Washington Named Its Bauxite Partner. It Still Won’t Name Its Owners.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY GOVERNANCE ◊  INVESTIGATION

Washington Named Its Bauxite Partner. It Still Won’t Name Its Owners.

The 592 Guardian — August 2026

The Pentagon has put US$85.5 million behind Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC to secure the Bonasika mine. The 592 Guardian’s July inquiry into who actually controls that company — and whether Guyana ever signed off on its formation — remains unanswered.

 WHAT THE PENTAGON ANNOUNCED

On August 7, the U.S. Department of War’s Economic Defense Unit announced an $85.5 million equity investment agreement with Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC (SBX), made through its Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) programme. The funding, combined with a further $64.5 million in private co-investment, is earmarked to acquire and expand the Bonasika mine operated by First Bauxite in Region Three, build new calcination facilities, and support a follow-on brown-fused alumina plant on U.S. soil.

Once operational, the Department states the project is intended to supply 100 percent of U.S. military demand for brown-fused alumina and 100 percent of domestic demand for refractory-grade bauxite — output the release frames as displacing supply currently sourced from Chinese-owned producers.

The Department of State, the release adds, “provided critical funding to support infrastructure associated with the project,” positioning this as an interagency effort. Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy Michael Cadenazzi and Economic Defense Unit Director George K. Kollitides II both framed the deal as the U.S. moving from strategic concern to direct ownership stake — in Kollitides’s words, no longer “waiting for supply chain dependencies to be exploited.”

THIS PUBLICATION ALREADY ASKED WHO SBX IS

This is not the first this newsroom has heard of Strategic Bauxite. On July 20, The 592 Guardian published “First Bauxite’s Quiet Sale: Who Is Strategic Bauxite, and Why Won’t Anyone Say,” examining First Bauxite’s July 15 announcement that it had been “acquired by an entity called Strategic Bauxite.” That report found the buyer had no SEC filing, SEDAR record, or prior press coverage under that name, and that its two publicly identified principals — Roy Ostrom III and Michael Smith — showed employment histories in New York private capital and Guyana-region gold and royalty ventures respectively, with no visible prior track record operating a mine.

Three weeks later, the Pentagon’s release confirms the counterparty by a fuller legal name — Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC — but adds nothing about who stands behind it. No mention of Ostrom. No mention of Smith. No mention of HSCM Bermuda, the Hudson Structured Capital Management vehicle that trade press had separately reported as having acquired a controlling interest in First Bauxite around the same period.

The Department’s own statement does not clarify whether “Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC” is the same entity this newsroom wrote about in July, a newly formed U.S.-domiciled holding company sitting above it, or something else again.

A federal agency has now put U.S. taxpayer capital behind a counterparty this newsroom could not fully identify three weeks ago — and the agency’s own announcement does not identify it either.

THE TIMELINE WASHINGTON SKIPS PAST

The Department’s release treats this as a freestanding industrial-policy decision. Read against the public record, it is the third beat in a sequence that began months earlier:

May 14–15

 Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg meets President Ali in Georgetown, tells reporters the U.S. is “eyeing” Guyana bauxite because reserves are already known, and offers U.S. assistance conducting high-tech surveys of Guyana’s mining lands to identify further mineral deposits.
July 15

 First Bauxite announces it has been acquired by “Strategic Bauxite,” a firm with no prior public footprint, undisclosed terms, and an ownership structure this newspaper found impossible to independently verify — including whether HSCM Bermuda was an intermediate owner.
Aug. 7

 The Department of War announces $85.5 million in equity funding to “Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC” to acquire and expand the same Bonasika mine — without naming a single principal, without mentioning HSCM Bermuda, and without any reference to Guyanese regulatory review.

THE QUESTION GUYANA’S REGULATORS STILL HAVEN’T ANSWERED

Guyana’s Mining Act contains change-of-control provisions — the same Section 18 framework this news media  examined in connection with G2 Goldfields’ acquisition by GMIN — that would ordinarily govern a transfer of this kind. As of publication, neither the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission nor the Ministry of Natural Resources has issued any public statement on the Strategic Bauxite acquisition, the reported HSCM Bermuda transaction, or Wednesday’s Department of War announcement.

Both agencies’ public communications channels show no reference to the matter. That silence was notable when this news outlet first raised it in July, when the transaction was a private commercial sale. It is considerably more consequential now that a foreign government’s Department of War has attached its own equity stake to the same mine, with an explicit goal of guaranteeing military supply.

First Bauxite’s July release stated only that “commitments to government stakeholders will remain unchanged” — a formulation that assumes, rather than confirms, that those commitments have been reviewed against the new ownership at all.

WHAT THIS NEWSROOM IS ASKING NOW

In addition to the questions put to First Bauxite in July and left unanswered, the following now require response from the Department of War, First Bauxite, and Guyana’s regulators alike:

♦ Is “Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC” the same legal entity described in First Bauxite’s July 15 release as “Strategic Bauxite,” or a separate U.S.-domiciled vehicle formed to receive federal equity funding?

♦ Were Roy Ostrom III and/or Michael Smith involved in negotiating the IBAS agreement, and do either retain an ownership or governance role in SBX?

♦ Did the Department of War’s due diligence process examine the HSCM Bermuda reports, and if so, what did it conclude about the mine’s ownership chain since December 2018?

♦ Did GGMC or the Ministry of Natural Resources receive notice of, or grant approval for, the U.S. government’s equity stake under the Mining Act’s change-of-control provisions prior to August 7, 2026?

♦ What obligations, if any, does the Guyanese state retain — royalties, local content, environmental bonds — once a portion of Bonasika’s equity is held by a U.S. federal agency rather than a private commercial owner?

This publication has sent these questions to the Department of War’s Economic Defense Unit, to First Bauxite’s Chief Sustainability Officer Elliott Lincoln, and to the Ministry of Natural Resources. Any response received will be published in full.

The 592 Guardian will continue to track this story as new information becomes available. This report will be updated or corrected as verified information comes to light.

— The Board

SIX BEDS AND A WARNING

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592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY&INTERIGTY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

SIX BEDS AND A WARNING

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

How GPHC Turned Its Own Failure Into a Public Service Announcement

The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation wants motorists to drive more carefully. On that point alone, no reasonable person disagrees. But buried inside the same release warning the public about speeding and seatbelts is an admission that should have been the headline, not a footnote: the nation’s flagship, referral-of-last-resort hospital is running its Intensive Care Unit on six beds. Four of them, at the moment of filming, held patients with severe brain injuries. GPHC did not lead with that number. It led with a lecture to pedestrians.

That ordering is not incidental. It is the story.

THE NUMBER THAT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE COUNTED

For four years, the Government of Guyana and its healthcare partners have not been shy about numbers. The 2022 Mount Sinai–Hess partnership was announced with the full weight of presidential rhetoric — a “transformative agenda,” a “human, systemic, institutional, infrastructural, technological, and cultural shift.” Its 2025 extension came with harder figures: pathology turnaround cut from three months to three days, a national electronic health records system aiming to be among the most advanced in the world by 2030. Budget 2026 alone put a number on nearly everything — 230 beds at the new New Amsterdam campus, 74 new maternal beds already added nationally, 98,500 student health screenings, $3.3 million for digital health records, $1.1 billion for a new oncology center, $3.7 billion to stand up a national emergency medical authority.

