CCJ -Is This What Standards Have Become?

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

CCJ -Is This What Standards Have Become?

OPINION BY: GHK LALL— August 2026

It pains to listen, read, absorb the descendants of slaves and indentured servants make public representation that prioritizes chasing after those condemned.  Leakers.  After all the great sacrifices made by fore parents, in the jaws of fearsome savagery, this is where matters terminate.  An emphasis, a priority, on tracking leakers.  Notwithstanding all the education, some of substantial quality, this is the sum of, shall I say, intellectual and ethical curiosity.  The heart of issues, its commanding pull, is the first casualty that collapses.  The next has to be we ourselves -me and you.

Coming out of Trinidad, some serious men and women with hard-earned reputations for illustriousness took the bull by the horns.  There’s a problem at the CCJ.  At the top.  In some of the worst ways possible.  Coming out of Guyana, the reaction was telling and chilling.  Pursue the leakers.  Is this for real?  Is somebody serious here?  The matter at hand is not of some government ministry with a suspected long program of corruption and generalized wrongdoing. 

The concern is that the system of justice at its highest elevation in this region now appears tainted.  Smells rancid.  Besmirched by its own hand, as alleged.  There must be some significance attached to the implications of the allegations made.  Not by political opponents in a political campaign.  But by respected jurists against a brother.  It calls for some guts, some trait in the character, to take such a momentous step. 

The anxieties were too tormenting-perhaps, to the point of being unbearable-for no objection to be tendered, no trail of disagreement to be imprinted.

Now the best that can be offered in reaction (in and out of Guyana) is to go after whoever breached walls, penetrated too far.  In the situation, I wonder what is thought of the five CCJ judges who made their positions so clear?  Maybe they should have let sleeping dogs lie.  From the snippets, however, there was more than a trace of dysfunction at the CCJ.  It was being eroded, and eroding, from deep inside.  And not at some mundane level. 

I invite my fellow Guyanese to weigh this question.  What if the situation, as identified, is allowed to continue?  Could it be said that there are more opportunities for more travesties and miscarriages to be inflicted on the peoples of this region?  Without the specifications of some of the hard disagreements among the judges, what probability for institutional self-improvement? 

Or, more ominously, what probability for further degradation, based on the stream of allegations?

Frankly, whoever leaked those emails did the CCJ and this region a huge favor.  The CCJ administration (and the political overlords) are afforded the room to examine what went on, finalize the steps necessary for a cure.  The region is now able to place the CCJ under a microscope and study from its people to its processes to its output. 

Languishing in ignorance.  Believing that a straight deck and a fair deal are at work.  Though such may not be the case.  An injustice. 

Then that is a command for exposure and enlightenment.  Some developments, some circumstances, are too vital to be left to resolve themselves on their own.  A leak serves as a spur to action, a call to correction, however harsh.  In the call to go after leakers, I go back to my slave reference. 

When the slave rebels were hunted down, it extended the ignominy of slavery.  When slaves were recruited, or pressed into duty, to track down those fighting for their cause, they (the trackers) were damaging themselves.

I think that some damage has been done to Guyanese.  I stop there.  But if the level of trust, the high degree of confidence, that should repose in the CCJ suffers from the slightest decline, then that has to amount to a big consideration for free and pure functioning of the law and the dispensation of what passes for justice in this region.  If not at the CCJ, then where?  If not with those who sit at the CCJ table, then who? 

Should the CCJ lack the required ethical fiber to perform at the highest, cleanest level, then all is lost.  Our ancestors made too many sacrifices in the fields, skimped in the homes, for matters to come to this.

A STATEMENT GUYANA DIDN’T HAVE TO SHARE

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

A STATEMENT GUYANA DIDN’T HAVE TO SHARE

OPINION BY: Staff Writer—August 2026

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary fold a direct conflict of interest into a joint statement, instead of speaking independently?

When the region’s Heads of Judiciary issued their joint statement on August 13 expressing “grave concern” over the confidentiality breach at the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana’s Chancellor of the Juidicary  was among the signatories. So was the Chief Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court — the superior court of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, an institution to which Guyana does not belong. The two signed separately, for separate courts, on the same document.

That much is a matter of record, not confusion.

The question worth asking is not why Guyana’s name sits beside the ECSC’s. It is why Guyana’s Chancellor chose to sign a joint statement — one crafted broadly enough to cover Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the ECSC bloc all at once — rather than issue an independent statement of her own.

GUYANA IS NOT A BYSTANDER IN THIS DISPUTE

The joint statement treats every signatory as equally distant from the substance of the allegations against CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson. For most of the signing jurisdictions, that framing may be defensible. For Guyana, it is not.

