Easy Credit Is Not Easy Money    

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 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Easy Credit Is Not Easy Money  

 A public guide for borrowers—and a standard for Guyana’s Development Bank

BUSINESS AND FINANCE COMMENTARY : Hem Kumar October 2026

Guyana’s new Development Bank can become one of the most consequential instruments for broad-based economic opportunity in the country—particularly for citizens and small businesses long excluded from conventional banking. Zero-interest and no-collateral financing can lower barriers that have kept capable farmers, tradespeople, vendors, processors, transport operators, women entrepreneurs, young people, and rural businesses outside the formal credit system.

But access to credit is not, by itself, development.

A loan is not a grant. It is not free money. And “no interest” does not mean “no risk.” The real test of the Development Bank will not be how quickly it distributes funds, how many applications it approves, or how attractive its public messaging becomes. The test will be whether borrowers build businesses that survive, grow, repay, create jobs, and move toward lasting financial independence.

International evidence does not support either extreme: that credit automatically ends poverty, or that it inevitably harms poor people. Credit can improve incomes and build assets—but mainly when it reaches people with viable opportunities, finances productive activity, reflects the borrower’s cash flow, and is supported by training, mentoring, savings, insurance, and sensible oversight.

That is the standard Guyana should adopt.

Credit Must Build, Not Burden

The most useful loan is one that helps a borrower make more money than the loan costs to repay. That sounds obvious, but too many people enter borrowing with the wrong starting question: How much can I get? The more important question is: What will this money produce?

A G$3 million loan should not be seen as a prize, a quick fix, or an opportunity to meet immediate household pressures. It should be tied to a credible productive purpose: expanding a farm with reliable buyers, purchasing equipment that increases output, securing stock for an established business, improving a workshop, building a processing operation, or strengthening an enterprise that already demonstrates demand.

Where credit is used mainly for food, rent, school expenses, medical emergencies, old debt, travel, celebrations, or consumption, the borrower may gain temporary relief but no new income stream. Repayment then becomes a burden carried by the household rather than the business.

The Development Bank must therefore distinguish between a person in need of social support and a person with an enterprise-ready investment plan. Both deserve help—but they do not necessarily need the same type of help.

A Message to Borrowers

Prospective borrowers should approach the Development Bank with discipline, not excitement alone.

Before applying, every applicant should be able to answer five questions clearly:

1.What exactly will the money finance?  

 Not “a business,” but a specific activity: a pickup for contracted produce delivery, a poultry-house upgrade, a freezer for fish sales, a welding machine, inventory for an existing shop, irrigation equipment, a small agro-processing line, or tools for a construction trade.

2.Who will buy the goods or service?  

 A business idea without customers is not yet a business. Applicants should know their likely buyers, expected sales volume, price, competitors, and how they will reach the market.

3.How much will the business actually earn? 

Revenue is not profit. Borrowers must calculate inputs, fuel, transportation, rent, labor, packaging, maintenance, taxes, electricity, losses, spoilage, and repayment obligations.

4.When will money come in?  

Repayment must fit the actual cycle of the enterprise. A rice farmer, livestock producer, market vendor, contractor, hairdresser, mechanic, minibus operator, and small manufacturer do not earn on the same schedule.  

5.What happens if things go wrong? 

Sales may fall. Equipment may fail. A customer may delay payment. Flooding, illness, theft, crop disease, supply shortages, or family emergencies can interrupt income. Borrowers need a contingency plan and, where possible, savings and insurance.

The applicant who cannot answer these questions should not be humiliated or discarded. That person should be guided toward training, mentorship, a smaller starter facility, or a period of business preparation before being asked to assume a larger debt.

Start Small, Prove Capacity

The most responsible approach is not necessarily to give every applicant the maximum available loan immediately.

A first-time entrepreneur may have ambition, energy, and a good idea—but still lack experience with stock control, bookkeeping, purchasing, pricing, suppliers, customers, taxation, labor, and cash management. A larger loan may magnify an early mistake rather than strengthen the business

For many applicants, the wiser model is:

♦ A modest first loan linked to a clear, verifiable productive activity.

