THE OFFICE AND THE MAN

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 THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM 

The Office and the Man       

Ambassador Theriot’s Sub Judice Problem-The 592Guardian.

When United States Ambassador Nicole Theriot told reporters this week that it would have been “inappropriate” to invite Azruddin Mohamed to the U.S. Embassy’s 250th Independence Day reception;

she was not simply commenting on a businessman she considers unwelcome. She was making a determination — publicly, and not for the first time — about a man whose guilt has not been established by any court, and in doing so, excluding from a diplomatic function the constitutional office he currently holds: Leader of the Opposition of Guyana.

These are two different acts, and the conflation between them is doing a great deal of quiet work.
The individual is not the office
Mohamed the individual is indicted in the Southern District of Florida on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud, connected to an alleged multi-year scheme to defraud the Guyanese state of gold export taxes and royalties. He is also under U.S. Treasury sanctions dating to June 2024. None of this is in serious dispute, and none of it is this media’s concern to relitigate here.

What is this media’s concern is that the Leader of the Opposition — a position created and protected by Guyana’s Constitution, carrying formal consultative functions including under Article 161(3)(b) on the appointment of GECOM commissioners — was not invited to a function marking the bilateral relationship between Guyana and the United States.

“An embassy is entitled to decline social engagement with an individual it has sanctioned. It is a considerably larger act to decline to acknowledge, at a diplomatic function celebrating partnership between two sovereign states, the constitutional office that individual currently and lawfully occupies. The first is a personnel decision. The second is a statement about whose institutions Washington considers legitimate.”

Ambassador Theriot’s own language elides the distinction. She did not say it would have been inappropriate to invite the Leader of the Opposition, currently Mr. Mohamed. She said it would have been inappropriate to invite him. The office disappears into the man — which is precisely the confusion that lets an ambassador’s personal judgment about an individual’s culpability stand in for a foreign government’s institutional recognition of a constitutional post.
This is not the first time
This would be a narrower complaint if it were an isolated lapse in phrasing. It is not.

In April, Ambassador Theriot told a national television audience: “We firmly believe that they’re guilty of the crimes that they’re being indicted for.

The remark drew a formal written warning from Florida-based attorney Peter A. Quinter, representing the Mohameds, cautioning that such comments were inappropriate given that the matter remained sub judice in Guyana — an argument grounded in the diplomat’s obligation under international convention to avoid prejudicial commentary on a host country’s live judicial proceedings. That extradition matter, at time of writing, remains before the Caribbean Court of Justice, which granted a stay and has scheduled further hearings on the applicants’ special leave application.

Three months after being formally cautioned for prejudging Mohamed’s guilt on air, the Ambassador made a second discretionary judgment against him — this time not verbal but structural, translating her stated belief in his guilt directly into an act of institutional exclusion .

That is not conflation happening by accident. That is a pattern: a foreign diplomat treating an unresolved extradition matter as settled, and now allowing that settled-in-her-mind verdict to determine which of Guyana’s constitutional officers gets a seat at the table.

The precedent, not the person
Set aside, for a moment, whatever view any reader holds of Mohamed’s conduct as a businessman. The question this editorial is asking is not whether he is guilty — that is for the CCJ and, if extradition proceeds, an American jury to determine.

‘The question is whether a foreign embassy should be in the business of deciding, unilaterally and prior to any judicial resolution, which of a host country’s constitutionally-elected office holders merit diplomatic recognition

If the answer is yes, Georgetown should understand clearly what has been established: that the standing of Guyana’s Leader of the Opposition —

an office that exists independent of, and as a check upon, whichever party holds executive power — is now contingent on the approval of the United States Embassy.That is not a small precedent for a small state to absorb without comment, regardless of who currently holds the office, and regardless of how this or any future extradition proceeding resolves.

It is worth noting, too, what standard is not being applied consistently. The sitting President of the United States was convicted — not indicted, convicted, by a New York jury on 34 felony counts — and continued to preside over the very independence being celebrated at Ambassador Theriot’s own reception.

Indictment abroad disqualifies a Guyanese constitutional officer from an invitation list; conviction at home did not disqualify an American president from his own inauguration

 If the operative principle were genuinely about legal jeopardy, it would need to explain that asymmetry. It cannot, because the operative principle is not legal jeopardy. It is discretion — American discretion, applied to a Guyanese institution, with no obligation to be consistent because there is no mechanism by which Guyana can hold Washington to account for it.

President Ali described the U.S.-Guyana relationship this week as being at its strongest point in the two countries’ history, founded on “mutual respect.”

Mutual respect between sovereign states is not merely a matter of warships and communications upgrades. It includes respecting the constitutional architecture of the smaller partner — including, and especially, the parts of that architecture a foreign government finds inconvenient.

An ambassador who cannot keep the man and the office separate has not yet demonstrated that respect. Whether Guyana’s government is prepared to say so is a separate question — and, this news-outlet would argue, an urgent one.

THE OFFICE ,NOT THE MAN

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRUTH♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦OBJECTIVITY

The Office, Not the Man: Ali’s “Continuity” Fiction and the Article 127 Breach

There is a particular species of executive overreach that does not announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives instead in a lawyer’s phrase, offered almost as an aside, and it is more dangerous for the modesty of its delivery. This week it arrived as “a grey area that we have to navigate carefully.”

That is how President Irfaan Ali characterised the question of whether he is constitutionally obliged to consult Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed on the substantive appointments of the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice. There is no grey area. Article 127(1) of the Constitution is not ambiguous, and it does not run to the President’s convenience. It states, without qualification:

The Chancellor and the Chief Justice shall each be appointed by the President, acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.” Not notice. Not courtesy. Agreement — from the Leader of the Opposition, a constitutional office presently held by Mr Mohamed, not by a letter Dr Ali wrote to his predecessor

The theory, in the President’s own words

Pressed on why he had not engaged Mr Mohamed directly, Dr Ali offered a “continuity of government” theory: that because his administration continued after the September 1 elections, the recommendation he had put to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton in October 2025 “remains the position of the government” and requires no fresh engagement with the man who has held the office since January 26. Asked again, directly, whether that position had been communicated to Mr Mohamed, the President repeated only that the recommendation “has not changed” — an answer to a question that was not asked, and a studied evasion of the one that was.

This is worth sitting with, because it is not a slip. It is a legal theory, articulated by a head of state, in defence of a decision not to perform a constitutional duty.

Reduced to its essence, the theory holds that “consultation” under Article 127 is satisfied once, in perpetuity, regardless of who subsequently occupies the office of Leader of the Opposition — that the President’s obligation attaches not to the constitutional office and the person Guyanese voters and parliamentarians have placed in it, but to whichever individual happened to be convenient to consult at the moment the President first formed a view.

Mr Mohamed’s rebuttal was plain and correct: “Mr Norton is not the Opposition Leader. He needs to write me or call me and mention that he wants to meet on whatever issue. We can’t go with that letter.” Put another way — the Office survives the transition of the person occupying it, and so does the President’s duty to it. That is not a novel constitutional proposition. It is the ordinary operation of Westminster-derived office.

The courts have already answered this question

The President is not improvising in a vacuum. Guyana’s High Court has already ruled — directly and specifically — on the character of the Article 127 obligation, in litigation arising from Dr Ali’s own decade-long refusal to make these very appointments. In April 2023, Justice Damone Younge held that “for as long as there are no substantive appointments to the offices of Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127(1) of the Constitution, the President and the Leader of the Opposition are under the continuous mandatory constitutional duty and obligation to engage in a process which results in compliance with Article 127(1) of the Constitution.”

Continuous. Mandatory.                Those are the court’s words, not the Opposition’s rhetoric. A continuous duty cannot, by definition, be discharged by a single static communication frozen at a moment in time and preserved thereafter as if the office to which it was addressed had not changed hands. If the duty is continuous, it necessarily runs to whoever currently holds the office being consulted — otherwise the word “continuous” means nothing at all. Dr Ali’s own government has never challenged this characterisation of the duty; it has only ever argued about timing, never about to whom the duty is owed.