Two matters inside the leaked internal correspondence bear directly, and specifically, on Guyana.

The first is Bhagwansingh, the February 2026 CCJ ruling whose interpretation — broad or narrow — will determine whether Guyana’s own exposure under TCL v Guyana [2009] CCJ 5 (OJ) remains intact or is quietly narrowed. That dispute over how Bhagwansingh should be read is, by Justice Eboe-Osuji’s own account, the reason he was removed from the D’Almada panel in the first place. This newsroom has reported that ground already, at length.

The second is more direct still, and it has not yet been given the weight it deserves. Justice Peter Jamadar, in his internal email to fellow CCJ judges, named the Mohamed v MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter as one of two specific instances in which he experienced Justice Anderson attempting “to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner.” That case was not an abstraction. It was Guyana’s own case. The Minister of Home Affairs, the Attorney General, and a sitting Magistrate of Guyana were named respondents. Guyana’s Attorney General, Mohabir Anil Nandlall, argued the government’s position before the court.

The CCJ unanimously dismissed the appeal by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father on July 29, clearing the way for US extradition proceedings to resume — a ruling delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” and presented publicly as settled and unanimous.

Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has alleged the court’s president tried to steer the outcome of that very case.

Jamadar’s account suggests the deliberations behind that unanimity were considerably less settled than the public judgment let on. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in the same correspondence, went further still, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” — and was, by Anderson’s own account, absent from the case’s judgment delivery for reasons that were never specified.

Azruddin Mohamed has since publicly demanded an independent examination of the allegations, on the basis that they concern his own case.

TWO GOVERNMENTS, TWO POSITIONS, ONE SIGNATURE

This is not a hypothetical conflict of interest. Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has now alleged, in writing, that the president of the court attempted to steer the outcome of that very case. Guyana’s government — through its AG — was a direct party to the proceeding a CCJ judge says may have been compromised by presidential overreach.

That is not the position of Barbados, or the Bahamas, or Belize, or the ECSC’s nine member territories, none of which had a government litigant inside the disputed case.

It is Guyana’s position, and Guyana’s alone.

A joint statement lets every signatory share both the cover and the ambiguity of collective phrasing. “Grave concern” about a confidentiality breach, expressed by seven Heads of Judiciary together, commits none of them individually to answering for the substance of what was breached.

An independent statement from Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary would have carried no such shelter. It would have had to address, explicitly or by conspicuous omission, whether Guyana’s judiciary has any view on an allegation that its own government’s litigation was the subject of alleged presidential interference at the region’s apex court.

That is a different kind of statement, with a different kind of fallout — and it is the statement Guyana did not make.

THE QUESTION THIS PUBLICATION IS PUTTING ON RECORD

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor choose to fold Guyana’s position into a joint statement covering jurisdictions with no comparable stake in the underlying allegations, rather than address, independently, a matter in which Guyana’s own Attorney General was a named litigant?

Guyana’s judiciary owes the public more than shared cover. It owes an answer to why silence, diffused across seven signatures, was judged the safer course than an independent word of its own.

— The Board

THE CO-OP THAT NEVER LEARNED ITS OWN LESSON

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

 THE CO-OP THAT NEVER LEARNED ITS OWN LESSON

A poultry hub floated for Region Two revives a structure Guyana’s own government already studied and watched fail — with none of the study attached

OPINION BY: Editor—August, 2026

At community consultations in Good Hope and Suddie on Monday, President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali proposed relocating Region Two’s backyard poultry farmers into a single, centrally managed production cluster. Roughly forty farmers, he suggested, could be brought together at a designated site, financed through the Guyana Development Bank, scaled up to 25,000 birds, and structured so “all of them own a stake in that without having these conflicts in the community.”

It is a tidy answer to a real irritant — the friction between backyard poultry operations and their neighbors. It is also, on the government’s own account of it, nothing more than an idea spoken aloud in response to a complaint.

AN IDEA, NOT A PLAN

Strip away the framing and look at what the reporting actually confirms exists: a verbal proposal, floated at a consultation, with no named site, no disclosed financing terms beyond the Development Bank’s involvement, and no ownership or governance structure beyond a single sentence about farmers holding “a stake.” The coverage itself concedes as much in its closing lines, noting the proposal “will have to be further developed, including identifying a suitable location, determining the financing structure and establishing how participating farmers would own and operate the facility.” Every element that would make this a plan rather than a mood is explicitly marked as undone.