Not one of these disclosures, across four years and three national budgets, states an ICU bed target for GPHC. An institution capable of tracking pathology results to the day has never once told the Guyanese public how many critical care beds its national hospital has, is building, or intends to build.

The omission is not an oversight in a single press release. It is a pattern maintained across an entire public communications apparatus that otherwise quantifies everything.

THE ARITHMETIC GPHC SUPPLIED AGAINST ITSELF

GPHC’s own institutional profile states its capacity at over 550 beds, managing more than 320,000 outpatient visits and 26,600 inpatient admissions a year. Its emergency department handles an estimated 75,000 visits annually. Set against that scale, six ICU beds is not a resourcing gap. It is roughly one percent of total hospital capacity, reserved for the single category of patient — polytrauma, traumatic brain injury, the critically unstable — for whom the difference between a bed and no bed is the difference between survival and death.

These are not figures a rival outlet dug up to embarrass the hospital. They are GPHC’s own published numbers, sitting on GPHC’s own website, unconnected to each other until placed side by side.

 

The hospital did the arithmetic for us. It simply never performed the division.

WHAT THE PARTNER INSTITUTION DOES WITH ITS OWN MONEY

In March 2026, Mount Sinai leadership was in Georgetown running a two-day workshop on hospital quality and patient safety with GPHC’s own leadership. The following month, Mount Sinai’s home system in New York broke ground on a new intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Queens — a project explicitly designed to nearly triple existing ICU capacity there.

Mount Sinai, in other words, knows exactly what it looks like to identify an ICU capacity shortfall and fund its correction. It has done so, publicly, for one of its own facilities, within weeks of meeting with GPHC leadership. It has never proposed anything comparable for the hospital it has spent four years publicly partnering with in Guyana.

The silence is not for lack of institutional capability. It is a choice about where capital and attention go — and Georgetown was not where they went.

THE SUBSTITUTION: A SYSTEMS FAILURE, SOLD AS A BEHAVIOR PROBLEM

Here is where the GPHC release does its real work, and where it deserves to be read most critically. Dr. Asif Subha, the hospital’s own Medical Registrar for Neurosurgery, names two contributing causes to the rising trauma burden in a single set of remarks: driver negligence, and the “rapid development” bringing construction activity and “temporary disruptions to roadways.”

One of those causes belongs to drivers. The other belongs to the state.

GPHC’s prescribed remedy addresses only the first. Wear a seatbelt. Wear a helmet. Slow down. Not one line in the release asks what the Ministry of Health or GPHC’s own administration intends to do about a six-bed ICU serving a nation whose own hospital cites government-driven construction disruption as a contributing hazard.

The institution identified a structural cause and issued a behavioral prescription.

That is not a coincidence of emphasis. It is a transfer of accountability — from the system that has not expanded its critical care capacity in years of “world-class” branding, onto the citizen expected to drive carefully enough that the system never has to be tested.

 

Driver behavior determines how many people are involved in a crash. It does nothing to determine how many the ICU can treat once they are. Conflating the two lets the resourcing question go entirely unasked — which is, functionally, the point.

A SHORTFALL WITH A LONGER MEMORY THAN THIS YEAR’S HEADLINES

This is not GPHC’s first documented capacity failure. Historical records citing the hospital’s 600-bed capacity carry a standing caveat dating to 2005: beds went unstaffed for lack of personnel even then. Two decades on, under a different set of branding — robotic surgery demonstrations for visiting dignitaries, kidney transplant certification, a Caribbean Heart Institute, a national partnership with one of America’s most prestigious health systems — the ICU remains fixed at six beds. The wrapping has changed. The capacity has not.

THE VERDICT THE HOSPITAL WROTE FOR ITSELF

GPHC did not need an investigative outlet to expose its ICU shortfall. It disclosed the number itself, on camera, in a release meant to warn the public about its own driving habits. What the release could not disclose — because no institution volunteers this about itself — is what four years of “world-class” partnership announcements, granular budget lines for MRI suites and cath labs and pathology labs, and a partner institution simultaneously tripling its own ICU capacity at home, add up to when the one number that determines whether a trauma patient lives never once appears in any of it.

The public was told to be more careful. The public deserves to know why an institution that can fund robotic surgery cannot, or will not, fund a seventh ICU bed — and why, four budgets and two Mount Sinai extensions later, that remains a question GPHC has never had to answer.

— The Board

A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ

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592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

REGIONAL JUDICIARY · ANALYSIS

A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ

Behind the wardrobe dispute that removed Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the D’Almada panel sits an unresolved legal fight that reaches directly into Guyana’s own treaty rights — and a Court whose public response answered none of it.

On June 26, 2026, CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson removed Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the panel set to hear D’Almada v Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Caricom. No reason was given in the e-mail itself. The explanation that eventually surfaced — that Eboe-Osuji’s Nigerian formal attire was unsuited to a robed sitting — has not survived its own timeline. Eboe-Osuji sat, in the same robe-optional capacity, on the Robateau panel two days earlier. He was not removed from that one.

That inconsistency is the least of what this dispute exposes. Read alongside the correspondence Justice Eboe-Osuji and Justice Peter Jamadar put on record, the removal looks less like a dress-code enforcement action and more like a president reshaping a panel ahead of a ruling on a question he has said, in Eboe-Osuji’s account, he believes was wrongly decided by the CCJ’s full bench in 2009.

WHAT TCL V GUYANA ACTUALLY HELD

Guyana is not a bystander to this dispute — it is the precedent at stake. Trinidad Cement Limited and its Guyana subsidiary sued Guyana in 2009 after Georgetown unilaterally suspended the Common External Tariff on cement, citing flood recovery and Cricket World Cup stadium construction. The CCJ, sitting in its Original Jurisdiction over the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, ruled against Guyana: the suspension breached the Treaty, and Guyana could be held liable in damages, even though TCL could not ultimately prove loss because it had sold all the cement it could produce regardless.

A follow-on 2010 ruling found Guyana had not complied promptly with the Court’s order — Guyana’s own request for an extension was treated as an admission of non-compliance — though the Court declined to hold Guyana’s Attorney General in contempt on procedural grounds.

The holding that matters now is narrower than either headline: TCL v Guyana established that a private commercial actor, not just a Caricom member state, can bring an enforceable claim against a state under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. For a small economy like Guyana’s, routinely on the receiving end of larger regional and extra-regional capital, that principle is not academic.

THE BHAGWANSINGH WRINKLE

In February 2026, the CCJ dismissed an application from Trinidadian national Mr. Bhagwansingh, who had challenged a Central Bank licensing requirement under T&T’s Financial Institutions Act as a breach of his right to provide financial services under the Treaty. The Court held the claim failed the threshold for special leave because it lacked any cross-border element — the Treaty does not give a national rights against his own state over a purely domestic regulatory matter.

