadhar is also, and has been since 2020, Chairman of the Board of Guyana Power and Light — a state-owned corporation, and not a small one.

That chairmanship already produced a public conflict-of-interest controversy on Gajadhar’s watch. In 2021, GPL purchased two vehicles from Rudisa Motor Company Guyana Inc., a company for which Gajadhar serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Former-Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson called it plainly: “That is a clear conflict of interest.” GPL’s response at the time did not deny the transaction — it defended the purchase as having gone through a National Competitive Bidding Process, which addresses the procurement mechanics without addressing the more basic problem: a state corporation buying vehicles from a company run by its own board chairman is a conflict irrespective of how the invoice was generated. Gajadhar was still chairing the GPL board as recently as February of this year, when he led a board inspection of the utility’s new National Control Centre.

To be precise about the shape of the concern: the Public Service Commission does not regulate GPL directly. Its Article 200 jurisdiction runs to the public service — the civil service proper — not to the governance of state-owned commercial entities, so this is not a case of Gajadhar being asked to police his own corporation from a new perch. The more grounded question is one of fitness. The PSC exists to safeguard the integrity of appointments and discipline across the public service; it is difficult to square that mandate with elevating a nominee whose own record as a public-corporation chairman includes a documented, publicly contested instance of exactly the kind of self-dealing the Commission is meant to guard against elsewhere in the state.

Neither of these facts, on its own, disqualifies either man. Guyana is a small country with a shallow bench of people credentialed enough to fill these seats, and some overlap between public roles is close to unavoidable. But “unavoidable in general” is not the same as “unexamined in this instance,” and nothing in the correspondence between Minister Teixeira and Opposition Leader Mohamed — nor in the Opposition’s brief, non-committal acknowledgments of the nominees — indicates that either overlap was raised, let alone resolved, before the names went forward.

The Opposition Leader’s responses to date have noted the nominees and their curricula vitae without expressly endorsing or objecting to either. That may still be the right posture while the record is incomplete. But it should not be the final posture.

Before Mohamed’s office signs off on Singh for the JSC or Gajadhar for the PSC, both men’s dual roles deserve a direct question, asked and answered on the record: what happens to the other seat if this one is confirmed. A commission built to guard against exactly this kind of overlap should not be the one asking Guyanese to take it on faith.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM GUYANA

A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

Sometime in early June 2026 — within his first two months as British High Commissioner to Guyana — Joseph Fisher sat for a photograph with a delegation from A Partnership for National Unity. It has the look of a standard early courtesy call: new envoy, opposition party, flags either side, the kind of introduction most incoming high commissioners work through in their first weeks. Around the same period, Fisher was photographed separately with Amanza Walton-Desir, leader of the Forward Guyana Movement, in a one-on-one portrait rather than a group shot.

There is no equivalent photograph, and no documented meeting of any kind, between Fisher and Azruddin Mohamed — or between Fisher and We Invest in Nationhood as a party. This is despite WIN holding sixteen seats in the National Assembly, more than APNU and Forward Guyana combined, and despite Mohamed having held the constitutionally recognised office of Leader of the Opposition since January 2026.

The timing complicates the obvious explanation

The APNU meeting falls in early June — before the Caribbean Court of Justice dismissed Mohamed’s extradition appeal on July 29, and well before his legal team’s mid-August campaign accusing CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson of bias, a campaign the Guyana Chronicle described as a coordinated effort spanning multiple WIN-linked social media platforms.

Whatever explains the absence of a Fisher–Mohamed meeting, it cannot be explained by conduct that had not yet happened. If Fisher’s early courtesy rounds reached the smaller opposition parties within his first eight weeks and did not reach the largest one, that gap predates the events most likely to be cited in its defence.

This does not resolve the question. It narrows it.

The precedent Fisher inherited

Fisher’s predecessor, Jane Miller, did not treat Mohamed’s US indictment as a reason for diplomatic distance. In January 2026, as the government and the Speaker of the National Assembly delayed the swearing-in of an Opposition Leader, Miller told Stabroek News on the record that the election of a Leader of the Opposition should proceed “without delay,” explicitly naming a functioning legislature as the priority — a position she took alongside the US, Canadian and EU missions, all of whom pressed for Mohamed’s confirmation despite his legal position being, by then, already public and unresolved.

Miller went further than neutrality; she used her office’s public voice to support the institutional recognition Mohamed was seeking.

Whatever the current posture reflects, it did not begin as British diplomatic orthodoxy in Guyana. It is, at minimum, a change from the position the previous High Commissioner staked out in writing.

Two explanations, neither proven

There are two honest ways to read the gap, and the record does not yet allow a confident choice between them.

“The first is that something shifted in the UK’s posture independent of Mohamed’s conduct — a judgment call by Fisher, made early and for reasons not publicly stated, to keep the largest opposition party at arm’s length while extending ordinary courtesy to the smaller ones.”

The second is that Mohamed’s own position made him progressively harder to engage — an indicted politician contesting extradition through the courts is a different diplomatic proposition than one merely facing an unresolved case, and a politician whose legal team is publicly attacking the integrity of the region’s highest court is a different proposition again.

On this reading, the calculus may simply have hardened as 2026 went on, even if it was not yet fully formed in June.

The honest difficulty is that the documented timeline fits neither story cleanly. The absence predates the CCJ campaign, which weakens the second explanation as a complete account. But Miller’s precedent shows the indictment alone was not, on the UK’s own recent conduct, treated as disqualifying — which weakens the idea that Mohamed’s legal jeopardy in isolation explains everything either.

Something in between is more likely than either extreme, and this publication is not in a position to assert which.

What this means for the appeals now underway

What can be said without speculation is this: Mohamed has, over recent months, written directly to Fisher on the Region 10 impasse, seeking his intervention with the same posture he has brought to letters addressed to President Ali and to the CCJ Registrar — treating the recipient as a good-faith channel whose engagement can reasonably be expected. The documented record does not support that assumption in Fisher’s case. It shows a High Commissioner who found time for Mohamed’s smaller rivals and, so far as this publication has been able to establish, none for him.

That gap may be snub. It may be consequence. It may be some combination that changed over the course of the year. What it is not, on the evidence available, is a settled diplomatic relationship capable of delivering the intervention Mohamed’s letters ask for.

 

Continuing to write as though it is one is, at best, an appeal to an audience whose willingness to listen has not been demonstrated — and, at worst, another entry in a pattern this news outlet has now traced across GECOM, Region 10 and the CCJ: letters addressed with confidence to authorities whose capacity or willingness to act on them remains, on the public record, unproven.