This is not incidental to how the idea arrived. It is the same shape as the President’s Rose Hall remarks days earlier, where noise complaints about bars produced an on-the-spot suggestion that proprietors use Development Bank financing — for a bank that had not yet opened its doors — to buy soundproofing material. It is the same shape as the Model Village Initiative’s granular infrastructure promises, unveiled as polished renders within a week of a tour launch, with no procurement or delivery timeline attached.

A complaint surfaces at a consultation; a structural fix is proposed within the same breath; the fix is reported as a policy development. The pattern is now well enough established on this record to name directly: consultations are functioning as the venue where the President workshops solutions in real time, and the solutions are workshopped, not developed.

A STRUCTURE GUYANA HAS ALREADY TRIED

What makes the poultry hub proposal worth more scrutiny than the soundproofing remark is that it does not just gesture at financing — it proposes reviving a specific organisational form. Forty independent farmers, pooled into a shared production facility, each holding a stake, coordinating collectively on output: this is, structurally, an agricultural cooperative.

Guyana does not need to speculate about how that structure performs under real conditions. It has the record.

Guyana’s cooperative movement was, at points, a central pillar of national economic policy — the country was styled a Co-operative Republic. It was also, over decades, a documented and repeated institutional failure. A 2017 Cabinet-commissioned task force report on the state of the cooperative sector catalogued the causes with some consistency: a lack of managerial skill among cooperative leadership, mismanagement of pooled funds, an absence of viability studies conducted before a cooperative was launched, and an inconsistency — bordering on indifference — in state support for the sector once formed. None of these are one-off failures of a particular co-op in a particular year. They are structural, recurring, and they were significant enough to warrant a government-commissioned study nine years ago.

The 2017 task force did not find bad luck. It found the same institutional weaknesses recurring across the cooperative sector — and recommended fixes that evidently did not outlast the report that proposed them.

The specific failure mode worth naming for a forty-farmer poultry cluster is the viability study. The 2017 report flagged its absence as a recurring cause of collapse — cooperatives launched on enthusiasm and political will, without groundwork on whether the pooled model would function for the specific commodity, the specific participants, or the specific market. Nothing in the Good Hope and Suddie remarks suggests a viability study preceded this proposal. It was, by every available account, generated in response to a complaint about backyard conflict — not in response to an assessment of whether forty independent poultry farmers, with their own methods, debts, and expectations, can be merged into a single 25,000-bird operation without the very conflicts a shared facility tends to produce.

FINANCING WITHOUT A FRAMEWORK

The financing vehicle attached to this proposal deserves its own scrutiny, and this publication has already built the record for why. The Guyana Development Bank Bill passed its second reading and full passage on July 27 without debate. Section 5(2) of that Act leaves collateral and interest terms to ministerial and board discretion, at odds with the public pitch of interest-free, no-collateral lending. The board itself is structured with sole appointment discretion resting with the Finance Minister — no reserved seats for opposition, civil society, or independent transparency nominees. This publication has already documented one instance of the President publicly directing the Bank’s future lending priorities — toward bar soundproofing — before the Bank had opened, before an application process existed, and before a disbursement mechanism was in place.

The poultry hub proposal repeats that sequence. A discretionary fund, not yet fully operational, is being publicly assigned a use before the institution itself has published eligibility criteria, application procedures, or — most relevantly here — any framework for how forty individual farmers would hold and exercise an ownership stake in a jointly financed facility. Ownership structure is not a footnote in a cooperative arrangement; it is the load-bearing element the 2017 task force identified as the site of collapse when left ambiguous. Proposing the financing before resolving the ownership question is proposing the easy part first.

THE PATTERN, NOT THE PERSON

This publication draws no conclusion here about what motivates the President to generate structural proposals at the podium in response to constituent complaints. That is not something available for verification from a wire report, and it is not necessary to the argument. What is available for verification is the pattern itself: a complaint is raised, a structural remedy is proposed on the spot, the remedy is reported by state and allied media as a policy in motion, and the substantive work — site, financing terms, governance, viability — is left, by the government’s own account, for later.

Rose Hall’s soundproofing pledge followed this shape. The Model Village Initiative’s infrastructure renders followed this shape. The Region Two poultry hub follows it now.

A cooperative model failed in Guyana before, and it failed for reasons a government-commissioned study wrote down in detail nine years ago. Reviving that model without reference to that study — without a viability assessment, without a governance framework, without so much as a named site — is not a new experiment.

It is the old one, run again, with the results not yet consulted.