That is a narrow, defensible ruling on its facts. But according to Eboe-Osuji’s account, Justice Anderson has read Bhagwansingh more broadly — as standing for the proposition that a national cannot sue his own state at all. Eboe-Osuji says he pressed, during deliberations in an unrelated matter referred to in his correspondence as the Barrow Referral, to have that ruling clarify that Bhagwansingh does not detract from TCL. Anderson is said to have preferred that the clarification wait for D’Almada — the very case Eboe-Osuji was then removed from hearing.

“The conclusion is inescapable that you removed me from D’Almada because you and I disagree on a point of law that foreseeably defines the fundamental question in that case.”

PROCESS, NOT JUST PRECEDENT

Two things can be true. The wardrobe justification is not credible on its own terms — the Robateau/D’Almada timeline defeats it. And the underlying legal question is genuinely live and consequential: how far can a Caricom national, or a private entity, go in holding a member state to its Treaty obligations. Guyana has been the losing party on that question once already, at a moment when it had no judge of its own on the bench. Who sits on the panel that next defines the boundary is not a procedural footnote.

The CCJ’s institutional response has done nothing to close that gap. Asked fifteen direct questions by the Sunday Express the preceding Wednesday, the Court did not answer them. It issued, two days later and on a Friday night, a general statement invoking the Bangalore Principles and warning that scrutiny “without the benefit of context” risks “misunderstanding or mischaracterisation.”

It did not dispute a single fact in either judge’s correspondence. It did not address the Robateau timeline. A statement that answers none of the specific allegations is not a defence of them — it is a deferral.

That pattern — an announced justification that collapses on its own facts, followed by an institutional statement that reasserts principle rather than answering the record — will be familiar to readers of this publication from other jurisdictions. It is worth naming plainly here: an unexplained exercise of presidential authority over a panel, on a matter where that same president has a stated view on the outcome, is a judicial-independence problem regardless of which court it occurs in.

TO WATCH

Justice Jamadar’s June 30 e-mail — seeking “urgent clarification” on whether Eboe-Osuji’s removal extends beyond D’Almada to all unrobed sittings, and citing Khan v Mc Nicholls (2012) in support — is already on the record and raises the same process question independently of Eboe-Osuji’s own complaint. Whether Jamadar takes this further, in this matter or in how the Barrow Referral ruling is eventually framed, is not yet known. It bears watching.

— The Board

WHO REGULATES THE REGULATOR

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

WHO REGULATES THE REGULATOR:

THE GWI BOTTLED WATER GAP GUYANA HAS NO LAW TO CLOSE

OPINON BY: Staff Writer 

The 592 Guardian previously examined the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association’s objections to the state’s entry into commercial bottled water — a competitor, GMSA argued, that the private sector never asked for and cannot fairly compete against. That critique was about market fairness. This one is about something narrower and, we think, more consequential: Guyana has no institution positioned to regulate Guyana Water Incorporated’s bottled water venture with the independence the arrangement requires, and the government has already lived through this exact problem once before.

A GOVERNMENT THAT HAS DONE THIS BEFORE

Guyana’s oil sector offers the precedent. When the state moved toward marketing its own share of Stabroek Block crude — hiring contracted trading firms to sell the government’s 50 percent share of profit oil — it did so as the same government that regulates the oil industry’s operations, safety, and revenue accounting.

The arrangement drew scrutiny precisely because it collapsed a distinction regulatory theory treats as foundational: the state cannot be both a commercial participant chasing favorable terms and the neutral referee assessing whether the industry as a whole is being run safely, fairly, and transparently. Guyana’s own investment climate reporting acknowledges the government has had to commit publicly to “updating laws and regulations, strengthening key institutions” specifically to manage that credibility gap.

Bottled water is a smaller commodity than crude oil, and the sums involved — GY$496.3 million, approved by the National Assembly on July 27 without extended public debate — are modest by comparison. But the governance defect is identical in kind. Once Guyana Water Incorporated begins selling bottled water alongside Banks DIH, Demerara Distillers Limited, and Aquafina, the state is again both seller and standards-setter.

The only question is whether Guyana built anything, in the years since the oil precedent, to prevent the same conflict from recurring in a different sector. It has not.

WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY SAYS

Two bodies would nominally oversee GWI’s bottled water on paper. The Guyana National Bureau of Standards enforces compulsory product-safety and labeling standards across seventeen monitored categories, including food and beverages, through its own certification and testing infrastructure. The Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission exists, per Guyana’s domestic law, “to foster market-based competition” — the body that would in principle assess whether a state-owned bottler using public capital and a subsidized distribution network is competing fairly against private manufacturers who financed their own plants.

Neither institution was designed with this scenario in mind. GNBS’s published standards make no distinction between how a state corporation and a private manufacturer are tested, inspected, or penalized — the framework assumes uniform application by a genuinely independent referee. Both GNBS and CCAC are executive-branch agencies. Their funding, their board appointments, and ultimately their leadership answer to the same Cabinet that owns GWI and championed the bottling investment in the National Assembly.

When GWI’s quality control lapses, or its pricing methodology is challenged, or a competitor alleges its subsidized capital gives it an unfair market advantage, the body assessing that complaint will be reporting, in effect, to the shareholder of the company under investigation.

 

President Ali has already previewed how the government intends to handle scrutiny of the venture. Responding to GMSA’s public objections, he rejected the association’s competition concerns outright: “GWI is not in competition with anyone,” he said, adding that local manufacturers should ask why foreign bottled water was displacing them in the first place. GWI officials have told the President the utility could bring bottled water to shelves for GY$100 or less — a price point no private manufacturer, financing its own capital and standing on the wrong side of the state’s implicit backing, has been asked to explain how it would match.

Whether that price reflects genuine efficiency or an unpriced state subsidy is exactly the kind of question an independent regulator would need to examine. None has been asked to.

THE COMPARATIVE PICTURE: EVEN STRONGER LAWS DON’T GUARANTEE ENFORCEMENT

It would be a mistake to assume that if Guyana simply had better statutes on the books, the problem would resolve itself. The regional record argues otherwise.

Jamaica’s Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act (2001) and its 2012 Corporate Governance Framework for Public Bodies, and Trinidad and Tobago’s Integrity in Public Life Act (2000) alongside its 2011 State Enterprises Performance Monitoring Manual, both formally require that state-owned enterprises be held to “the same high quality accounting, disclosure, compliance and auditing standards as listed companies” — precisely the principle Guyana would need to apply to GWI’s bottling arm for the arrangement to be credible. St Vincent enacted dedicated SOE oversight legislation in 2019.

Guyana has no equivalent statute. There is no Guyanese law requiring that a state enterprise entering a commercial market submit to the same audit cadence, disclosure requirements, or arms-length review that a public company would face. The oil-marketing precedent produced a promise to strengthen institutions; it has not yet produced a public body with the statutory independence to test that promise against GWI’s bottled water.

And even where the region’s statutes exist on paper, enforcement has been chronically weak. A recent Trinidad-focused governance review found that 40 to 50 percent of that country’s 47 state enterprises carry audit backlogs of three to fifteen years — municipal corporations trail by twelve to fifteen years, and even the National Gas Company, a flagship revenue generator, had gone unaudited since 2021. Caribbean governance commentary has described regional disclosure of SOE performance and governance information as poor relative to international benchmarks. If Trinidad’s marquee energy company can go five years without a published audit despite dedicated integrity legislation, there is no basis for assuming GWI’s bottling operation — a minor commercial sideline for a utility, in a country with no comparable statute at all — would face tighter scrutiny by default.