♦ Mandatory training in financial literacy, record keeping, costing, pricing, and repayment.

♦ Regular mentoring during the first business cycle.

♦ Evidence of sales, cash flow, and repayment discipline.

♦ A larger follow-on facility only after the borrower demonstrates capacity.

This is not exclusion. It is protection.

A borrower who successfully manages a smaller loan gains experience, confidence, a repayment record, and a stronger basis for larger financing in the future. That is how a development bank can help citizens move from informal survival to sustainable enterprise and, eventually, conventional banking.

Repayment Must Follow Reality

One of the most damaging errors lenders can make is imposing a repayment schedule that ignores the way businesses actually earn.

Agriculture is seasonal. Construction payments can be delayed. Manufacturing may require upfront spending before products reach the market. Retail businesses may have daily turnover but tight margins. Tourism, transport, fishing, poultry, livestock, and agro-processing all have distinct risks and revenue cycles.

A borrower should not be driven into default simply because the bank’s schedule does not match the enterprise’s cash flow.

The Development Bank should therefore design loans around the productive cycle:

♦ Seasonal or harvest-linked repayments for agriculture.

♦ Grace periods for equipment purchases, expansion projects, and businesses that require time before earning.

♦ Flexible schedules for enterprises with irregular but predictable revenue.

♦ Clear restructuring options where a genuine shock—not recklessness or fraud—disrupts a viable business.

♦ Early intervention when a borrower is struggling, rather than waiting until the debt becomes unmanageable.

Repayment discipline remains essential. But discipline is not the same as rigidity. A development institution must understand the difference.

Screen Opportunity, Not Just Poverty

The Development Bank should not lend merely because a person is poor, politically connected, persuasive, or able to complete an application form. Nor should it reject a capable applicant simply because that person lacks land, a house, formal pay-slips, or a conventional banking history.

The institution must screen for productive opportunity.

Loan officers should assess:

♦ The applicant’s experience in the proposed activity.

♦ The specific use of the loan.

♦  Evidence of customers, contracts, demand, or market access.

♦ Input costs, suppliers, pricing, margins, and competition.

♦ The borrower’s existing debt and household financial obligations.

♦ Records of sales, purchases, mobile-money use, deposits, invoices, customer orders, or supplier relationships.

♦ Whether the borrower actually controls the funds and the business.

♦ The capacity of the household to withstand a setback without sacrificing food, housing, education, health care, or productive assets.

This is especially important for women and young entrepreneurs, who may be named borrowers but lack control over the business, income, equipment, or loan proceeds. No citizen should carry repayment responsibility for money controlled by somebody else.

A good loan officer should not simply ask: Can this person repay? The more important question is: Can this proposed investment generate enough income to repay and still leave the borrower better off?

Training Cannot Be Decorative

Financial literacy must not be treated as a ceremonial workshop held before a photograph and a cheque presentation.

Every borrower—particularly a first-time borrower—should receive practical instruction in:

♦ Separating household money from business money.

♦ Recording daily sales and expenses.

♦ Understanding profit versus revenue.

♦ Calculating the real cost of goods and services.

♦ Setting prices that cover expenses and create profit.

♦ Managing stock, spoilage, theft, and credit sales.

♦ Planning for loan instalments.

♦ Using digital payments and basic banking tools.

♦ Understanding tax, NIS, licences, permits, and regulatory requirements.

♦ Saving for equipment repair, emergencies, and slow periods.

The Bank should also provide sector-specific support. A poultry farmer needs different guidance from a seamstress, a taxi operator, a shopkeeper, a fisher, a contractor, a small manufacturer, or an agro-processor.

Training should be delivered before disbursement, followed by mentoring after disbursement. The borrower’s greatest need often begins after the money is received.

No Collateral Does Not Mean No Accountability

Removing collateral can correct a serious historic barrier. Many capable Guyanese have been excluded from formal finance because they lack titled land, property, vehicles, established credit histories, or the connections required to secure a commercial loan.

That exclusion must be addressed.