Indeed, it is the government’s own former courtroom position that now undercuts the President’s “continuity” theory. In the same 2023 proceedings, Attorney General Anil Nandlall argued on the State’s behalf that the President retained discretion over when to initiate the Article 127 process — “as soon as is reasonably practicable” — while never once disputing that the party owed consultation was the sitting Leader of the Opposition. The government’s litigated position, then, conceded implicitly what Dr Ali now wishes to avoid conceding explicitly: that the obligation tracks the office as currently occupied. He cannot rely on a letter to Mr Norton to satisfy a duty his own Attorney General has already told a judge is continuous and mandatory.

Anticipating the deflection

There is a precedent the government may reach for, and it should be dealt with before it is deployed. Mr Nandlall has separately noted, in relation to the appointment of the Commissioner of Police, that the constitutional consultation requirement did not apply at a moment when there was, in fact, no Opposition Leader in office to consult — a genuine vacancy, not a change of occupant. That is not the present case. Mr Mohamed is the duly elected Leader of the Opposition.                                                 

There is no vacancy for Dr Ali to invoke, no absence of an interlocutor, only his own reluctance to pick up the telephone.

Any attempt to graft the Police Commissioner precedent onto this dispute should be recognised for what it would be: a false equivalence between an empty office and an occupied one the President would simply prefer not to deal with.

A demand grounded in the Office, not the man

Some will note, correctly, that Mr Mohamed and his father are presently the subject of United States sanctions and an extradition fight tied to allegations of gold export tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering. That is a serious matter, and it is entirely beside the point. The Constitution does not condition the President’s Article 127 duty on the Opposition Leader’s personal legal standing, his popularity, his business history, or Dr Ali’s evident discomfort with him. It conditions the duty on the office. This publication has never hesitated to hold power to account regardless of who wields it or who opposes it, and we extend the same standard here: the demand that Dr Ali consult with Mr Mohamed is a demand that he respect the Office of Opposition Leader, exactly as we would make of any president confronting any opposition leader, popular or reviled. To excuse the President from a constitutional duty because the current occupant of a co-equal office is personally unpalatable to him is to hand him a permanent veto over which opposition leaders he must respect the Constitution for — a veto no president should have and none was given.

The pattern this fits

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the latest instance of a governing style this publication has documented repeatedly: a President who treats the constitutional bodies and processes designed to check him as optional formalities to be honoured only when convenient, and who prefers his own unilateral pronouncement to the deliberative process the Constitution actually requires.

We have seen it in his preemption of the Integrity Commission’s findings before the Commission itself could act. We have seen it in the GECOM commissioner impasse, where the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nomination rights have met similar resistance.

 We now see it in the judiciary’s top two offices — offices that have sat without substantive appointments for more than two decades, a fact the Caribbean Court of Justice’s own President, Adrian Saunders, has publicly and pointedly lamented.

Seventeen years without a substantive Chancellor. Seventeen years without a substantive Chief Justice. A High Court ruling, sought by his own government’s political opponents, that already tells him the duty is continuous and mandatory. And still, in July 2026, the President’s answer is a “grey area” and a letter written to a man no longer in office.

A 36-seat mandate is a mandate to govern. It is not a dispensation from the Constitution’s plain text, and it is not, whatever the President may have convinced himself of, a title deed to a kingdom.

  . Mr Mohamed says he is prepared to test court, as the opposition did successfully in 2023. He should. The Constitution, and the ruling already on the books, are on his side.

THE EITI BOARD SPEAKS FOR CIVIL SOCIETY

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Board Speaks of Civic Space. Guyana Shows What Closing It Looks Like. –The 592 Guardian — Editorial.July 2026

When the EITI Board issued its statement reaffirming that “meaningful, representative and independent civil society participation is essential to the credibility and effectiveness” of extractive-sector transparency, it was speaking in the register international bodies reserve for principles nobody in the room will admit to violating. Helen Clark, the Board Chair, framed it as a defence against a global trend — civic space closing across 122 countries, 43 of them EITI implementers. Guyana did not need to wait for the global statistics.

It has spent the past year demonstrating, in real time, exactly what “closed, repressed or obstructed” looks like when practiced through procedure rather than force.

 The Board’s validation team was on the ground in Guyana from June 8–12. What they found, or were permitted to find, sits at the center of a story this paper has been tracking since the reconstitution of the Guyana EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group began unraveling in 2025 — a story that is, at its core, about who gets to sit at the table and who decides who sits at the table.

A Convenor With a Concession

Start with the appointment that should have disqualified itself.

In appointing Dr. Ivor English as Convenor of the Civic component of the MSG, Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat handed the gatekeeping role for civil society’s own selection process to a man who, by Policy Forum Guyana’s account, had been granted gold-mining concessions totaling nearly 20,000 acres — concessions later subdivided into over a dozen medium-scale permits, a structuring pattern civil society groups say is commonly used to dodge the fee thresholds that apply to large-scale operations. PFG’s statement went further, noting that the permits were contiguous and paid on the same day, which it said raised questions about coordination in how they were structured.

The Ministry’s defence was that English had since divested and posed no conflict. English himself told a local outlet he might return to mining “in a big way” in the future. That is not the language of a man with no stake in the sector he was appointed to help oversee on civil society’s behalf.

A civic convenors entire function under the EITI Standard is to guide an independent, representative caucusing process — to be, in effect, the referee civil society trusts to keep the selection clean. Guyana handed that whistle to a player.

This was not the Ministry’s first attempt to install a favorable convenor. Its earlier bid to hand the role to the then-Chairman of the Private Sector Commission was reversed only after the EITI’s Oslo Secretariat intervened. The English appointment was, by the accounting of Policy Forum Guyana and the Transparency Institute Guyana Inc. — this paper’s own investigative partner — the second attempt within the same cycle to shape civil society’s representation from the government side of the table.

Notices That Never Arrive

The pattern repeats at the level of pure logistics, which is where obstruction hides best because it never has to admit to being obstruction. When the civic caucusing meeting was finally convened in November 2025 to select MSG representatives, established organisations — the Guyana Human Rights Association, Red Thread, the Breadfruit Collective, the Amerindian Peoples Association, and TIGI among them — say they never received the invitation carrying the agenda and preparatory documents needed to participate meaningfully.

The Ministry’s rebuttal was that it had placed an advertisement in the newspaper. Civil society’s answer, correctly, was that a newspaper notice is not an invitation to a meeting requiring documents nobody had seen.

That same choreography resurfaced during the Validation Team’s June visit. An official letter dated June 5 inviting Members of Parliament to engage with the visiting EITI evaluators was, according to the Clerk of the National Assembly’s own account, signed for and received at the Parliament Office nearly a week before Opposition MPs say they were notified — reportedly only hours before their scheduled slot. The Chief Whip’s charge was direct: that government was limiting who got to speak to the international body sent to assess the state of Guyana’s transparency and accountability. Whether or not that characterization is accepted in full, the sequence of dates is not in serious dispute, and it fits a now-familiar shape — technical compliance with the letter of a notice requirement, paired with practical exclusion of the people the requirement exists to protect.

What the Board’s Language Actually Demands

The EITI Standard’s civil society protocol is not decorative language. It exists precisely to prevent governments from performing openness while managing outcomes — to ensure, as the Board’s statement puts it, that civil society can participate “freely, independently and safely.” Guyana’s MSG saga over the past year has tested every clause of that sentence. Freely — when convenors are drawn from the extractive sector itself. Independently — when the referee for civic selection is appointed by the same Ministry whose licensing decisions civil society exists to scrutinize. Safely — when mining-sector stakeholders across the Guiana Shield already cite “security concerns” as their standing excuse for withholding basic reporting data, a reluctance the GYEITI Secretariat itself flagged in its own 2025 Annual Progress Review.

The Board’s statement was general by design, calibrated to a global membership, careful not to name a single implementing country. It did not have to. Guyana wrote its own footnote in real time — the concession-holding convenor, the caucusing meeting held without proper notice to the very groups the process was meant to enfranchise, and now an opposition delegation informed of its audience with international evaluators only after the paper trail shows it should have known a week earlier.

 Awaiting the Verdict

Guyana’s second EITI Validation, which commenced formally on May 15 and brought the assessment team to Georgetown in June, is now the mechanism that will either ratify this pattern as acceptable or name it for what it is. The Validation Standard examines three things: outcomes and impact, stakeholder engagement, and transparency.