The regional exception worth naming is Montserrat, where the Auditor-General holds direct statutory authority to audit public corporations under international INTOSAI standards, sitting entirely outside the ministerial chain that owns the entities under review.

That is the structural feature — audit power exercised by an office with no stake in the outcome — that Guyana’s framework lacks for GWI.

WHAT INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

For GWI’s bottled water venture to be credibly regulated rather than self-certified, several things would need to exist that do not:

♦ Published, product-specific GNBS test results for GWI’s bottled water, on the same public cadence applied to any commercial licensee — not aggregated into a general compliance statement, but disclosed with the same specificity a private competitor’s results would carry.

♦ A stated commitment, in writing, that GNBS or CCAC can penalize, recall, or publicly cite GWI’s product without requiring ministerial sign-off — removing the chain of accountability that currently runs the regulator’s findings back through the same Cabinet that owns the regulated entity.

♦ Financial reporting that separates GWI’s bottling unit from its core public water-supply subsidy, so that the GY$100 price point can be assessed against its actual production cost rather than treated as an assertion.

♦ An audit mechanism, ideally modeled on Montserrat’s example, with statutory independence from the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation — empowered to publish findings on GWI’s commercial arm on a fixed timetable regardless of ministerial preference.

None of these mechanisms accompanied the GY$496.3 million allocation. GMSA’s public statements, focused on market fairness, have not raised them either. Minister Indar’s assurance to the private sector that the initiative “is not intended to compete with existing businesses” is a policy position, not a regulatory structure — and it does nothing to establish who would test that assurance against GWI’s actual conduct once the plant is operating.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

Guyana’s government has, in the oil sector, already encountered the structural problem of being both commercial participant and regulator, and it has publicly acknowledged — through its own investment climate disclosures — that this requires institutional strengthening to manage credibly. Nothing in the public record indicates that acknowledgment has produced a mechanism transferable to GWI’s bottled water venture. The GNBS and CCAC frameworks that would nominally oversee it were built for a market without a state-owned competitor in it, and neither agency sits outside the ministerial chain that owns GWI.

The Caribbean comparison does not offer reassurance. Countries with statutory frameworks considerably more developed than Guyana’s still post multi-year audit backlogs on their flagship state enterprises. A framework on paper is not the same as an office willing and able to act on it.

Until an independent body — resourced, publicly reporting, and structurally separated from the ministry that owns GWI — is named and empowered to test the bottling venture’s safety compliance, pricing claims, and competitive conduct, the honest answer to who regulates the regulator is: for now, no one does.

The government is marking its own homework, and it has not yet said when, or whether, that will change.

— The Board

Failure Exposed: Govt’s Bottled Water Is Admission It Cannot Provide Basic Access

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

Failure Exposed: Govt’s Bottled Water Is Admission It Cannot Provide Basic Access

OPINION BY: Dr. Vincent Adams                                                                                    August 2026

The Government of Guyana is known to be the first to come up with skullduggeries to camouflage its incompetence and wrongheadedness; but this unprecedented maneuver to build and operate its own bottled water plant has to take the cake as the big stunt to distract from its gross incompetence, failure, and dereliction of duty of a normal Govt to perform its paramount function of delivering a clean municipal water supply system to its citizens.

Along with clean air, clean water is the most indispensable necessity for sustaining life, but unfortunately, this Govt has botched the God-given gift of being the land of many waters; or, as the famous Poet, Samuel Coleridge puts it “water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” 

This desperate move signifies the Govt’s confession of its lack of ability to perform this basic function, while callously caring less about the extra arm and leg expenses to be faced by the poverty stricken making up 60% of the population, who will be forced to purchase this water, accompanied by the retrograde step of going back to the days of fetching water in bottles, then transferring to buckets and calabash for bathing, in lieu of showering.

In contrast, the minority well to do friends and families of the Boys, will continue their merry affluent life styles enjoying in-house water treatment furnishing not only clean pipe water for their showering, but also for their clean dishes and laundry.     

The Guyanese people no doubt welcomes the outcries by the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA) and the Opposition against this endeavor that threatens private enterprises, and which exposes the fakery that the PPPC had somehow converted itself from communism—socialism to capitalism.

However, this unheard-of action flies in the face of a Govt’s moral imperative to guarantee a reliable and convenient pure water supply system to sustain all life and health for its people, which is far more vital than commercial interests.

Not surprisingly, the Govt openly entertains the commercial argument so as to get out of jail free by switching the conversation to distract from its obvious dereliction of duty for 29 years to carry out this most basic function, despite being handed a functional modern water system which they ran into the ground, resulting in the current discharge of unhealthful, toxic and discolored pipe water 630 times more acidic than safe drinking water (see my July 10, 2026 Letter to the Editor “GWI’s statement is irresponsible, callous and dangerous – water 630 times safe limit”).

Most despicably, though the GWI’s own laboratory water analyses show the water to be irrefutably unsafe and unfit for sanitary consumption, the Govt continues to claim that it is clean. In other words, condescendingly berating the public that they must not believe their own eyes, and don’t believe GWI’s own laboratory data.

That being the case, the President, Minister Indar, and/or the GWI CEO must drink in front of nation, the same water that they deem clean and which they implore the public to drink.

How unfathomable is it that a government could lack the ability to provide a potable water supply system to its nation dubbed as the land of many waters, despite inheriting an oil bonanza that triggered the fastest growing economy in the world, and a national budget that increased by more than 5 times to $1.6 Trillion since taking office. Not to mention that 60% of this humongous budget goes into infrastructure with wastage of a whopping 45%.

Owing to its proven incompetence, incapabilities, and ill-suited budgetary priorities as evidenced by its failures, the Govt seemingly had to resort to this alternative upon surrendering its failed efforts to mete out a universally traditional municipal water system, though drowning in resources to do so. For instance, as published by DPI on November 17, 2022, the Govt awarded contracts totaling $40 Billion to upgrade 12 water plants, and construct 7 new ones where “300,000 customers will be the beneficiaries of an improved water supply”.

Most notably, all of these improvements were slated for the PPP areas of Regions 3, 6 and the East Bank and East Coast of Demerara, with none in Linden with its five decrepit plants evidenced by the very poor and unhealthy water quality recently published by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).

Notwithstanding these massive expenditures targeted to PPPC constituents, the water quality continues to get patently worse, no doubt the reason for resorting to this bottled water trick, unmindful of the added negative impacts to the business sector, and the added financial hardships and inconvenience to the majority poor. 

Taking the Plant on its face value, there appears to be no basis for its $500 Million estimated cost which is guaranteed to end up at least two to three times higher, based upon the Govt’s track record; thus, in the interest of transparency, the Govt must inform the people of the following:

♦ What was the basis for the $496 Million estimate?

♦ What will be the added costs to each household for purchasing this water for drinking, bathing, laundry, and other sanitary purposes?

♦ What is the procedure for conducting water sampling analyses representative of the entire distribution system? 