THIS PUBLICATION ASKS

The 592 Guardian requests that the Office of the President and the Ministry of Agriculture disclose, in writing:

  1. Whether any viability study — of the kind the 2017 cooperative sector task force identified as a precondition — has been conducted or commissioned for the proposed Region Two poultry cluster;
  2. What governance and ownership framework, if any, has been drafted to define how participating farmers would hold, transfer, or exit an equity stake in the facility;
  3. Whether the Guyana Development Bank’s transitional secretariat has been formally briefed on this proposal, and whether any funds have been provisionally earmarked for it ahead of the Bank’s public launch.

— The Board

TWO VOICES, ONE COUNCIL

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

TWO VOICES, ONE COUNCIL

The Bar Council speaks fluently when the Judiciary is threatened. It has not yet found the same language for seventy-three dead Guyanese

OPINION —August 2026

THE OCCASION FOR THIS COMPARISON

On 10 August 2026, the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana issued a statement addressing media reports of a leaked internal correspondence among Judges of the Caribbean Court of Justice. The statement is unambiguous in its concern. It describes the unauthorized disclosure of internal judicial correspondence as a matter capable of bringing the administration of justice “into disrepute.”

It calls the act, if proven, “a gross breach of confidence and a serious dereliction of duty.” It urges that the President of the CCJ be afforded “sufficient latitude” to lead the Court according to his vision, subject to the Code of Judicial Conduct. It is, by any reasonable reading, a forceful and considered institutional intervention.

The 592 Guardian does not dispute the legitimacy of that statement. Confidentiality of judicial deliberation is a serious matter, and a Bar Association has standing — indeed, an obligation — to speak to it. The question this editorial raises is not whether the Council was right to speak on the CCJ leak. It is why the same Council, addressing a catastrophe that killed at least seventy-three Guyanese citizens and left dozens more missing, found only sympathy to offer, and nothing more.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

On 22 July 2026, four days after the MV Barima capsized en route from Georgetown to Port Kaituma, the Bar Council issued its “Statement of Solidarity and Support.” It is a document of condolence. It extends “deepest sympathies” to the families of the dead, describes the Council as “profoundly saddened,” wishes survivors “strength, healing, and a full recovery,” and closes by joining “the nation in mourning the lives that have been lost while praying for comfort, healing, and peace.”

That is the entirety of the Council’s public position on the deadliest maritime disaster in Guyana’s modern history. A review of the Bar Association’s own media centre, and of its public social media channels, confirms that as of this writing, no further statement has followed.

◊ Not on the international Commission of Inquiry chaired by Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith, sworn in on 30 July with a mandate to establish facts, determine accountability, and recommend reforms.

◊ Nothing on the conflict of interest involving one of its own member’s— a sitting minister  professional relationship with an appointed commissioner.

◊ Not on the Terms of Reference published in the Official Gazette, which direct the Commission to examine vessel maintenance, certification, loading practices, and the conduct of state agencies above the level of the crew.

◊ Not on the murder charges laid against Captain Kevin Price, Chief Mate Rondell Roberts, and Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson — each facing seventy-two counts — nor on the due process protections owed to them as the matter proceeds through the Charity Magistrate’s Court alongside an international inquiry operating in full public view.

This last silence is the most difficult to explain. A Bar Association’s core institutional purpose is the protection of legal rights and fair process, particularly for the accused, particularly under public pressure, particularly when the pressure is most intense.

Three Guyanese citizens face the heaviest charge in the criminal code, multiplied seventy-two times, under conditions of extraordinary public anger. If there was ever a moment for the Council to speak in its own primary register — due process, fair trial rights, the presumption of innocence — this was it. It did not.

THE CONTRAST, SIDE BY SIDE

CCJ Leak Statement — Aug 2026

 MV Barima Statement — 22 July 2026
“Gross breach of confidence”

“Serious dereliction of duty”

“Bring the administration of justice into disrepute”

 “Deepest sympathies”

“Profoundly saddened”

“Stand in solidarity”
Institutional integrity of the CCJ invoked and defended

 No reference to institutional integrity of any state agency
Explicit latitude urged for the CCJ President’s authority

 No reference to the Commission of Inquiry, its Terms of Reference, or its work
Confidentiality and disclosure framed as a matter of principle

 No reference to preservation or disclosure of maintenance, inspection, cargo, or communication records
Duty of members to the Court articulated in detail

 No reference to the due process rights of the three persons charged

The disparity is not simply that one statement is longer or more detailed than the other. It is that the two statements draw on entirely different vocabularies. The CCJ statement speaks the language of institutions, duty, and consequence. The Barima statement speaks the language of grief.