Guyana’s own record over the last twelve months has supplied the evaluators with a stakeholder-engagement case study that writes itself — assuming the team was allowed to hear the parts of it that mattered.

The 592 Guardian will be watching for that report closely, and we will hold it against the paper trail we have already built rather than against the government’s press releases about “open and transparent” processes. A country that has to keep re-litigating who counts as civil society, six years into its EITI membership, is not managing implementation friction. It is managing dissent. The Board has now said, in its own words, that this distinction matters. Guyana’s Validation report will tell us whether the Board is prepared to say so about Guyana by name.

 The 592 Guardian will publish further analysis when Guyana’s 2026 Validation report is released.

THE CORNER HE CANNOT NAME

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The 592 Guardian Accountability Journalism.July 2026

Energy Procurement · Karpowership Investigation

The Corner He Cannot Name

Minister Indar insists the Government was never backed into a corner. The arithmetic of his own admissions tells a different story — and Guyanese ratepayers will fund every cent of the distance between those two accounts.                                                               The 592 Guardian Editorial Board June 2026 · Georgetown.

Public Utilities Minister Deodat Indar appeared on the Starting Point podcast this month to reassure the nation that the Government of Guyana had not been outmaneuvered in its ongoing contract renewal negotiations with Turkish power company Karpowership. “No one should believe we were ever backed into a corner,” he declared. “We will defend the interests of the Guyanese people.”

The minister’s confidence deserves scrutiny — not because his rhetoric is untypical, but because the numbers embedded in his own account produce a conclusion he appears unwilling to draw. When those numbers are laid end to end, what emerges is not a portrait of a government defending its citizens. It is a portrait of a government presiding over a structural dependency of its own making, and reaching for the language of strength to describe the dimensions of its own trap.

The 592 Guardian does the arithmetic Minister Indar declined to offer.

I.The Rate Surrender: From 7.2¢ to 9.5¢

When GPL signed the first Karpowership contract in 2024 — the 36 MW vessel docked at Everton in the Berbice River — it secured power at 7.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Indar himself called this “the lowest rate on the market at that time.” The second vessel, 60 MW at Meadow Bank on the Demerara River, was contracted at 9.5 cents per kWh. No public explanation was ever furnished for why the second ship cost 32 percent more per unit than the first, negotiated in the same calendar year, by the same government, with the same counterparty.

Now both contracts have elapsed. Karpowership is asking for 9.5 cents per kWh across the board for the renewal. The Government, Indar tells us, wants 9 cents. “We are working between that,” he said, which is the minister’s way of announcing that the floor established in 2024 — 7.2 cents, which he himself described as historically low — is simply gone. It will not be recovered. It is not even part of the conversation.

“They would never renew it for a concessional rate of 7.6 cents. We know that.” — Minister Deodat Indar, Starting Point Podcast, 2026                                                                                                            The minister says this as though it is a concession to realism. What it is, in fact, is a confession that the procurement architecture of 2024 contained no mechanism to preserve the rate advantage the Government now boasts about securing. A truly advantageous contract is one whose terms can be extended or benchmarked against renewals. A concessional rate that evaporates at the two-year mark is not a negotiating victory. It is a deferred cost.

II.What the Minister Did Not Do: The Full Cost Calculation

Indar offered no numbers to the public beyond the per-kWh rates. He offered no annual cost figure. He offered no contract-total projection. He offered no per-household burden. The 592 Guardian provides what the minister withheld.

The two vessels together supply 96 MW of contracted capacity. At a standard capacity factor of approximately 85 percent — a conservative industry estimate for powerships operating as baseload or near-baseload supply — annual generation is approximately 713,376 MWh, or roughly 713.4 million kWh per year. The calculations below use this figure across all scenarios.

// Cost Analysis — Karpowership Procurement · 96 MW Combined Capacity
Scenario Rate (¢/kWh) Annual Cost 2-Year Cost vs. 7.2¢ Baseline (Annual)
Original Berbice rate
2024 benchmark — “lowest on market”		 7.2¢ US$51.4M US$102.8M —
Government’s current position
Indar’s stated ask in renewal		 9.0¢ US$64.2M US$128.4M +US$12.8M/yr
Karpowership’s demand
Company’s stated position		 9.5¢ US$67.8M US$135.5M +US$16.4M/yr
NEGOTIATING BAND EXPOSURE
Gap between 9.0¢ and 9.5¢ positions
“Working between that” — Indar		 0.5¢ US$3.6M/yr US$7.1M over 2 years
Full surrender arc: 7.2¢ → 9.5¢
Total rate erosion since 2024		 +2.3¢ US$16.4M/yr US$32.8M cumulative 2-yr loss vs baseline
Calculation Assumptions Combined capacity: 96 MW (36 MW Berbice + 60 MW Demerara) · Capacity factor: 85% · Annual generation: ~713.4M kWh · All figures in USD · Per-household burden (see below) assumes ~230,000 residential GPL customers · Exchange rate: GYD 209/USD · Cost pass-through assumed via tariff or subsidy mechanism

III.What Households Absorb

GPL does not operate on charity. The cost of purchased power — whether from Karpowership, InterEnergy, or any other supplier — flows directly to consumers through tariffs, to the Treasury through subsidy obligations, or to both. The minister did not address this transmission mechanism. The 592 Guardian addresses it now.

 Per-Household Cost Burden — ~230,000 GPL Residential Customers
Rate Scenario Annual System Cost Annual Burden/HH Monthly Burden/HH
7.2¢ — 2024 baseline US$51.4M US$224 US$18.6
9.0¢ — Government’s ask US$64.2M US$279 US$23.3
9.5¢ — Company’s demand US$67.8M US$295 US$24.6
INCREMENTAL HOUSEHOLD EXPOSURE vs. 7.2¢ BASELINE
Additional burden at 9.0¢ +US$12.8M/yr +US$55/yr +US$4.60/mo
Additional burden at 9.5¢ +US$16.4M/yr +US$71/yr +US$5.90/mo

To be precise: these figures represent the Karpowership component of GPL’s power purchase cost. They do not include transmission losses, administrative overhead, or the cost of other purchased-power agreements. They represent the minimum exposure attributable to this single contract. The actual per-household pass-through, depending on GPL’s tariff review schedule and subsidy arrangements with the Treasury, may be higher.

In a country where the median household income remains below US$800 per month, an additional US$4.60 to US$5.90 in monthly energy burden attributable to a single contracted supplier is not a rounding error. It is a policy consequence. And it has a name: it is what happens when a government procures power on a short-term, sole-source basis from a foreign supplier, creates grid dependency, and then discovers at renewal time that its leverage has been structurally foreclosed by its own prior decisions.

IV.The Architecture of Dependency

Indar’s most revealing statement was not his bravado about defending Guyanese interests. It was his acknowledgment that “the vessel is here, it’s already hooked up to our system, we need the power.” That sentence is the admission the minister did not intend to make. It describes, with clinical precision, the conditions under which one party in a negotiation does not, in fact, have the options it claims.

A supplier whose infrastructure is already integrated into the national grid, whose disconnection would immediately affect 96 MW of national generating capacity, and whose contract renewal is being negotiated while their ships continue to operate, holds structural leverage that no amount of ministerial firmness in a podcast interview can neutralize. This is not a commentary on Indar’s competence as a negotiator. It is a structural observation about the procurement choices made in 2024 and the absence of any competitive tendering process that would have created genuine alternatives at renewal time.

“We know we need the generation, but they’re not the only ones in town too.” — Minister Indar, conceding dependence while asserting leverage simultaneously

The minister cannot have it both ways. Either the Government needs the 96 MW — in which case the supplier has leverage — or it does not need the 96 MW, in which case the minister should immediately explain to Guyanese consumers what the backup generation plan is, who supplies it, at what rate, and under what procurement mechanism it was secured. No such explanation has been offered.

What has been offered is the assertion that the Government “has options.” The 592 Guardian formally requests that those options be named, costed, and subjected to public scrutiny. The people whose household budgets underwrite this negotiation are entitled to that information.