♦ The PUC must publish on a monthly basis, the water quality analyses in #4.

— The 592 Guardian

The Missing Logic Isn’t the Protesters’ — It’s Peeping Tom’s

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This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series ▶️
592 GUARDIAN• ACCOUNTABILITY &INTERIGTY JOURNALISM •GUYANA

The Missing Logic Isn’t the Protesters’ — It’s Peeping Tom’s

By Hem Kumar, Editor The 592 Guardian 

Peeping Tom spent an entire column asking what, exactly, the protesters are protesting about — since, in his telling, the cause of the MV Barima’s sinking has not yet been established and only the Commission of Inquiry can establish it. It’s a clever framing. It’s also a straw man, and a fairly transparent one.

Nobody serious is protesting to demand a verdict on why the vessel sank. That is, correctly, the Commission’s job, and no responsible voice in this movement has tried to pre-empt it. What the public is protesting is a set of facts that are already established, on the record, and that do not require a single day of the Commission’s evidence to evaluate.

Start with what the minister said, not what the ship did. Within roughly two hours of the tragedy, Minister Edghill made public claims about what had happened — claims that turned out to be wrong and took days and several revisions to correct. That is not a mystery for naval architects to solve. That is a minister’s own words, in public, misrepresenting a mass-casualty event as it was unfolding. You do not need the Commission’s final report to hold a public official accountable for what he told the nation while people were still being pulled from the water.

Then look at the manifest — or the absence of one. Weeks on, there is still no final, confirmed count of who and what was aboard that vessel. The numbers have shifted more than once. The total gross weight of the vessel remains unaccounted for by MARAD’s own administrative arm. A state ferry operator that cannot produce a reliable headcount for its own boat, after a disaster that killed dozens, is not a “cause not yet established” problem. It is an existing institutional failure that was true before the Commission was even sworn in.

Then look at the money. A vessel reportedly requiring a bill of quantities in the order of $125 million was nonetheless kept in active passenger service. Whatever the Commission eventually finds about structural cause, the decision to keep sailing a vessel with repair needs of that magnitude is a documented resource and oversight decision, made by named officials, on paper, before the tragedy. 

That is not speculation. That is an admission already sitting in the file.

Then look at the law itself. Maritime scholar Robert Millington’s published analysis of the Guyana Shipping Act found what he calls a “24-Metre Gap” — stability and safety regulations written to apply under 24 metres, and cargo-vessel rules that explicitly exclude passenger ships. The Barima, at roughly 40 metres, fell into neither category, leaving it with fewer statutory safety obligations than a small wooden boat. Section 3(3) of the same Act makes MARAD’s own Director the legal “owner” of the vessel — regulator and owner, one office, one person. That is not a question the Commission needs to resolve.

That is a structural indictment of the framework the ministry was operating under, written into law long before anyone boarded that ferry.

And then look at the prosecutors’ own standard. Three crew members were charged before the Commission had taken a single day of evidence, on what is by all accounts incomplete disclosure. Peeping Tom accepts that without complaint — the law permits it, he says correctly, and charges proceeded anyway. But he then insists the public must wait for the Commission’s full causal finding before treating a minister’s false public statements as fair game. 

That is not consistency. That is a standard applied by rank: incomplete evidence is sufficient to charge three crew members, but insufficient to criticise one minister.

Peeping Tom asked what the protesters know that the Commission does not. The honest answer is: quite a lot, and none of it requires the Commission’s permission to say out loud. A false public statement made in the first hours of a tragedy. A manifest that still doesn’t add up. A repair bill in the tens of millions ignored in favour of continued service. A statutory gap that left a passenger ferry less regulated than a canoe.

 A prosecutorial standard that finds “enough to charge” for deckhands and “not enough to criticise” for a minister.

That is not theatre missing its cause. That is logic Peeping Tom chose not to follow where it led.

THE 592 GUARDIAN

THE GATE, NOT THE GARDEN

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THE 592 GUARDIAN•ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY• JOURNALISM• GUYANA

THE GATE, NOT THE GARDEN

How a Barred Chairman Exposes the Model Village Initiative as a Campaign, Not a Consultation

 OPINION — August, 2026

At the Melanie Nursery School on Thursday, villagers of Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil sat through a public consultation on the government’s Model Village Initiative. President Irfaan Ali told them the exercise was about resilient, sustainable communities — that the transformation of a village is bound up with the transformation of the economy, the transformation of the country.

He promised culverts, bridges, walkways, streetlights, green space. He said their input would be incorporated into the plans.

Outside, and then behind a police barricade, stood the one person whose presence should have made that promise credible:              Walston Martins, Chairman of the Buxton/Foulis Neighbourhood Democratic Council, the elected local government official for the very jurisdiction hosting the consultation. He had an invitation. He was told to leave anyway, and warned he would be arrested if he refused.

A consultation that excludes the elected voice of the community is not a consultation. It is a performance staged in front of one.

THE SALES PITCH

Circulating alongside the Melanie Damishana outreach are two renderings that tell you plainly what this initiative is actually selling. The first is a gateway sign — stone pillars, hanging lanterns, a warm sunset backdrop — reading “Welcome to Melanie Damishana.” The second is a before-and-after board: on the left, an aerial photograph of an undeveloped, waterlogged stretch of land beside the public road, labelled “Existing”; on the right, the same stretch of land transformed into a manicured “Family Park,” complete with a splash pad, gazebos, landscaped walking paths, and playground equipment, labelled “Proposed.”

 Concept render of a proposed “Melanie Damishana” village gateway sign, presented at the Model Village Initiative consultation.

“Existing vs. Proposed” concept board for a village park, presented at the same consultation.

These are not blueprints. They are not budgeted works orders with contractors attached and completion dates fixed. They are architectural concept renders — the same genre of image a developer uses to sell condominiums that do not yet exist. Nothing on either board discloses a procurement timeline, a funding source, or a date.

What they disclose is a feeling: this is what your village could look like, if. The “if” is the part no one is saying aloud. Ask what compels these plans to become a market with vendors in it, a park with a working splash pad, a gateway sign that is stone and not vinyl — and the honest answer, on the government’s own timeline, arrives sometime after the next Local Government Elections.

The visual aid is not a construction schedule. It is a ballot.

THE PRECEDENT ALREADY ON THE RECORD

This newsroom  does not have to speculate about what happens to a glossy village render once the cameras move on.                         Silica City — announced in 2022 as the flagship of this kind of transformation — still has no completion date for the 110 homes of Phase One, four years later.

The public language around it has not hardened toward delivery; if anything it has softened, drifting from claims of near-completion toward vaguer assurances of steady progress. Christopher Ram, writing in Stabroek News earlier this year, described the project as operating in near-complete secrecy, with no disclosed financing structure and no disclosed allocation criteria for who actually receives a home.

A model village is, in that sense, a smaller and more portable version of a model city. The scale changes. The mechanism — announce, render, tour, promise, and let the follow-through go quiet once the political calendar has moved past it — does not.

WHY EXCLUDE THE ONE PERSON WHOSE JOB THIS IS

Local government exists, constitutionally and in practice, precisely to handle the granular business the Model Village Initiative claims to be doing: how wide a road should be, what species of tree goes where, where a streetlight is needed, where a playing field belongs. That is the statutory function of a Neighbourhood Democratic Council and its elected Chairman.