But the answer cannot be to replace sensible assessment with blind lending. When public money is lent without collateral, the need for strong appraisal, transparent criteria, performance monitoring, and ethical loan recovery becomes even greater.

The Bank must protect borrowers from predatory or unsuitable lending. It must also protect taxpayers from politically directed lending, favoritism, fraud, careless approvals, and hidden write-offs.

No-collateral lending should mean that a borrower is not automatically disqualified by a lack of property. It must never mean that the Bank has no basis for judging risk, no system for monitoring funds, and no mechanism for accountability.

Support the Whole Financial Life

Credit works better when it is not expected to solve every problem.

A small business may require a loan, but it also needs a safe way to receive payments, pay suppliers, save during good months, insure against shocks, access a market, obtain permits, and keep basic records.

The Development Bank should therefore help build a wider financial ecosystem around borrowers: 

♦ Savings plans that create buffers for emergencies and slow periods.

♦ Digital-payment options that reduce cash-handling risks and improve records.

♦ Insurance products suited to farmers, livestock producers, fishers, transport operators, small manufacturers, and micro-enterprises.

♦  Business networks that connect borrowers to buyers, suppliers, mentors, and technical advisers.

♦ Referral pathways for applicants who need grants, social assistance, training, licensing support, or mental-health and family-support services rather than immediate debt.

Credit is an important tool. It is not the entire toolbox.

 A Standard for Loan Officers

Loan processors should be evaluated not by the speed or volume of approvals alone, but by the quality and long-term performance of the loans they recommend.

Every loan decision should answer the following:

♦ Is this a productive use of public capital?

♦ Does the applicant understand the business and control the enterprise?

♦ Is there evidence of demand beyond optimism?

♦ Is the amount appropriate to the business’s stage and capacity?

♦ Does the repayment schedule fit how the borrower earns?

♦ Has the applicant disclosed all existing debts and household pressures?

♦ Has the borrower completed meaningful financial and business training?

♦ Is there a clear monitoring and mentoring plan after disbursement?

♦ Would the loan still be sensible if the applicant had no political connection, personal relationship, or public profile?

♦ Can the officer explain the decision publicly, professionally, and without embarrassment?

Loan officers should be trained to identify warning signs: unrealistic sales projections, unclear ownership, inflated equipment prices, no customer base, dependence on one uncertain buyer, unexplained existing debt, pressure from relatives or intermediaries, repeated consumption borrowing, and applications prepared by people who do not understand the business they claim to be starting.

Where the opportunity is promising but the applicant is not ready, the answer should not automatically be “no.” It should be: not yet—here is what you must do to become ready.

Public Money Requires Public Transparency

The Guyana Development Bank should publish regular, accessible reports showing whether the program is working.

The public should be able to see:

♦ Applications received, approved, declined, and pending.

♦ Loans by region, sector, age group, gender, and business category.

♦ The number and value of loans to startups compared with existing businesses.

♦ Repayment, arrears, restructuring, recovery, and write-off rates.

♦ Training and mentoring participation.

♦ Business survival rates after one, two, and three years.

♦ Jobs created or sustained.

♦ The number of borrowers graduating to commercial bank finance.

♦ Complaints received and resolved.

♦ Conflict-of-interest safeguards, related-party lending controls, and board-level oversight.

Transparency is not hostility to the Bank. It is how the institution earns credibility and avoids becoming another opaque public body vulnerable to waste, political interference, and eventual failure.

The Choice Before Guyana

Guyana can build a Development Bank that gives excluded citizens a genuine path into enterprise, assets, formal finance, and economic dignity. That would be a major national achievement.

But it will not happen by distributing money quickly and hoping for the best.

It will happen when loans are treated as investments in people and productive opportunity; when applicants are prepared rather than merely processed; when first-time entrepreneurs are protected by staged finance and mentorship; when repayment reflects business reality; when loan officers assess viability rather than connections; and when the institution reports honestly to the public.

The objective should not be to create the largest possible number of borrowers. It should be to create the largest possible number of successful, independent, financially capable Guyanese entrepreneurs.