V.The Gas-to-Energy Deflection

Both the minister and the Government’s public communications have consistently invoked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project — slated to deliver approximately 300 MW from offshore natural gas “later this year” — as the eventual solution to Guyana’s generating capacity deficit. The power-ships, on this account, are merely a bridge. This framing deserves direct challenge.         

The GtE project has been “later this year” for multiple successive years. Its cost trajectory, contractor complications involving Venezuelan-linked entities, and MOAP Inc. payroll irregularities have been documented in this publication and remain subjects of active public concern. Even accepting the Government’s timeline at face value, the question the minister has not answered is this: at what rate, and under what contract terms, will the two Karpowership vessels operate during the remaining window before GtE comes onstream? That window — measured at either 9.0 or 9.5 cents per kWh, for 96 MW, at 85 percent capacity — costs Guyanese consumers between US$64 million and US$68 million per year. The bridge has a toll.

Furthermore, bridging procurement that creates grid dependency without exit mechanisms is not a bridge. It is a foundation for the next renewal negotiation, in which the same structural conditions — hooked-up vessels, immediate need, no competitive alternative — will recur. Nothing in Indar’s account suggests the Government has contractual exit rights, performance benchmarks, or rate-cap provisions that would constrain Karpowership’s leverage at the next renewal point, assuming GtE delays continue.

VI.What Accountability Requires

The 592 Guardian does not allege bad faith on Minister Indar’s part. What we allege — on the basis of his own public statements — is a pattern of rhetorical deflection that consistently substitutes bravado for transparency, and that systematically withholds from Guyanese citizens the cost information necessary for informed public judgment about their government’s energy procurement decisions.

The minister is not “99 percent there” on a deal the public understands. He is 99 percent there on a deal the public has never been permitted to properly examine. That is a distinction with consequences — for parliamentary oversight, for GPL’s tariff review process, and for every household whose electricity bill will reflect the outcome of negotiations conducted, as Indar himself put it, away from public view.

Editorial Demands — For the Public Record

1. Minister Indar must publish the full cost modelling for each rate scenario under negotiation — annual totals, 2-year contract values, and projected per-household burden — before any renewal contract is signed.

2. The National Assembly’s Sectoral Committee on Economic Services must convene an emergency session on GPL’s power purchase agreements, including Karpowership, InterEnergy, and any other sole-source contracts, and do so at monthly frequency, not the quarterly schedule to which it has been reduced.

3. The Government must disclose what competitive procurement process, if any, was conducted before the 2024 Karpowership contracts were signed, and what competitive process, if any, is being conducted alongside the current renewal negotiations.

4. GPL’s Board must confirm, in writing, whether the renewal contract contains rate-cap provisions, exit clauses, or performance benchmarks enforceable against the supplier.

  A minister who is truly not backed into a corner will welcome this transparency. One who is will not.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism publication covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry, and parliamentary oversight.  ·  Methodological note: all cost projections derived from publicly disclosed rates and capacity figures per Minister Indar’s own podcast statements. Calculation assumptions available on request

THE MANDATE IS NOT DISCRETIONARY

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THE
ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM • GOVERNANCE • ELECTORAL INTEGRITY.                                                                                                   

Editorial — Electoral Governance
The Mandate Is Not Discretionary: President Ali Must Act on Article 161

This is not a vacuum in the law. It is a vacuum manufactured by an Executive that prefers paralysis to a Leader of the Opposition it does not like.
The 592 Guardian | July 2026
Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom column this week calls for the courts to “settle” the question of GECOM commissioner tenure, framing the dispute as an unresolved ambiguity that only judicial intervention can cure. It is a comfortable position for everyone content to wait. It is also wrong, and it lets the one actor with a present constitutional duty — the President of Guyana — off the hook entirely.
There is no ambiguity here. There is a refusal.

Two Provisions, Not One
Article 225, imported into the Elections Commission framework through Article 161(6), governs removal for cause: infirmity, misconduct, the disciplinary track that shields a sitting commissioner from being purged mid-term for political convenience.                                                                                    Nobody is invoking that provision against the opposition-nominated commissioners. Nobody has alleged misconduct. That is precisely why the “security of tenure” defence being raised on their behalf is a category error — it answers a question nobody asked.
The actual provision in play is Article 161(3)(b): three members appointed by the President acting on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, tendered after meaningful consultation with the non-governmental parties in the National Assembly. The text names an office, not an individual. It has always named the office. That is why the same phrase recurs, unaltered in meaning, in the appointment of the Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127, the Judicial and Public Service Commissions under Articles 198 and 200, and the GECOM Chairperson under Article 161(2) itself.
Follow the logic of “permanent commissioner” theory to its end and it collapses on contact with its own premise: had the 2025 elections returned a different government, would anyone seriously argue the opposition-nominated commissioners should answer to advice tendered by a Leader of the Opposition who no longer exists in that configuration? The theory only survives because it currently protects the people asserting it.

Where the Obligation Actually Sits
GECOM’s own Chairperson has already said, on the record, that she has no power to remove or reconstitute the Commission herself — that the Constitution assigns appointment and removal elsewhere, and that the path runs through the President once the Leader of the Opposition tenders his nominees. That is not an unsettled question. That is the President being told, by his own Commission’s Chairperson, where his desk is.
Azruddin Mohamed, as the sitting Leader of the Opposition following meaningful consultation, holds the sole constitutional standing to tender that advice under Article 161(3)(b). Not the immediate past Leader of the Opposition. Not the Forward Guyana Movement, however useful a third seat might be to a compromise communique The office, as currently occupied, and no other.

The President’s instruments of appointment are not a courtesy he extends when convenient. They are a duty triggered by the tendering of valid advice.

Whether the appointing power is exercised promptly or withheld indefinitely is therefore not a gap in the Constitution — it is a choice made daily inside the Office of the President. A choice, this publication notes, made considerably easier by the fact that the current Leader of the Opposition is no friend of this government.

What the Courts Cannot Fix
Peeping Tom is right that political compromise cannot override constitutional text. He is wrong about what the text requires the courts to resolve. A judicial reference would take months, invite appeal, and hand every interested party an incentive to relitigate a question the Constitution already answers in plain language. What it would not do is compel a President who is already declining to act under clear advice to suddenly act under a court order he can also slow-walk.

Guyana does not have a drafting problem at Article 161. It has an enforcement problem at the Office of the President.

The remedy is not five more months of uncertainty manufactured for the comfort of incumbents on both sides of the seat — it is the President discharging the duty the Constitution already places on him.

THE GUARDIAN’S DEMAND
President Irfaan Ali must formally receive the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nominees and issue the instruments of appointment within thirty days of their tender, consistent with the duty the Constitution already imposes on his office. Anything short of that is not constitutional caution. It is obstruction with a legal-sounding excuse.
— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Trinidad’s Golden Silence : Fails Venezuela in it hour of Need .

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRANSPARENT OBJECTIVITY JOURNALISM

Trinidad’s Golden Silence: Fails Venezuela in its hour of need

When two powerful earthquakes tore through Venezuela on 24 June 2026, toppling buildings, crushing lives, and forcing rescue teams into a race against time, the Caribbean was handed a test of basic regional humanity. Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela’s nearest neighbour, should have answered that test with speed, visible solidarity, and concrete action. Instead, its public posture amounted to sympathy wrapped in caution: an offer of support “if requested,” rather than an unmistakable move to place assistance in motion.

That distinction matters. In earthquake disasters, the first hours are everything. Survivors buried beneath rubble do not benefit from diplomatic caution or polished statements. They need urban search-and-rescue teams, medical support, emergency shelter, and logistics that can be mobilised while there is still a chance to pull people out alive. International reporting showed that other countries responded with urgency: Mexico moved to deploy specialized rescue teams, while the United States, Qatar, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic signalled assistance quickly. Against that backdrop, Trinidad and Tobago’s response looked not merely restrained, but conspicuously slow.