Both languages have their place. But when the body capable of the former chooses only the latter in the face of mass state-linked death, the choice itself becomes the story.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This editorial does not allege that the Council’s silence was purchased, ordered, or coordinated with the Government of Guyana. We have no evidence of that, and we do not suggest it. Institutional caution is a real and sometimes legitimate instinct — a Bar Association may reasonably hesitate to comment publicly on matters that are, or may become, sub judice while criminal charges are being prosecuted. That caution deserves to be named as a possible explanation, not dismissed.

But caution explains restraint. It does not explain three weeks of total silence on the existence of a Commission of Inquiry, the fairness of an ongoing prosecution, or the state’s own regulatory failures — none of which required the Council to prejudge a single fact. A Bar Association can call for an independent and timely inquiry, for the preservation of evidence, for respect for due process, and for accountability wherever the facts lead, without pronouncing a single person guilty or innocent. Those are not political demands. They are the ordinary vocabulary of a functioning Bar Association. It is a vocabulary the Council used fluently for the CCJ. It has not yet used it for the Barima.

The question is not whether the Bar Council expressed condolences. It did. The question is whether its intervention matched the gravity of a catastrophe involving mass death, a state-operated transport system, and the due process rights of three citizens now facing seventy-two counts of murder apiece.

— The Editorial Board

A PATTERN WORTH NAMING

This is not the first institution this news room  has documented responding with force to threats against the machinery of governance while offering only ceremony in the face of harm to ordinary Guyanese. It is a pattern this newsroom has traced across the Model Village consultations, the Development Bank Bill’s passage without debate, and the Region 10 administrative impasse: energetic institutional voice where institutional privilege is at stake, and comparative quiet where public accountability is owed.

The Bar Council’s conduct across these two statements fits that pattern precisely — not proof of coordination, but further evidence of a civic culture in which the instruments meant to hold power accountable reserve their sharpest words for their own house.

WHAT THE COUNCIL SHOULD DO

The remedy is straightforward, and it costs the Council nothing it has not already spent on the CCJ matter. The Bar Council should issue a further statement addressing the MV Barima tragedy on its merits as a matter of public law: affirming the necessity of an independent and transparent Commission of Inquiry, insisting on the preservation and disclosure of all relevant maintenance, inspection, cargo, and communication records, and affirming the due process rights of every person charged in connection with the disaster, including the presumption of innocence pending trial.

None of this requires the Council to take a side. It requires only that the Council speak in the register it has already shown it possesses.

Guyana does not lack institutions capable of forceful language. It lacks the consistent will to direct that language toward the country’s actual emergencies rather than its institutional grievances.

The Bar Council has, this month, demonstrated that it knows how to speak with teeth. Seventy-two families are still waiting to hear it use them.

Sources: Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana, “Statement by the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana on Media Reports Concerning the Leak of Internal Correspondence Among the Judges of the Caribbean Court of Justice” (Aug. 2026); Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana, “Statement of Solidarity and Support by the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana Following the MV Barima Tragedy” (22 July 2026); Guyana Chronicle, “MV Barima CoI Empowered to Probe Safety Failures, Recommend Prosecutions, Maritime Reforms — ToRs Outline” (4 Aug. 2026); Guyana Chronicle, “Boat Captain, Two Others Remanded on Murder Charges Over MV Barima Tragedy” (29 July 2026); Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, “Guyana to Launch International Inquiry into MV Barima Tragedy.”

THE LOOP CLOSES: HOW THE STATE FED A FEED SHORTAGE, THEN CALLED IT A CRISIS

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

THE LOOP CLOSES: HOW THE STATE FED A FEED SHORTAGE, THEN CALLED IT A CRISIS

Exclusive: Customs Records Show a Tacama Consortium Member Importing Brazilian Feed Duty-Free — Even As the Same Network Exported Guyana’s Soya and Now Seeks Relief for a Chicken Shortage It Helped Create

August,2026 Staff — Investigations Desk

In April, this newsroom asked a question the government has never answered: why, four months after the State-funded Tacama corn-and-soya project began exporting its harvest to Barbados, was Guyana still relying on poultry import waivers to keep chicken on the table? We called it “alchemy” — public capital turned into private export surplus, while the domestic market absorbed the shortfall through the back door.

On August 11, the government made that back door the front page. Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha announced a formal, 330,000-pound-per-week chicken import program, brokered through the New Guyana Marketing Corporation (New GMC), at the direct request of the Guyana Poultry Producers Association (GPPA) — a body whose leadership includes the same consortium interests that built Tacama.