 

WHO REGULATES THE REGULATOR

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

WHO REGULATES THE REGULATOR:

THE GWI BOTTLED WATER GAP GUYANA HAS NO LAW TO CLOSE

OPINON BY: Staff Writer 

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

A GOVERNMENT THAT HAS DONE THIS BEFORE

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY SAYS

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

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

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

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

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

— The Board

The Airline Ultimatum: A Government That Never Asked for Terms

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Airline Ultimatum: A Government That Never Asked for Terms

President’s public pressure campaign against hinterland carriers omits a 2020 fare concession the industry says it already made — and a fuel cost curve his government never offset

By Hem Kumar, Editor ♦ August 2026

President Irfaan Ali used an outreach at Santa Rosa Secondary School in the Moruca sub-district this week to declare his government “is very disappointed” in the local aviation sector, accusing hinterland carriers of failing to lower fares despite years of state investment. The remarks echoed a similar complaint Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo made at the National Toshaos Conference, where he charged that hinterland air operators had been “unfairly hiking” prices at residents’ expense.

Both officials framed the sector’s pricing as a moral failure — private operators declining to pass state generosity on to the public.

Neither addressed a fact the industry says is already on the record: local carriers reduced hinterland fares by roughly eight percent in 2020, at the government’s own request.

AN UNCONTESTED 2020 REDUCTION

Multiple hinterland aviation operators, speaking to this newsroom on background, independently corroborated that the 2020 fare reduction was made in direct response to a government request to the industry — not a unilateral gesture, and not, as far as any operator could confirm, tied to a written or renewed precondition that survives to today.

No operator contacted could identify a current, standing agreement obligating further reductions. No public statement from the Ministry of Finance, the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority, or Cabinet was found committing government to offset hinterland aviation’s operating costs — through fuel subsidy, duty relief tied to fare performance, or otherwise — in exchange for that 2020 concession.

A government that requested a fare cut once, received it, and offered no counterpart obligation in return is not owed a second cut on demand.

THE COST CURVE THE PRESIDENT DID NOT MENTION

The five years separating that 2020 reduction from this week’s rebuke were not stable ones for fuel-dependent transport. Guyana’s diesel price — the relevant input for much of the hinterland fleet’s ground and marine logistics, and a proxy for the volatility jet fuel has tracked over the same period — bottomed near GYD 145 per litre in October 2020 and climbed to roughly GYD 265 per litre by May 2022, an increase of some 80 percent at the peak before easing. Global Jet A-1 aviation fuel, the direct input for the aircraft actually flying hinterland routes, moved on a comparable trajectory over the period, per IATA and S&P Global Platts benchmarks.

A fare structure fixed in 2020 and never revisited would, on cost grounds alone, represent a real-terms reduction for the operators absorbing that fuel volatility with no compensating relief from the state.                        The President’s framing — that operators have declined to translate government investment into lower prices — omits this arithmetic entirely. It also omits any accounting of what “government investment” in the sector has consisted of, and whether that investment came with reciprocal obligations the industry failed to meet, or came with none at all.

A FAMILIAR PATTERN OF LEVERAGE NEVER TAKEN

This is not the first sector where Guyana’s government has extended concessions — tax holidays, duty waivers, state-facilitated financing — without securing binding commitments in return, then expressed public frustration when the resulting behaviour failed to align with its expectations.

The Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association faced a comparable public rebuke earlier this year despite operating under a similar concessionary regime. The pattern recurs: incentives granted without conditions attached, followed by executive displeasure when the incentivized sector behaves as any unconstrained private actor would.

Guyana has not renounced its status as a free market economy.              A government that wishes to compel fare reductions from private carriers has instruments available to it — negotiated route agreements, subsidy-for-fare-cap arrangements, service concessions with enforceable terms.

Public remonstration at a school outreach, paired with the suggestion that the Guyana Defence Force’s Air Corps might expand into cargo and passenger service as an implicit alternative, is not one of those instruments.

It is pressure applied in place of policy — and it shifts the burden of the government’s own unfinished negotiating work onto operators who, by the government’s own request, have already cut once.

WHAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

This newsroom was unable to locate any public record of a government commitment — fuel subsidy, duty concession tied to fare performance, or otherwise — offered to hinterland carriers as a counterpart to the 2020 reduction, or as an inducement for a further one now being demanded.

Until such a record surfaces, or the Ministry of Finance and the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority clarify what obligations, if any, currently bind the sector, the President’s public complaint rests on a claim of inaction the industry disputes which the fuel cost record does not support.

— The Board

SELF-PRESERVATION, NOT PRINCIPLE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

 SELF-PRESERVATION, NOT PRINCIPLE

What GMSA’s Sudden Voice on the Water Plant Reveals

By; Hem Kumar, Editor

The Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association has, this week, said something true. Its August 4 press release identifies a real conflict of interest in the $496.3 million the National Assembly approved for a state-owned bottled water plant under Guyana Water Incorporated — capital deployed by the state directly into a market that private Guyanese manufacturers already serve, with their own money, at their own risk.

The Association is right to call for a review. It is right to point out that President Ali’s own February commitment, at the Bartica plant commissioning, described a shared-infrastructure model, not a state producer competing against the businesses it claims to be strengthening.

What is worth examining is not whether GMSA’s complaint has merit. It does. What is worth examining is why it took a threat to members’ own balance sheets to produce it.

A RECORD OF WELCOME, NOT WATCHFULNESS

GMSA’s public statements over the past eighteen months form a consistent pattern, and it is one the Association has built proudly and on the record. It welcomed Budget 2025 within days of its presentation, citing income tax adjustments and SME market-development funding as reasons for its enthusiasm. It welcomed Budget 2026 as a “game changer,” citing the removal of corporate taxes on agro-processing and the launch of the Guyana Development Bank — the same Development Bank Bill that passed the National Assembly on July 27, 2026 without debate, without independent board representation, and without a word of public concern from GMSA about the $40 billion in ministerial discretion it concentrated in one office.

It thanked the Government for securing reduced US tariffs on Guyanese exports. It welcomed the opening of the Demerara River Bridge as a competitiveness win. In December, marking its own thirtieth anniversary, GMSA told the public directly that the Government’s five-year economic agenda “closely reflect[ed] long-standing policy recommendations and advocacy advanced by the GMSA on behalf of its members.”

That is not the record of a watchdog. It is the record of a partner — one that has, by its own account, had the Government’s ear and used it successfully.

•Where was that same voice when the Development Bank Bill moved through the same sitting the water plant did, concentrating discretionary lending authority with no debate?

•Where was it during any of the accountability fights this Board and others have carried over the past year — the sequencing questions, the unexplained appointments, the pattern of legislation moving fastest when public attention is fixed elsewhere?

GMSA was not silent because it lacked standing to speak. It has proven, repeatedly, that when it speaks, government listens. It was silent because none of those matters touched its members’ pockets.

THE CHICKENS AND THE POCKETBOOK

This is not a case for cynicism about the water plant complaint itself — the complaint stands on its own facts, and this Board has made a version of the same argument elsewhere.

It is a case for clarity about what has changed. What changed is not GMSA’s appetite for good governance. What changed is that the State, for the first time in this run of documented alignment, has turned its commercial weight toward GMSA’s own membership rather than toward their competitors, their tax bills, or their trade barriers.

The Association has found its voice now because self-preservation, unlike principle, does not wait to be invited.

There is a lesson here for every private-sector body that has treated proximity to government as a substitute for independence. Access purchased with silence is access that lasts only as long as your interests and the State’s happen to run in the same direction.

 

GMSA is discovering, publicly and in real time, what that arrangement is worth the moment those directions diverge. The water plant may well be reviewed. The $40 billion Development Bank will not be, because the body best positioned to demand it already spent its credibility welcoming the bill that created it.

GMSA is owed a serious answer on the bottled water plant. It is also owed the observation, plainly made, that a voice raised only when the wallet is threatened is not oversight.

It is self-interest wearing the language of principle — and Guyana’s private sector, as a whole, will need to decide whether that is the posture it wants to be known for the next time the State’s ambitions cross into its own territory.