The government’s defenders may point to procedure. They will say sovereignty matters, that assistance should be coordinated carefully, and that no state should impose itself on another in the middle of a calamity. That argument is not frivolous. But it is also incomplete. There is a wide gap between reckless intervention and decisive regional leadership. A government can make an immediate, public, and practical offer of help without violating diplomatic norms. It can pre-position assets, dispatch medical supplies, open lines to emergency coordinators, and make clear that the closest neighbour is ready to act the moment clearance is given. What it should not do is hide behind language so conditional that it sounds like a neighbour waiting at the gate while the house burns.

This is where geography becomes moral pressure. Trinidad and Tobago is not a distant observer reacting from another hemisphere. It sits just across a narrow stretch of sea from Venezuela.                                                                                             That proximity is not a matter of symbolism; it is a measure of responsibility. The nearer state should be among the first to respond, not among the last to settle on a cautious formulation. When a region is struck by disaster, proximity ought to translate into readiness, not hesitation. Yet that is exactly the impression Port of Spain has left.

The scale of the Venezuelan tragedy only sharpens the criticism. Reports from the United Nations and major international outlets described a grave and worsening situation, with deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction rising rapidly in the aftermath.

ReliefWeb’s situation reporting underscored the urgency of coordination, rescue, and humanitarian response in the immediate days after the quakes. That is why public solidarity alone is not enough. Sympathy does not cut through reinforced concrete. Readiness does not free the trapped. Only action does.

There is also a political context that cannot be ignored. Relations between Port of Spain and Caracas have long been strained, and that tension may well have shaped the government’s careful language. But if political friction is what explains the delay, then the explanation is not a defense; it is the indictment. Human beings buried under collapsed buildings should never become collateral in diplomatic discomfort. In a moment like this, the question is not whether relations are difficult. It is whether leadership can rise above them.

That is why this episode demands scrutiny, not excuses.
What exactly did the government do in the first hours after the earthquakes?
Was there a direct call to Venezuelan authorities?
Were rescue assets identified and readied?
Did the Coast Guard, Defence Force, or emergency management agencies receive instructions to prepare for deployment or logistics support? Were supplies placed on standby? Were CARICOM or bilateral channels used to accelerate consent and coordination?
These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions a serious public deserves answered.

If Trinidad and Tobago lacked the capacity to deploy search-and-rescue teams, then say so plainly and explain why. If its hands were tied by diplomatic protocol, then show what was done to overcome that obstacle. If the government chose caution because of political calculations, then the public should know that too. In a crisis of this scale, transparency is not optional. It is part of accountability.

The strongest case for regional solidarity is not sentimental. It is practical. Today’s disaster zone can be tomorrow’s rescue corridor. “Today for me, tomorrow for you” is not merely a slogan; it is a principle of Caribbean survival. Small states know, better than most, that when catastrophe comes, help cannot always wait on perfect paperwork. It must move with urgency, competence, and courage.

Trinidad and Tobago had an to show that it understood that truth. So far, it has chosen caution over force, language over logistics, and procedural comfort over visible neighbourly duty.
That may satisfy bureaucrats. It will not satisfy the families still waiting in the rubble, or the region that expects more from a government positioned so close to the suffering. History will remember not the sentiment of the statement, but the speed of the response.

The 592 GUARDIAN offer these few questions for the relevant authorities :

⇒What specific actions did the government take in the first 24 hours after the earthquakes struck Venezuela?
⇒Did Trinidad and Tobago offer any deployable rescue or medical assets immediately, or only a general expression of readiness?
⇒Was direct contact made with Venezuelan authorities, and at what time?
– ⇒Did the Coast Guard, Defence Force, or national emergency agencies receive instructions to prepare for deployment?
⇒Were humanitarian supplies, medical kits, or emergency shelters pre-positioned for rapid transfer?
⇒Was the government waiting for a formal request from Venezuela before acting, and if so, why?
⇒Did CARICOM or any bilateral channel help facilitate faster coordination?
⇒What prevented Trinidad and Tobago from publicly announcing immediate, practical assistance?
⇒Was the response shaped by current political tensions with Caracas?
⇒Does the government have a standing protocol for rapid assistance to neighbouring states struck by disasters, and was it activated?                                                                                                      Until these questions are adequately addressed ,the public can draw their own conclusions .                                                      THE 592 GUARDIAN maintains its objectivity, in addressing issues in the public’s interest  

SANCTIONED HANDS FAMILIAR ARCHECITURE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Accountability Journalism for the Guyanese Public Interest

SANCTIONED HANDS, FAMILIAR ARCHITECTURE: VENEZUELA’S EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE HOLDS A MIRROR TO GUYANA’S PETROSTATE DECAY
EDITORIAL | JULY 2026

When acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez addressed her earthquake-shattered nation in the early hours of June 28, she did so flanked by officials carrying a combined burden of U.S. and Canadian sanctions for corruption, narcotics trafficking, human rights violations, and — with particular relevance — the deliberate obstruction of international humanitarian aid. The death toll from the June 24 double earthquake has officially surpassed 1,500. Independent organizations and the United Nations estimate tens of thousands remain missing. And the officials tasked with the national reconstruction response cannot legally receive a wire transfer from a Western bank.
Georgetown should not watch this with detached concern. It should watch it with recognition.

THE ANATOMY OF CARACAS’S CAPTURED RESPONSE
The architecture of Venezuela’s disaster governance deserves precise enumeration, because precision is what distinguishes accountability from commentary.
Rodríguez placed the country’s Military Command under Defense Minister Gustavo González López, sanctioned by Washington since 2015. She assigned her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez — sanctioned by both the United States and Canada for corruption and political repression — to chair the presidential commission responsible for temporary housing and rapid reconstruction. The broader commission incorporates Food Minister Carlos Leal Tellería, sanctioned by Canada; Caracas Mayor Carmen Meléndez, sanctioned by the United States; and Carabobo Governor Rafael Lacava, blacklisted by Washington in 2019 specifically for blocking the entry of international humanitarian aid into Venezuela.
Standing beside her at the José María Vargas Sports Complex was Diosdado Cabello — alleged head of a massive money-laundering and narcotics network, subject to a $25 million U.S. arrest bounty — whom Rodríguez instructed to keep “working and inspecting” the clothing drives while rescuers miles away dug through concrete rubble with their bare hands.
The consequence of this arrangement is not merely optics. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a temporary humanitarian waiver suspending restrictions on financial transactions tied to earthquake relief — a procedural concession that is rendered structurally incoherent by the fact that the officials administering that relief remain individually sanctioned. International donors, multilateral institutions, and bilateral partners face an impossible compliance architecture: funds released for humanitarian purposes flow into a command structure that Western treasuries have formally designated as corrupt.

The waiver opens the pipe. The sanctioned cabinet poisons the well it feeds into.

This is not governance responding to a crisis. This is capture consuming one.

THE MIRROR GEORGETOWN REFUSES TO LOOK INTO
Guyana’s political class will observe Venezuela’s response and locate itself on the correct side of the moral ledger. This is a comfort it has not earned.

The structural condition on display in Caracas — the routing of national resource governance, public expenditure, and crisis authority through a closed network of loyalists insulated from legal accountability — is not a Venezuelan pathology. It is a petrostate pathology. And Guyana is a petrostate.

Consider the precise parallels.
Venezuela placed its earthquake reconstruction under officials who cannot be audited by Western partners. Guyana placed its single most consequential sovereign instrument — the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement — under a cost recovery and profit oil architecture that Christopher Ram’s forensic analysis has demonstrated operates without functional audit capacity, without independent verification of ExxonMobil’s submitted cost claims, and without the enforcement mechanisms a sovereign state requires to prevent systematic fiscal hemorrhage. The GGMC’s last credible independent audit is now nine years stale. The Guyana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s self-certification failures — documented in this publication’s collaboration with TIGI — mean that Guyana’s extractive sector reports its own compliance to itself.

This is not oversight. This is the formal appearance of oversight performing the function of its absence

 Venezuela assigned reconstruction authority to Jorge Rodríguez, whose familial relationship to the acting president is the primary qualification on display. Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee — the constitutionally mandated instrument for legislative scrutiny of public expenditure — has been systematically rendered non-functional through the deliberate absenteeism of government members, depriving it of quorum at precisely the moments when accountability is most operationally required. The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services was reduced from monthly to quarterly meetings.