What we could not prove in April, we can now document. A Guyana Revenue Authority exemption letter and a corresponding Customs & Excise declaration, obtained by this newsroom, show that Royal Chicken Inc. — a founding member of the Tacama consortium — secured duty-free, VAT-free entry for 1,500 tons of Brazilian soyabean meal in February 2026, alongside a separate 100-metric-ton shipment of crude soyabean oil from the same Brazilian supplier weeks earlier. Both moved through the Lethem border crossing. Neither shipment came from Tacama.

“The soya beans are exported; the chickens are imported; the money is extracted; and the people are left to pay.”

WHAT THE RECORDS SHOW

The first document is a Guyana Revenue Authority letter, addressed to Rasheed Baksh, General Manager of Royal Chicken Inc., approving a customs duty exemption under the Customs Act and a VAT zero-rating under the Value-Added Tax Act for 1,500 tons of soyabean meal, sourced from North Link Brazil Ltda under a commercial invoice dated February 9, 2026. The exemption is explicitly tied to the stated end-use of the goods and is valid for three months from issue.

The second is a Customs & Excise Department import declaration dated January 26, 2026, recording a separate 100-metric-ton shipment of crude soyabean oil, again from North Link Brazil Ltda of Boa Vista, Roraima, again consigned to Royal Chicken Inc., cleared through the Lethem Multipurpose Complex with a customs value of roughly GY$29.8 million.

Taken individually, these are routine trade filings. Taken together, and set against the public record of Tacama’s stated purpose, they document something else: a consortium member built on the promise of import-substitution, drawing duty-free feed inputs from Brazil in the same window that its own consortium was preparing to export Guyana-grown soya to Barbados.

THE CONSTRUCT

None of this happened in the abstract. Tacama was sold to the Guyanese public in specific terms — cheaper feed, cheaper chicken and eggs, thousands of jobs, and an end to dependence on imported feed inputs that, by the government’s own figures, cost the country close to US$30 million annually before the project began. More than $1.4 billion in public infrastructure — roads, wharves, drying facilities, storage — was committed to make that promise real, benefiting a consortium dominated by Royal Chicken, Guyana Stockfeed, Bounty Farm, Edun Farms, SBM Wood & Dubulay, and the Brazilian-owned NF Agriculture.

On April 12, the government announced the first-ever export of Tacama soya to Barbados, framed by President Ali as evidence of a “full ecosystem for production, value addition, and export.” No tonnage was ever disclosed. No outlet — state or independent — has since published a customs figure for that shipment, or confirmed it moved on schedule.

Every report on the export, without exception, was a verbatim rewrite of the same Department of Public Information release.

Four months later, the same producer class that stood to benefit from that export is the one that went to government asking for emergency chicken imports. GPPA’s own representatives raised declining production against rising demand in the meeting that produced Monday’s announcement. The Association making the request and the consortium exporting the input are not separate interests — Bounty Farm and Royal Chicken sit inside both.

This is the construct: export the surplus when the optics favor it, import the shortfall when the market requires it, and let the public carry the difference in price and in the appearance of scarcity.

A shortage that follows an unmeasured export is not evidence of bad luck. It is evidence of a choice.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY, EXCEPT WHEN IT ISN’T

The Royal Chicken exemption raises a sharper question than the export alone did: was Tacama ever load-bearing for its own consortium’s feed supply, or was it one input stream among several — including a tax-free Brazilian one — while the public-facing justification for the subsidy remained self-sufficiency and import substitution?

A company does not need duty-free access to 1,500 tons of Brazilian soyabean meal, on top of a separate 100-ton crude oil shipment, if the domestic project built to supply it is functioning as advertised. The exemption does not prove Tacama failed outright — but it proves that at least one flagship beneficiary was not relying on it exclusively, at the same time the government was publicising Tacama’s harvest as sufficient to export.

THE SCALE THIS IMPLIES

This newsroom is in possession of one exemption letter, for one company, for one quarter. Royal Chicken is one of at least six named consortium members. If comparable volumes were required by even two or three of the others — and there is no public reason to assume Royal Chicken’s needs were unique among them — the implied annual Brazilian feed import volume tied to this “self-sufficiency” project runs into the tens of thousands of tons, not the fifteen hundred documented here.

We state that plainly as an implication, not a finding. It is not proven by the two documents in our possession, and we will not present it as though it were. But it is the direct and reasonable consequence of the only hard figures currently public: one consortium member, one exemption, fifteen hundred tons, three months’ validity — multiplied across a consortium the government itself credited with transforming Guyana into a “regional powerhouse.”