It does not require a sitting President, a Vice President, and an entourage of ministers touring the country village by village to determine where a culvert goes.

So when Walston Martins — the Chairman actually elected to make exactly these decisions for Buxton/Foulis — is stopped outside a business across the road, questioned by police for asking why a group of young women were being moved along, and then told by Assistant Commissioner Mahendra Siwnarine that he would be arrested if he did not retreat behind a barricade, the question answers itself.

Martins had committed no offence. He said as much on the spot: “This is my jurisdiction. Why must I go? I am not doing anything that is illegal.” He was removed anyway.

No statute empowered that removal. No bylaw, no provision of the Local Government Act, gives the State authority to bar an elected NDC Chairman from a public consultation held inside his own jurisdiction. What operated in his place was a police officer’s discretion, applied at a government-branded campaign event, against the one local figure positioned to ask an inconvenient question on the record.

A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

Thursday’s barricading of Martins is not an isolated overreach.      It follows the same script this news media  has already documented at Watooka House in Linden, where barriers were breached and joint security forces mobilised within minutes; at Koberimo in Region One, where a handful of women with placards were met by police in flak jackets; and on the Pomeroon River, where the Opposition Leader’s vessel was intercepted and turned back over paperwork that had not been demanded of the same boat hours earlier that morning.

Each time, the government’s public-facing message is outreach, consultation, listening. Each time, the security posture on the ground says something else entirely.

 

Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil, like Linden, are communities without a history of PPP electoral dominance. That is not incidental to where this tour has gone. A government confident that its development promises would be judged on delivery would have no reason to fear the one person in the room who could ask, on the record and in front of his own constituents, whether any of it is actually funded.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION  IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is formally asking the Office of the President and the Guyana Police Force to disclose: under what legal authority Chairman Martins was ordered behind a barricade and threatened with arrest at a public consultation in his own jurisdiction; whether any funding, procurement, or delivery timeline exists for the works depicted in the Melanie Damishana renderings, and if so, to publish it; and whether local government chairs and councillors across the Model Village tour route are being invited to these consultations as a matter of course, or selectively excluded where their presence is politically inconvenient.

Villagers deserve real culverts, real walkways, real streetlights. They do not deserve to have their patience rented out as backdrop for a campaign that dares not let their own elected representative into the room.

— The Board

     

    

The Ambassador’s Blind Spot

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series ▶️
592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

The Ambassador’s Blind Spot

EDITORIAL◊GUYANA DEVELOPMENT BANK

BY: Staff Writer- August,2026

Singh Praised the Bank’s Discipline the President Had Already Abandoned

Sasenarine Singh, Guyana’s Ambassador to Belgium and the EU, used his column this week to praise President Irfaan Ali’s “will” in pushing the Guyana Development Bank into law, and to warn — in the abstract — that the $40 billion facility could collapse into the next GAIBANK if credit decisions ever became subject to political influence, such as “officials prioritising requests from Regional Chairpersons rather than on merit and the bankability of the project.”

Singh wrote that warning as a hypothetical. It was already out of date. The very day  before his column ran, President Ali stood before residents in Rose Hall, Region Six, and told bar and entertainment-venue owners to expect Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises — a specific sector, a specific use of funds, announced by the President personally, at a political roadshow stop, months before the Bank has a board, a lending policy, or an application process.

This is not adjacent to the risk Singh described. It is the risk Singh described, already realized, by the same president Singh’s column exists to praise.

AN AMBASSADOR, NOT AN ECONOMIST, AND NOT A NEUTRAL ONE

It is worth stating plainly what Singh is and is not. He is not an independent financial commentator assessing a policy on its merits. He is a sitting Guyanese ambassador — accredited to Belgium, the EU, and the OACPS — writing under his diplomatic title to build a partisan case for the head of the government that appointed him.

This is not the first time. In July, Kaieteur News called for his recall after he inserted himself into a domestic political dispute over the government’s handling of Region Two squall damage, on the grounds that an ambassador represents Guyana, not the party, and not the administration currently in office.

That distinction is not a technicality; it is the entire basis on which a diplomat is permitted to speak with the authority of the state rather than the authority of a faction. Singh has now set it aside twice inside a single month.

None of that would matter much if the substance of his column were sound. It is not.

THE GOVERNANCE ARGUMENT SINGH BORROWED, THEN ABANDONED

Singh’s strongest material is not his own. His warning about Section 5(2)’s discretionary lending language — the provision allowing loans “with or without collateral and with or without charging interest” — closely tracks a public warning from Kenrick Hunte, a former Guyanese ambassador, who argued in a letter to the editor that the same provision creates four distinct lending scenarios, and that reliance on the looser two would turn the Bank into “a welfare agency” rather than a functioning development institution, repeating the mistakes that sank GAIBANK.

Hunte made that argument as a critique. Singh borrowed its shape, then used it to build the opposite conclusion — that the Bank’s guardrails simply need to be “constructed early,” as though early construction were still possible, and as though the President himself were a neutral party to that construction rather than the person already making unilateral allocation decisions in public.

Singh’s own numbers undercut him further. He cites the Bank of Guyana’s 2025 non-performing loan ratio — 1.5 percent, against a 4.9 percent Caribbean average — as evidence of the discipline this new institution inherits. That figure describes the existing commercial banking sector operating under existing prudential regulation.

It describes nothing about an institution with no board, no published lending criteria, and a president who has already begun naming sectors and use cases from a podium.

WHAT THE TIMING ACTUALLY SHOWS

Singh’s column never mentions that the Bill passed the same sitting the opposition boycotted in protest over the MV Barima disaster — a maritime tragedy still without a resolved accountability process. He does not mention that the Bank remains, as of this writing, a statute and a launch date: no portal, no office, no application window. And he does not mention Rose Hall, where the President personally directed a category of prospective borrowers toward the Bank’s future financing — bars and entertainment venues, for soundproofing — a sector Guyana’s own police force and the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons reports have repeatedly identified as a recurring site of labor and sex trafficking risk, most recently in the pending Magic City Nightclub matter now before the courts.

Singh asked the country to trust that “the country must demand” discipline of this Bank going forward. The country does not need to demand anything hypothetically. It needs an ambassador willing to report what has already happened, rather than one auditioning to have written the government’s press release before the government did.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

This outlet renews, in this context, the disclosure requests already put to the Office of the President and the Bank’s future secretariat:

  1. Whether soundproofing financing for bars, taverns, or entertainment venues will carry any safeguarding, licensing-compliance, or anti-trafficking due-diligence conditions, and who will verify compliance.
  2. Under what legal authority a not-yet-operational Bank — with no board, no published lending criteria, and no application process — is being publicly committed by the President to specific borrowers and specific uses of funds.
  3. Whether any establishment currently under investigation, charge, or licence review — including those connected to the pending May 28 Magic City matter — would be eligible to receive Development Bank financing under this initiative.

Ambassador Singh’s column asked Guyanese to trust that discipline would come later. Rose Hall is the record of what came first.