The institution of parliamentary oversight did not fail in Guyana. It was disassembled from the inside, procedurally, by the same administration that controls the expenditure it is constitutionally obligated to examine

 Venezuela placed Governor Lacava — sanctioned specifically for blocking international humanitarian aid — in charge of reconstruction. Guyana awarded the Wales Gas-to-Energy contract to Venezuelan-linked entities BSJI and Lindsayca-CH4 through a procurement process that has not withstood public scrutiny, with MOAP Inc. payroll irregularities and budget variances that remain unreconciled in any public accounting. The contract award was not blocked. It was celebrated.

Venezuela’s acting president addressed a national catastrophe wearing a military cap, praising armed forces for folding clothes while citizens died under rubble, offering the nation a message that “the future is always marked by joy.” Guyana’s President Ali announced a diaspora bond to international applause while no enabling legislation exists, no regulatory framework has been tabled, and no independent institution has been empowered to receive, audit, or protect the savings of Guyanese citizens abroad who might invest in faith.
The parallel is not rhetorical. It is structural. Both governments have constructed governance architectures in which the formal institutions of accountability — audit, parliamentary scrutiny, independent procurement review, transparent resource contracts — exist as facades behind which captured networks make decisions of national consequence without legal exposure.

THE AID DIMENSION GUYANA CANNOT ESCAPE
Guyana holds a seat at CARICOM. Guyana chairs no small portion of regional diplomatic conversation about Venezuela. And Guyana’s own governance deficit will materially constrain any meaningful bilateral solidarity it attempts to offer.

Any humanitarian contribution Guyana extends toward Venezuela’s earthquake recovery will pass through Georgetown’s own procurement and disbursement machinery — machinery that this publication has documented, across multiple investigations, as structurally compromised

Sole-source contracting, as demonstrated in the GPL-InterEnergy award, is not an exception in Guyana’s public expenditure framework. It is a pattern. A humanitarian disbursement routed through that framework does not become clean because its destination is a disaster zone.
More fundamentally: Guyana cannot credibly advocate for transparent, accountable reconstruction governance in Venezuela while refusing to subject its own extractive revenues, parliamentary committees, and public contracts to the standards it would demand of Caracas.

The moral authority to hold Venezuela’s sanctioned cabinet to account requires first demonstrating that Guyanese oil wealth is itself governed by institutions with teeth. It is not.

The Amerindian Peoples’ Association’s unresolved FPIC complaint before the IACHR, the 25-year absence of audited financials from the Amerindian Purpose Fund, the Indigenous land rights violations at Chinese Landing — these are not peripheral footnotes. They are the accountability record of the state that would position itself as a regional governance exemplar.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
Rodríguez offered Venezuela “hope” and “joy” while tens of thousands remained buried. Ali offers Guyana “progress” and “transformation” while the instruments designed to verify that progress have been systematically hollowed.
The difference between Caracas and Georgetown is not the presence or absence of capture. It is the degree to which capture has been forced into the open by catastrophe.
Venezuela’s earthquake did not create a governance failure. It illuminated one that was already complete.
Guyana’s reckoning has not yet arrived with that clarity. It will.

The 592 Guardian calls on the National Assembly to immediately restore the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services to its monthly schedule, reinstate functional quorum requirements in the Public Accounts Committee enforceable by the Speaker, and commission an independent audit of the GGMC’s verification record covering the full nine-year gap. We call on the Ali administration to table enabling legislation for the diaspora bond before a single dollar is solicited. And we call on Guyanese civil society to resist the temptation of continental distance — the assumption that Venezuela’s condition belongs to Venezuela alone.

Petrostate capture does not respect borders. It follows the oil.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry, and civic rights. Editorial positions represent the institutional voice of the publication.

THE COUNSEL WHO WOULD BE GATEKEEPER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism · Guyana
EDITORIAL
 June 2026 | Georgetown, Guyana

The Counsel Who Would Be Gatekeeper: Devindra Kissoon and the Architecture of a Monopoly

When an officer of the court wields legal process not to vindicate rights but to extinguish competition, the integrity of the bar —and of Guyana’s constitutional order—demands an accounting.

The facts documented in Kaieteur News’ three-part investigation into Guyana’s commercial explosives market are not in dispute. They emerge from sworn affidavits, court filings, and correspondence on the letterhead of London House Chambers. They are, in the precise language of the law, matters of record. What remains in dispute — and what this Board now addresses directly — is whether the conduct they reveal is compatible with the duties of an attorney-at-law admitted to practice before the courts of this Republic.
The subject is Devindra Kissoon, known commercially as Dave Kissoon: a U.S. citizen, former director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guyana, and the self-described exclusive supplier of explosives to the Guyanese mining market for decades. His firm, London House Chambers, acts as commercial counsel to Orica Mining Services, the world’s largest commercial explosives provider. In that capacity, the record shows, Kissoon has systematically deployed the machinery of the High Court to accomplish what the Civil Law of Guyana Act expressly forbids: the creation and enforcement of a commercial monopoly.

The Civil Law Act states that grants or licenses for the ‘sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana… are altogether contrary to the laws of Guyana, and so are and shall be utterly void.’

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF EXCLUSION                                   
In 2015, Dominicana De Cales S.A. — Docalsa — a regional licensee of global distributor Dyno Nobel, attempted to enter the Guyanese market. This was a lawful commercial act. Dyno Nobel is a credentialed international explosives provider. Docalsa’s principals are not insurgents; they are business people pursuing trade in a jurisdiction whose laws explicitly contemplate competition.

Kissoon’s response was not to compete. It was to litigate. He filed an ex parte application — a proceeding conducted without notice to the opposing party — arguing that Docalsa’s solicitations to domestic buyers constituted tortious interference with his prospective business relations. In his sworn affidavit of 30 July 2015, Kissoon named BK Quarries Inc., AGM Inc., Guyana Goldfields Inc., Troy Resources Guyana Inc., and Pharsalus Gold Inc. as clients with whom he expected continuous and exclusive business — a claim that, stated plainly, is an assertion of monopoly rights presented to a court as though they were enforceable entitlements.

The High Court granted an interim injunction in August 2015. Docalsa was frozen out of the market. When the competitor attempted to discharge the injunction in December 2016, London House Chambers deployed procedural arguments to strike out their defense. The matter did not proceed until May 2018 — nearly three years during which a lawful competitor was excluded from a market that Guyana’s Constitution and statutory law promised would remain open.
That three-year exclusion coincided precisely with one of the most consequential periods in Guyana’s modern economic history: the confirmation of the Stabroek Block discovery in 2015 and the onset of the infrastructure surge that would require, among other inputs, commercial explosives at scale. The timing was not incidental. It was, the record suggests, the point.

THE THREAT OF ARREST: AN OFFICER OF THE COURT                 SPEAKS
This Board directs particular scrutiny to a piece of correspondence dated 14 August 2015, dispatched on London House Chambers letterhead to Docalsa. The letter, obtained by Kaieteur News, did not merely assert a legal position. It explicitly threatened a ‘warrant for your arrest and imprisonment’ should Docalsa fail to withdraw from the market. It further noted that customs authorities had been instructed to seize and destroy their products.

An attorney who threatens a competitor’s principals with arrest and imprisonment — not as a legal prediction, but as an instrument of market exclusion — has ceased to function as counsel. He has become an enforcement arm.

Let this be stated without euphemism: threatening arrest and imprisonment in a cease-and-desist letter to a lawful commercial actor is not the conduct of an officer of the court discharging professional obligations. It is the use of legal authority — real or implied — to intimidate. It weaponises the coercive power of the state, or the appearance thereof, to achieve market outcomes that the law explicitly prohibits. The Guyana Bar Association and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court bear an institutional obligation to examine whether this conduct falls within the bounds of professional propriety. This Board calls on both bodies to do so.