The government, not this newsroom, is positioned to close that gap. It holds the full set of GRA exemption records. The public does not.

A TRAIL THAT WENT QUIET

The outlet that first obtained the Royal Chicken exemption letter found, in the aftermath, that comparable records for other consortium members were no longer forthcoming. We note this not as speculation but as a documented change in access: a single leak surfaced one company’s exemption, and the channel that produced it did not produce others.

That pattern is itself part of the story. A government confident that Tacama’s feed supply was adequate, and that duty-free Brazilian imports by consortium members were incidental rather than structural, would have no reason to make the underlying exemption data harder to obtain once one instance became public.

The opacity that followed the leak is not proof of wrongdoing on its own — but it is not the behaviour of an administration eager to demonstrate that the first document was an outlier.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NOW

  • The Guyana Revenue Authority should publish, or make available under access-to-information request, the full register of duty and VAT exemptions granted to Tacama consortium members for feed-input imports over the past 24 months, by company, tonnage, and origin.
  • New GMC and the Ministry of Agriculture should disclose the actual tonnage of soya exported to Barbados in April, and confirm whether the shipment moved on the announced timeline.
  • The Ministry should account for the gap between Tacama’s reported harvest volumes and the consortium’s own import figures, so the public can judge whether the project is supplementing or substituting for imported feed.
  • GPPA should disclose which of its member companies will be distributing the 330,000 pounds of weekly imported chicken now being facilitated through New GMC, given the overlap between its membership and the Tacama consortium.

The government’s own language in April promised an “ecosystem” — production, value addition, export. What the documented record now shows is a narrower and more familiar arrangement: public money underwrites the platform, a private consortium draws inputs from whichever source is cheapest in a given quarter, and when the domestic shelf runs short, the same government that funded the platform steps back in to license the import that fills it.

The public pays three times — for the infrastructure, for the shortage, and for the imported chicken that follows 

Until the Ministry of Agriculture and the Guyana Revenue Authority release the fuller record, the two documents at the centre of this report stand as the clearest public evidence yet that Tacama’s self-sufficiency narrative and its consortium’s actual sourcing practices have not been the same thing.

— The Board

SOURCES & DOCUMENTATION

  1. Guyana Revenue Authority, letter to Mr. Rasheed Baksh, General Manager, Royal Chicken Inc., “Re: Tax Exemption — Royal Chicken Inc. (Raw Materials),” approving exemption for 1,500 tons soyabean meal per Commercial Invoice No. 003/2026 (Feb. 9, 2026), North Link Brazil Ltda. Signed for the Commissioner-General by Gavin Low; copied to the Comptroller of Customs, Excise & Trade Operations, the Deputy Commissioner of Law Enforcement & Investigation, and the Auditor General.
  2. Guyana Customs & Excise Department, Single Administrative Document / import declaration, Lethem Branch Office, dated Jan. 26, 2026, recording 100 metric tons of crude (non-degummed) soyabean oil, exporter North Link Brazil Ltda (Boa Vista, Roraima), consignee Royal Chicken Inc. (Lot 60, Garden of Eden, East Bank Demerara), customs value GY$29,815,500.
  3. “Subsidised Soya, Exported Feed, Imported Chicken,” The 592 Guardian, April 30, 2026.
  4. Department of Public Information (Guyana), press release on the poultry market stabilisation measure and Minister Mustapha’s meeting with the Private Sector Commission, Aug. 11, 2026.
  5. Prior Guardian and public reporting on the Tacama corn-and-soya project, consortium membership, and public infrastructure investment, 2023–2026.              

WHEN A JUDGE WRITES TO WARN A PRIME MINISTER: THE CCJ’S CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY &INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

WHEN A JUDGE WRITES TO WARN A PRIME MINISTER: THE CCJ’S CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

An internal reckoning at the Caribbean Court of Justice has reached the desk of a head of government

The dispute engulfing the Caribbean Court of Justice has stopped being an internal matter. It is now a regional one.

In a June 2026 email exchanged among his fellow judges of the CCJ, Justice Arif Bulkan — the Guyanese-born jurist who sits on the region’s court of last resort — made a statement that reaches well beyond the corridors of the tribunal’s Port of Spain headquarters. The very concerns that have led Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to distrust the CCJ, Bulkan wrote, center on the risk of a single judge imposing a legal position contrary to that of the majority.

The appellate process, he said, exists specifically to guard against that kind of bias, and to preserve the integrity of the institution.

That sentence does two things at once. It confirms, from inside the court, that a sitting head of government has expressed distrust of the CCJ’s leadership. And it identifies, in a sitting judge’s own words, the precise institutional failure she is said to distrust: the concentration of authority in one office holder — CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson.