— The Board

Court Denies VAMED’s Injunctions, But Guyana Still Hasn’t Answered the Novation Question

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

ANALYSIS

Court Denies VAMED’s Injunctions, But Guyana Still Hasn’t Answered the Novation Question

The High Court’s Thursday ruling in the VAMED Engineering dispute is being read by some as vindication for the contractor. It is not. A closer look at what Justice Renita Singh actually ordered — and what the Government still refuses to say — tells a different story

On Thursday, Justice Renita Singh of the High Court delivered a ruling in the dispute between the Ministry of Health and VAMED Engineering GmbH that has already been mischaracterized in parts of the public conversation as a setback for the Government. The record says otherwise. Justice Singh denied VAMED’s application for conservatory orders that would have restrained the Ministry from taking possession of or occupying the Guyana Pediatric and Maternal Hospital (GMPH) site at Ogle and the New Amsterdam Hospital Campus, from expelling VAMED’s personnel or subcontractors, and from enforcing a EUR14.9 million performance bond.

VAMED’s fallback request — that conservatory relief remain in force pending an expedited inter partes hearing or the constitution of a Dispute Adjudication Board or Arbitral Tribunal under clause 21 of the contracts — was refused as well. The court found that VAMED had not demonstrated the urgency required for interim relief.

What Justice Singh did order was narrower and more balanced than VAMED’s public statement suggested. Both parties — not VAMED alone — were directed to preserve the fifty-two containers of equipment on the GMPH site, without opening or interfering with them. Only VAMED’s own security personnel may access the site, and only for the sole purpose of securing those containers.

The Ministry was separately ordered to preserve all contractor documents, property designs, plans, and intellectual property. By consent of Attorney General Anil Nandlall and VAMED’s counsel Nigel Hughes, the site crane is to be returned to VAMED. Critically, these preservation orders expire the moment an Arbitration Tribunal is appointed. This is a holding measure, not a judgment on the merits of either party’s claim.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE CLAIM

VAMED’s arbitration claim, filed as a statement of claim on July 27, 2026, seeks approximately EUR45.53 million. Of that figure, only EUR19.15 million is described as certified payments already approved for work completed. The balance is composed of variations, indexation, additional works, and other contractual entitlements — categories that are, by their nature, contested rather than settled. The Government’s own supervising engineer has separately estimated Guyana’s indebtedness to VAMED at approximately EUR37.94 million, a figure that sits meaningfully below VAMED’s claim and suggests the two sides disagree less about whether money is owed than about how much, and for what.

The underlying contracts are now a matter of public record: a EUR149 million Design-and-Build agreement dated June 8, 2022, for the GMPH facility at Ogle, and a EUR150 million agreement dated July 12, 2023, for the New Amsterdam Hospital Campus in Region Six — together, EUR299 million in public commitment for two hospitals that remain unfinished more than four years after the first contract was signed.

On completion, the two sides are not close to agreement. VAMED maintains that GMPH is 67 percent complete. A Government official, speaking to Demerara Waves, put the figure closer to 50 percent, and added a detail that will matter before an arbitral tribunal: that VAMED has not shipped or installed any biomedical equipment at a facility now a year past its original deadline, and that all subcontractors on the project have been released. If accurate, this is not a minor discrepancy.

A gap of that size between the contractor’s own completion claim and the Government’s — on a project already the subject of a multimillion-euro payment dispute — is exactly the kind of fact an arbitral tribunal exists to resolve, and this newsroom takes no position on which figure is correct.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT’S REBUTTAL SAYS — AND DOES NOT SAY

The Ministry of Health has rejected VAMED’s public account as a “misleading narrative” that omits the contractor’s own performance failures. In its fuller statement, the Government maintains it has remained committed to completing both hospitals given their strategic importance, that it acted in good faith throughout, and that payments under a Design-and-Build contract are properly tied to measured, approved works rather than to the passage of time alone. It states that the Notices of Intention to Terminate, issued on June 2, 2026, followed extensive contractual correspondence over many months documenting delays, missed milestones, and inadequate mobilisation of resources — and that VAMED was given numerous opportunities to remedy these deficiencies before the Ministry exercised its contractual rights.

This is a more procedurally careful defense than the Government’s initial public posture suggested, and it deserves to be weighed on its own terms rather than dismissed. If the documented correspondence trail the Ministry describes holds up before an ICC tribunal, it materially strengthens the Government’s position on the question of who breached first.

But a defense built carefully on milestones and mobilization is conspicuous for what it leaves out. This news outlet asked, in February, whether a Deed of Novation had been executed transferring the Ogle and New Amsterdam contracts from VAMED Engineering to the successor entity now marketing itself in Guyana as VAMED+WWH, following the April 1, 2025 sale of VAMED’s international project business to the WWH Group — a sale VAMED’s own corporate website confirms took place.

We asked whether Performance Bonds and Advance Payment Bonds had been re-issued in the successor’s name, and whether UK Export Finance and Sweden’s export credit agency had authorized any transfer of the financing facilities underwriting these projects. Five months, a Ministerial statement to the National Assembly, an ICC arbitration filing, and two rounds of detailed public rebuttal later, none of those questions has been answered. Not confirmed. Not denied. Simply absent, in a rebuttal otherwise willing to engage on nearly every other point of contention.

A government capable of a paragraph-by-paragraph defense on contractual performance is not a government that forgot to mention novation. The silence is a choice, and it is the same choice that has now persisted across a change of government minister’s statement, an arbitration filing, a High Court hearing, and a written press rebuttal.

Whether that silence reflects an unresolved legal status the Government does not wish to admit to, or simply institutional carelessness about the corporate mechanics underlying a EUR299 million commitment of public and export-credit money, the public still does not know, in law, who the Government’s counterparty actually is.

WHERE THIS LEAVES THE PUBLIC

Thursday’s ruling should not be read as either side’s win. VAMED sought real, substantive protection from the court and was refused on every count save the narrowest possible preservation of disputed property — property whose ownership Justice Singh herself described as being in dispute. The Government avoided a more damaging injunction but has not yet had to answer, under oath or under parliamentary questioning, the single question this publication first raised in February: does a Deed of Novation exist.

Both parties will have their opportunity to present evidence on payment and performance before an ICC tribunal, and that process should be allowed to run its course. But the novation question does not require an arbitral tribunal to answer. It requires a government prepared to name the office responsible for tracking corporate ownership changes on a state infrastructure project financed substantially by sovereign export-credit borrowing, and to put a Deed of Novation — or its absence — on the record. Five months of silence on a question this simple is not an oversight. It is a pattern.

This publication takes no position on which party’s account of performance or payment is accurate; that determination belongs to the ICC tribunal. Figures cited above are drawn from Justice Singh’s ruling, court reporting, VAMED Engineering’s public statements, the Ministry of Health’s public rebuttal, and VAMED’s own corporate disclosures.

Joint Civil Society Statement on the COI and Other Matters of National Importance Related to the MV Barima Tragedy

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592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

Joint Civil Society Statement on the COI and Other Matters of National Importance Related to the MV Barima Tragedy

PRESS RELEASE.