The November 2025 cease-and-desist letter to Eclisar Financial — a firm involved in state-sponsored audits of offshore oil operations — carries the same architecture, scaled to the present moment of petrostate expansion. Explicitly copied to the Minister of Natural Resources and the Commissioner of Police, the letter threatens ‘actual, punitive and exemplary damages… in an amount to exceed US$1,000,000.00′ and asserts that London House’s client remains the ‘only authorized explosives dealer in Guyana.’ The carbon copy to the Minister of Natural Resources is not procedural courtesy. It is a signal — to the recipient, to the market, and to any regulator who might contemplate authorizing a competitor — that institutional power stands behind the claim.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTRADICTION                                        
The irony documented in the Kaieteur News investigation is not merely rhetorical. It is legally precise and professionally damning. Devindra Kissoon was lead commercial counsel in litigation that successfully dismantled the decade-long state telecommunications monopoly held by the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, arguing before the courts that such monopolies violated the same Civil Law of Guyana Act that he now relies upon — by implication — to defend market exclusivity in explosives.
The Act’s prohibition is not ambiguous. It declares void ‘all grants or licenses for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana.’ Kissoon understands this provision. He argued it successfully. He knows, as counsel must know, that the Explosives Act’s regulatory framework — however legitimate its public safety rationale — cannot lawfully be converted into a permanent barrier to market entry for the benefit of a single commercial actor. The police commissioner’s licensing authority exists to prevent diversion of dangerous materials to criminal uses, not to guarantee a monopoly to any attorney’s client.

The Explosives Act creates a safety regime. Kissoon appears to have converted it into a property right. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.

THE U.S. CITIZEN AND THE SHERMAN STANDARD                       
Devindra Kissoon is a United States citizen. That fact carries weight beyond biography. The Sherman Antitrust Act — the foundational statute of U.S. competition law — criminalises monopolistic conduct and attempts to monopolise any part of trade or commerce. American courts have held that the Sherman Act applies to conduct abroad that has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on U.S. commerce. Guyana’s extractive sector, in which Kissoon claims exclusive explosives supply rights, is substantially capitalised by U.S.-registered entities and subject to extensive cross-border commercial flows.
This Board does not assert that U.S. antitrust jurisdiction attaches to the specific conduct documented here. That is a legal question for competent counsel. We assert, however, that a U.S. citizen operating in a market where American firms do business — and using legal threats to exclude competitors — operates in a landscape where extraterritorial regulatory scrutiny is not merely theoretical. The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have both demonstrated willingness to examine conduct affecting U.S. commercial interests in foreign jurisdictions. Kissoon’s AmCham directorship further embeds him in a network of U.S.-Guyana commercial relationships in which his market conduct becomes visible to exactly the regulatory audience most capable of acting on it.

THE FDI CALCULUS                                                                                  
Guyana is, by IMF measurement, the world’s fastest-growing economy. Its 2024 GDP growth exceeded thirty percent. The country requires foreign direct investment at scale to build the highways, sea defences, energy infrastructure, and industrial capacity that its oil revenues are meant to fund. That investment requires quarrying. Quarrying requires explosives. When the explosives supply chain operates through a single gatekeeper who has demonstrated willingness to use legal threats to suppress competition, every investor in every extraction-adjacent sector inherits that risk.

Foreign capital does not enter markets where legal process is weaponised as a market control mechanism. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and institutional equity investors conducting due diligence on Guyanese infrastructure projects will encounter this record. When they do, they will price it. Guyana’s investment climate absorbs the cost of Kissoon’s conduct whether or not any single project is visibly deterred.

DEMANDS                                                                                                    
This Board directs the following demands to the named institutional actors:
→To the Guyana Bar Association: Initiate a formal professional conduct inquiry into whether the August 2015 and November 2025 cease-and-desist letters issued by London House Chambers, and the ex parte litigation strategy deployed against Docalsa, constitute a breach of the professional duties owed by an officer of the court to the legal system and to commercial counterparties. The threat of arrest and imprisonment deployed as a market-exclusion instrument is not advocacy. It requires examination.
→To the Chief Justice: Direct the court’s registry to review the procedural history of the Docalsa litigation — specifically, the use of strike-out applications to delay proceedings from 2015 to 2018 — for consistency with the duty of candour and the prohibition on using procedural mechanisms to oppress opposing parties.
→To the Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission: Open a formal market inquiry into the commercial explosives sector under the Competition and Fair Trading Act. The concentration of supply in a single commercial channel, maintained through preemptive litigation and cease-and-desist correspondence copied to government ministers, constitutes a prima facie matter for regulatory examination. The Commission’s enabling legislation provides the authority. What has been lacking is the will.
→To the Minister of Natural Resources: Explain publicly why your ministry received a copy of the November 2025 cease-and-desist letter threatening a competitor in the explosives market. Your acceptance of that notification — without documented objection or referral to the Competition Commission — implies a degree of ministerial endorsement of the incumbent’s market position that is incompatible with your statutory obligations under the Competition and Fair Trading Act and your constitutional duty to act in the public interest.
→To the Commissioner of Police: Clarify under what statutory authority the August 2015 cease-and-desist letter could credibly assert that customs had been ‘instructed’ to seize and destroy a competitor’s products, and whether any such instruction was in fact given. If it was, on whose authority and under which provision of the Explosives Act or Customs Act did it issue.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD FOR OFFICERS OF THE COURT                                                                                                          
This Board closes with a principle that is neither partisan nor speculative. Officers of the court in every common law jurisdiction are held to a standard of conduct that transcends their client’s commercial interests. An attorney may zealously represent a client. An attorney may litigate aggressively. An attorney may seek injunctions, file strike-out applications, and write cease-and-desist letters — all within the bounds of professional duty.
What an attorney may not do is deploy the language and implied authority of the legal system to threaten competitors with arrest and imprisonment as a market control strategy.

What an attorney who successfully argued against telecommunications monopoly may not do is build a commercial monopoly in another sector using the same legal instruments he once condemned. And what an attorney who holds U.S. citizenship and leads a chamber of commerce bridging American and Guyanese commercial interests may not do is cultivate, in his professional conduct, the kind of market-distorting behaviour that the legal systems of both his countries prohibit.

Devindra Kissoon is not beyond accountability. He is, precisely because of his prominence, his dual citizenship, and his institutional affiliations, subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian will continue to document his conduct and the conduct of every institutional actor whose silence enables it.
The gatekeepers of Guyana’s explosives market will answer to Guyana’s law, or they will answer to the investors, institutions, and international partners who are watching what kind of legal culture this Republic is building on the foundation of its oil wealth.
                                           The Editorial Board
                                            The 592 Guardian

RESPONSE TO THE “INQUISITIVE OBSERVER”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL RESPONSE

The Inquisitive Observer’s Gulf Analogy Cannot Survive Contact With Guyanese Facts

A response to “The Inquisitive Observer,” published in Guyana Chronicle

The column in question is theoretically coherent and factually bankrupt. Its author correctly identifies that oil-rich states must convert hydrocarbon revenues into durable human capital — the UAE and Qatar offer genuine instructive precedents on that point. The argument collapses, however, the moment it arrives in Guyana, because the writer has chosen as his Exhibit A a programme that is itself a study in procurement failure, institutional opacity, and unresolved accountability.

GOAL is not a model. GOAL is a warning.

In early 2025, Staffordshire University publicly denied any affiliation with courses being offered under the GOAL initiative through a third-party intermediary, the International School Development Consortium (ISDC). Hundreds of Guyanese students had enrolled under the impression that they were earning internationally recognised degrees, only to discover that Staffordshire University had never authorised those courses.

Students registered for Maritime Affairs found themselves assigned Business and Finance modules. Those pursuing psychology and engineering encountered equivalent programme mismatches. These are not administrative anomalies. These are systemic failures of due diligence at the ministerial level.
The government’s response was not accountability — it was deflection. Vice President Jagdeo attributed the crisis to a change in management at the university, dismissed characterisations of fraud, and assured the public that a resolution was being sought through a meeting in London.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Ashni Singh redirected press inquiries about GOAL’s financial arrangements with ISDC to GOAL Director Professor Jacob Opadeyi — who initially promised the information by March 17, and then did not provide it. 
The financial dimension alone demands a forensic reckoning. In 2024, the Government injected $4 billion into GOAL — just $100 million more than the total allocation to the University of Guyana, Guyana’s only public tertiary institution.

The public is entitled to know how much of that $4 billion flowed to ISDC, what contractual oversight existed, and who bears liability for the breach.