WHAT BULKAN TOLD HIS COLLEAGUES

Bulkan’s email was direct about where authority does and does not lie inside the court. The content of judgments, he wrote, is “very clearly a matter within our sole discretion as independent office holders.” He went further, noting that the appellate process “by its very definition requires a panel of more than one judge to consider an appeal and to independently come to a decision” — a structural safeguard that is undermined the moment one judge is able to determine, alone, who sits and who does not.

“…there are constructive ways of fulfilling such obligations, one of which includes being respectful of colleagues’ opinions, recognizing peers as equals and treating them accordingly and not dismissing their concerns…” — Justice Arif Bulkan

 

Read plainly, this is a judge of the region’s apex court telling its president, in writing, that he has fallen short of the standard collegiality requires.

THE ALLEGATIONS ON RECORD

Bulkan’s email sits inside a wider chain of correspondence among CCJ judges, exchanged amid escalating complaints against Justice Anderson. Those complaints — attributed to the judges raising them, and not verified findings of fact — include claims that Anderson unilaterally imposed a judicial dress code; accusations of “panel fixing”; and claims that he attempted to influence the outcome of cases before the court. A majority of the court’s judges, according to the same correspondence, have accused Anderson of running the regional court in a manner they characterized as “authoritarian” and “dictatorial.”

These are serious allegations, made by sitting judges against the president of their own court. They should be read as exactly that: allegations, contested and as yet unadjudicated by any outside body. But their source matters. This is not commentary from outside critics of the CCJ.

It is an internal reckoning, conducted in writing, by the judges responsible for the institution’s credibility.

WHY THIS IS NOW KAMLA PERSAD-BISSESSAR’S PROBLEM

The CCJ is not simply another regional body. It is headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago, and its credibility as the region’s apex appellate court rests in large part on the confidence of the governments — and the publics — it serves. When Bulkan frames his colleagues’ concerns as the same concerns driving Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s distrust of the court, he is not speculating.

He is describing an alignment between an internal judicial complaint and an external political one.That alignment is what turns this from a story about judicial temperament into a story about regional governance.

A prime minister’s confidence — or lack of it — in the CCJ is not a private opinion. It bears directly on the willingness of CARICOM member states to submit to the court’s appellate jurisdiction, on the perceived legitimacy of its rulings, and on the broader project of regional judicial integration that the CCJ was built to serve.

The Trinidad Express has sent questions via WhatsApp to Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, seeking her response to the allegations against Justice Anderson and asking directly whether the claims raised by his fellow judges have affected her confidence in the CCJ’s leadership. As of this writing, no answer has been made public.

THE SILENCE IS ITSELF A FINDING

That silence should not be read as neutral. 592 Guardian readers will recall the CCJ’s own pattern in responding to scrutiny: when questions were first raised over Justice Eboe-Osuji’s removal from a Trinidad and Tobago/Jamaica/CARICOM panel earlier this year, the court ignored fifteen direct questions before issuing a statement — on a Friday night — that addressed none of the specific allegations put to it. (See our earlier coverage: “A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ.”)

A pattern is now visible: serious institutional questions are met first with silence, then with a statement that restates the court’s confidence in itself without engaging the substance of what was asked. Whether that pattern holds with Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar’s office remains to be seen.

WHAT GUYANA — AND THE REGION — SHOULD BE ASKING

Guyana has direct stakes in the CCJ’s integrity that extend beyond institutional propriety. The court’s earlier ruling in TCL v Guyana established that a private cross-border actor can hold a member state to account under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas — a precedent whose future application is itself entangled in the same panel dispute that produced this email chain. That is a separate matter, addressed at length in our earlier reporting, and it is not necessary to relitigate it here.

What is necessary is to ask, plainly, what happens next. Does a CARICOM head of government’s documented distrust of the CCJ’s leadership warrant a public response — to her own citizens, and to the citizens of every state that has submitted to the court’s jurisdiction? Does the CCJ’s own governance structure permit an independent review of a sitting president’s conduct, given that a majority of his fellow judges have raised the alarm in writing? And if the appellate process exists, as Justice Bulkan says, “to guard against” one judge overriding the rest — what safeguard exists when the judge in question is the one who presides over the entire court?

Those are not rhetorical questions. They are owed answers — by Justice Anderson, by the CCJ as an institution, and now, by Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar.

— The Board

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

/0 Comments/in , , /by
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

/0 Comments/in , , /by
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

/0 Comments/in , , /by
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

/0 Comments/in , , /by
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