We, the undersigned individuals and non-governmental organizations in Guyana, the Caribbean, and other countries, mourn with the families of all the passengers and crew who drowned when the MV Barima capsized and sank off the Guyana coast during the night of 18 July 2026. This tragedy which took the lives of a still-unknown number of innocent, economically disadvantaged, and historically marginalized persons, was wholly preventable and should never have occurred in the first place. 

This disaster- the worst in Guyana’s history apart from the foreign-led Jonestown massacre, and one of the worst maritime disasters in the Caribbean- has exposed the broken system of governance in Guyana, characterized by regular and widespread abuse of State power, chronic lack of accountability and oversight at all levels, intimidation and repression of critical and dissenting voices, and denial of civil society participation and representation in local governance and community based decision-making. Our mourning thus encompasses the strangling of democracy that we witness and experience daily in Guyana. 

We echo the public calls for the resignation of Minister of Public Works- Juan Edgill, Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation- Deodat Indar, and MARAD Director General- Stephen Thomas, along with General Manager of the Transport and Harbours Department (T&HD)- Yolanda Hughes Smith and Chairperson of the T&HD Board- Rosalinda Rasul, in keeping with well established norms of international accountability that locates ultimate overall accountability in those at the highest level of authority in the chain of command. However, it is a well-known principle of delegation that the delegation of authority does not absolve the delegator of responsibility. The public is therefore entitled to know how those above these specific individuals are also responsible in this tragedy.

We remind President Ali that all Commissions of Inquiry must satisfy the full implementation of Article 13 of the Constitution of Guyana on inclusionary democracy, guaranteeing the participation of citizens and their organizations in state management and decision-making, especially regarding wellbeing and safety. 

As such, the present COI- established unilaterally by President Ali on 26 July 2026- is unacceptable and must be replaced by a truly representative COI widened through genuine consultative processes to include the perspectives of survivors and families who lost loved ones, Indigenous leaders and organizations, relevant civil society groups and representatives of the opposition parties.  

We have learnt from the deficiencies of the previous COI into the Mahdia tragedy of 2023, which also lacked impartiality and suffered from State overreach, shielding of subject ministers and other State officials from accountability, and manipulation of grieving and traumatized family members of the 20 Indigenous students who died at that time. We reject a repeat of such ineffectual and unsatisfactory past COIs and will not accept anything less than a genuine consultative process so that full accountability can be realized. 

We also note the public reports of wrongdoing on the part of several of those appointed by President Ali to this COI, and urge the removal of all such tainted individuals from this process. 

  The Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster must: 

  • Be public and accessible to all Guyanese- not held behind closed doors- with full transparency to survivors, their families, and all Guyanese. As part of full accessibility, Creolese and Indigenous languages interpreters must be provided during the asking of questions and the taking of testimonies. 
  • The proceedings must be covered by the independent press who must be treated with respect and given unimpeded access to all participants, except for court-specified restrictions.
  • Ensure that the key role and position of Secretary to the COI must satisfy public confidence and strict requirements for independence, transparency, impartiality, integrity, and aptitude. 
  • Record the testimony of survivors of the MV Barima sinking as well as those who did not board it but who witnessed its final boarding and who can accurately describe conditions of travel to Port Kaituma on July 18 and previous public ferry journeys to the Northwest Region. 
  • Record eye- witnesses accounts of public and private parties involved in the search, rescue, and recovery operations, and evaluate the coordination, speed, and effectiveness of emergency response mechanisms inclusive of state and private agencies.
  • Record, share, document and specify in detail the psycho-social trauma counselling given to survivors and their families inclusive of who, how many times, where and qualifications of counsellors- not only for adults but also the many children who lost mothers, fathers, siblings and other family members. Detail arrangements in place to continue long term counselling for survivors and their families. Identify civil society organizations who have been approached to assist with psycho- social and trauma counselling short term and long term.
  • Document arrangements made for burial of those who lost their lives, to show if these were carried out in keeping with dignity and sensitivity and the wishes of their families.
  • Make all findings and recommendations in the final report publicly available locally, regionally and internationally.

Additionally, 

  • Indigenous and riverain communities must be meaningfully consulted and given the opportunity and means to testify to the shortcomings of the existing system of riverain transportation, and to contribute to solutions as they are the ones who rely most heavily on these systems and suffer disproportionally the risks and inequities. 
  • Sanctions must be applied on any public official who misleads or obstructs this inquiry.
  • The Government of Guyana must provide free, equal, and equivalent independent legal representation for survivors and bereaved families as that for public bodies, officials and ministers.
  • Admissibility of evidence must be determined by the Chair of the Commission- not the State agencies under investigation, and there must be no attempt to invoke ‘national security” in order to shield public agencies and officials from accountability.

We call on the President of Guyana to direct the Minister of Labour and the Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, among other agencies, to investigate and report on the numerous allegations of violations of health and safety requirements on the MV Barima ferry and other public hinterland ferries managed by the Transport and Harbours Department. 

Guyana, as a member of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and signatory to the International Convention for the Safety of Lives at Sea (SOLAS), must undertake an independent technical marine casualty investigation consistent with the IMO Casualty Investigation Code, the IMO Model Regulations on Domestic Ferry Safety, and SOLAS. A Commission of Inquiry cannot be a substitute for an independent marine safety investigation conducted in accordance with internationally recognized standards. 

We also call on the relevant authorities to also immediately comply with Guyana’s Shipping Act 49.01- especially Part X VIII which clearly outlines a structured framework for addressing marine casualties and requires formal marine casualty investigations by qualified boards or authorized officers to determine the cause of incidents before criminal liability is assessed for captains and crew. These marine investigations must precede any criminal prosecution, ensuring the root cause is established within the framework of maritime law- rather than bypassing it for common law charges or the Criminal Law Procedures Act.  

As such, it is our view that the action of the Director of Public Prosecutions- in recommending 72 charges of murder against the boat captain, first mate and goods loading supervisor- is precipitate and in fact, obstructs the full and fair investigation into this disaster. The events on 18 July 2026 suggest that the people with the most relevant knowledge of the disaster are these very individuals who are now prevented from answering questions to avoid self-incrimination according to Section 12 of Guyana’s Commission of Inquiry Act (cap. 19:03, 1933-1997). 

The DPP’s actions also prevent the coroner from holding an inquest into the circumstances of the MV Barima deaths, as required normally by sections 06 and 18 of the Coroners Act.  As the DPP has been unable or unwilling to disclose her reasons for these recommendations of hers, we urge that she withdraw these charges in order to allow a complete investigation and inquest. The grieving families and people of Guyana need to hear the full and unconstrained testimony of all relevant parties and all those who contributed to this tragedy must be held fully accountable. 

Finally, we demand assurances that all attempts to criminalize persons and organizations for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of conscience, expression, assembly, association, equality, and non- discrimination be ceased immediately.

Endorsed by: 

Guyanese Organization of Indigenous Peoples

Red Thread Crossroads Women’s Center

Transparency International Guyana Inc.

Oil and Gas Governance Network

We The People (Gen Z Youth Movement)

Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)

Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC)

and additional signatories:

Link ⇒https://www.ipetitions.com/p/joint-civil-society-statement-on-the-mv-barima-coi-sign-on/