To date, those questions remain unanswered.
Accountability analyst Christopher Ram called on the President to pause the programme, release the full ISDC contract, publish a detailed breakdown of all payments made, and subject GOAL to a forensic audit.

That call has not been acted upon.                                                    The writer’s Gulf comparison also exposes a structural contradiction he does not address. Qatar’s Education for a New Era initiative worked precisely because it was governed by a Supreme Education Council, an independent Education Institute, and an Evaluation Institute with a mandate to track outcomes against labour market needs. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 embeds education reform within a broader diversification architecture with measurable sectoral targets. The UAE’s early investments included direct grants to overseas students conditioned on return and service to national institutions. These were not scholarship disbursements laundered through unvetted intermediaries. They were governed ecosystems.

What does Guyana have in comparative terms? A programme operated outside normal procurement architecture, directed by an official who has a documented political relationship with the President — having supervised his doctoral dissertation, a thesis that has never been made public — and shielded from parliamentary scrutiny. GOAL has no published outcome data, no accreditation verification protocol, and no independent evaluation body. The writer praises the inputs while declining to examine the outputs.

Here, the Exxon question becomes decisive. ExxonMobil Guyana President Alistair Routledge recently announced the commissioning of a comprehensive industrial baseline study to assess Guyana’s labour capacity and future needs, stating explicitly that “it is becoming harder to find additional Guyanese workers, particularly those with the advanced skills and expertise required by a highly technical industry such as oil and gas.” This is not a peripheral data point. This is the principal employer in Guyana’s oil sector — the very sector that GOAL’s scholarships are ostensibly meant to serve — publicly declaring that the skilled labour deficit is widening, not closing. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued 13,713 work permits to foreign nationals in 2024, citing lack of local skills as the rationale. 

If GOAL were functioning as the writer claims — producing the engineers, ICT specialists, and technical professionals Guyana needs — Exxon would not be commissioning a skills gap study. The Ministry would not be importing nearly 14,000 foreign workers. The programme’s own graduation statistics would be visible in labour market outcomes. They are not.

The Inquisitive Observer’s instinct — that education is the indispensable instrument of resource nationalism — is correct in principle. The 592 Guardian has made that argument repeatedly. But honouring that principle demands that we apply it honestly. The Gulf states built enduring educational ecosystems on transparency, independent governance, and outcome accountability. Guyana has built a billion-dollar scholarship programme on opaque procurement, a politically connected director, a university partner that publicly disowned its association with the programme, and a government that silenced inquiry rather than invited it.

The graduates celebrating at GOAL’s recent ceremony are not the problem. They deserve recognition for their effort and better from their government. The problem is that a columnist has offered those graduates — and the Guyanese public — a flattering analogy in place of the accountability those graduates are owed.
Celebrating graduations while the ISDC liability question remains unresolved, while no forensic audit has been conducted, and while ExxonMobil is commissioning the skills gap survey the government’s own programme should have made unnecessary — this is not economic statecraft. It is state-managed amnesia.

The 592 Guardian calls, once again, for the immediate release of all GOAL-ISDC financial transactions, an independent forensic audit of the programme’s expenditures, a published accreditation verification report for every partner institution, and the tabling of all GOAL contractual arrangements before the National Assembly.

The oil will not wait. Neither will the facts.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry, and public finance.

THE EMPTY CHAIR AS GOVERNMENT POLICY

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The 592 Guardian
Accountability Journalism for a Nation That Deserves Better

The Empty Chair as Government Policy

How the PPP administration has turned parliamentary absenteeism into a structural guarantee of impunity
Editorial | June 2026

Less than two weeks after its long-overdue formation, Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee is dead in the water. Not because of procedural confusion. Not because of resource constraints. Because the government’s elected members will not show up.
Four dates were proposed for the PAC’s inaugural session: June 22, June 23, June 24, and June 26. The Clerk’s office made the calls. The government benches were unavailable. Every single time. PAC Chairman Vishnu Panday has now confirmed publicly what anyone following Guyanese parliamentary governance has understood for years: the administration’s absence is not coincidence. It is method.

“The Government members’ reluctance to respond positively tells us that the affairs of proper governance are compromised,” Panday stated. The word he chose — compromised — deserves to sit without decoration. He is not describing a scheduling conflict. He is describing a political decision to prevent the one committee constitutionally empowered to hold the executive’s finances to account from doing its work.

The Architecture of Impunity
The mathematics of this dysfunction are more damning than any single allegation. The PAC has completed its examination of public financial records only through fiscal year 2018. Six full years — 2019 through 2024 — remain entirely unscrutinized. At the committee’s historical meeting frequency, clearing one fiscal year per calendar year, the backlog will not be resolved until 2031. By then, six new years will have accumulated behind it. The audit gap becomes permanent. That is not a consequence of this government’s behaviour. It is the design.
The previous parliamentary term, 2021 to 2025, produced its own indictment: 25 of 51 scheduled PAC meetings were cancelled. The reason cited, each and every time, was the unavailability of government members. This administration has now reproduced the same pattern within the first fortnight of a new term, before a single hearing has been held. The new parliament, same as the old.

Consider what those six unexamined years contain. They span the full arc of Guyana’s oil windfall: the first production revenues, the Gas-to-Energy project’s contested procurement, the proliferation of sole-source contracts, the expansion of state-linked commercial enterprises, and an infrastructure spending programme that has drawn repeated questions about oversight, competitive tendering, and beneficial ownership. The Auditor General has filed his reports. Parliament has received them. The PAC cannot examine them because the government will not attend.

Transparency as Rhetorical Performance
President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo have made transparency and prudent financial management cornerstones of their public communications. The administration advertises Guyana’s economic transformation to international investors, development partners, and multilateral lenders as evidence of disciplined, accountable governance. The language is fluent and well-rehearsed.

What Panday’s statement exposes is the gap between the rhetoric and the institutional reality. An administration genuinely committed to financial transparency does not need to be compelled to attend the PAC. It attends because transparency is not a communication strategy — it is a practice. The PPP government’s elected representatives will attend ribbon-cuttings, press conferences, and regional investment summits. They will not attend the committee that examines whether public money was spent as Parliament authorised.                                                The contradiction is not subtle. Panday made it explicit: the same government that “publicly champions transparency, accountability, and prudent financial management” is the same government whose members will not take their seats at the only table where those claims can be tested. The chair is empty. It has been empty, structurally and deliberately, for years.

What Investors With Integrity Should Note
Guyana markets itself as open for business. On the narrow question of whether capital can enter and whether contracts will be honoured, the answer is largely yes. But the business being conducted is not Guyana’s business. It is business transacted by a governing party that has systematically disabled the parliamentary mechanisms through which citizens verify how public resources are managed.

Responsible institutional investors, development finance institutions, and sovereign wealth fund counterparts operate under governance due-diligence requirements that extend beyond deal terms. They assess the quality of the public accountability ecosystem in which they are placing capital. A country where the PAC has a six-year audit backlog — not because the institution lacks capacity, but because the government refuses to attend — is a country that has answered a material governance question. The answer is not reassuring.

Some capital will come regardless. Capital without integrity always does, and the terms on which resource economies attract it are themselves a governance story. But those investors and development partners who weight institutional accountability should register what is being demonstrated here, with consistency and with impunity, in full public view.

The Constutional Stakes
The PAC is not a preference. It is a constitutional mandate. Its function — scrutinising the Auditor General’s annual reports to ensure public funds are spent as Parliament authorised — is the primary mechanism by which elected representatives exercise oversight of the executive’s use of public money. An administration that prevents that mechanism from functioning is not simply being evasive about individual expenditures. It is undermining the constitutional architecture of democratic accountability itself.

Panday has called on government members to attend and fulfil their obligations to the citizens who are their paymasters. The framing is deliberately civil. This editorial will be less so. Citizens of this country are owed six years of public accounts. Those years encompass billions of dollars in oil revenue, infrastructure spending, and state procurement conducted with minimal competitive constraint. The people whose names are on those contracts know that the committee empowered to examine them has been reliably, systematically, and deliberately prevented from meeting.
That is not a coincidence anyone should accept as such.

— The Editorial Board, The
Georgetown, Guyana | June 2026