— The Board

Zero Dollars, One Hundred Lives: The Price of Guyana’s Deference to Exxon

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

Zero Dollars, One Hundred Lives: The Price of Guyana’s Deference to Exxon

BOARD EDITORIAL

By: Editor

Exxon made roughly US$160 million in profit per day in the second quarter of 2026 — US$14.5 billion over three months, its highest quarterly haul since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. Chevron and Shell posted comparable windfalls over the same period, all driven by the price spike that followed the outbreak of the US-Iran war. None of that profit was earned in Guyanese waters. But a meaningful share of the conditions that produced it were: the Stabroek Block is now one of the most productive and lowest-cost oil provinces on earth, and Guyana’s 2016 Production Sharing Agreement is the instrument that decides how much of that windfall the country that owns the resource actually keeps.

The answer, this news-media has now modelled directly against the government’s own published figures, is: far less than the government’s own most aggressive supporters could defend if forced to show their work.

THE ZERO-DOLLAR TAXPAYER

Under the 2016 PSA, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC do not pay corporate income tax to the Guyana Revenue Authority out of pocket. Instead, Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund pays the companies’ tax liability on their behalf, out of the government’s own share of profit oil — and the GRA then issues the companies a Certificate of Tax stating the liability was met.

Chartered accountant Christopher Ram has pursued this point publicly and specifically, at one stage challenging Attorney General Anil Nandlall directly to produce the actual schedule of certificates issued to the consortium.

This news  is not aware of that schedule ever having been produced. Until it is, the public claim that Exxon “pays taxes” in Guyana rests on paperwork the state itself generates and the state itself funds — not on money the company forfeits from its own earnings.

Ram has not minced words about what this arrangement amounts to in practice: while other governments move toward taxing the same oil-price windfall, he has written, “Guyana’s leaders have ruled this out,” and ExxonMobil and its partners are “not paying one dime in taxes on its profits.”

THE REFUSAL, ON THE RECORD

This is not a one-off oversight. President Irfaan Ali was asked directly about windfall oil revenue in an interview with Rice University’s Baker Institute earlier this year — with an Exxon representative present in the room. His answer: “windfall I would not go so far because you have to balance this off.” He then moved on to artificial intelligence, drones, and hotel development before returning, unprompted, to Exxon’s own cost-recovery position and Guyana’s future as an oil producer “beyond 2060.”

Ram’s own proposals, laid out most recently in April 2026 as international pressure over war-driven oil prices intensified, are neither radical nor unfamiliar to any functioning petroleum jurisdiction: that the oil companies “bear their own corporation tax liabilities,” pay withholding tax on profits, and that a “modest mechanism” allow the state to participate more fully during periods of exceptional prices.

Every element of that ask has been available to this government since at least early 2025. None of it has moved.

WHAT THE NUMBER ACTUALLY IS

Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund recorded US$1.996 billion in deposits for the first six months of 2026 — US$1.779 billion from the government’s share of profit oil, the balance from royalties. Independent analysis of the Stabroek Block’s output puts total block revenue for the same six months at approximately US$12.3 billion. That works out to Guyana retaining roughly 16 percent of total revenue generated from its own resource — consistent with ExxonMobil Country Manager Alistair Routledge’s own public figure of “roughly 14 and a half percent.”

Modelling a windfall tax — not a renegotiation of the royalty or profit-share structure, simply an additional levy of 10 percent on total Stabroek Block revenue, the same modest mechanism Ram has proposed — against that six-month revenue figure produces approximately US$1.23 billion. Guyana’s entire 2026 national budget allocation for roads and bridges, announced with fanfare in January, is GY$196.1 billion — approximately US$938 million.

A single ten percent windfall levy on six months of oil revenue from one offshore block exceeds the entirety of what the government has allocated for a full year of national transport infrastructure. Annualised, the same modest levy would run to roughly US$2.5 billion — more than double it.

This is not this news-media’s number. It is Ram’s proposed rate, applied transparently to the government’s own disclosed revenue figures, using the most conservative available base — Stabroek Block revenue alone, not Exxon’s global profit, which would produce a far larger figure still. We show the arithmetic because we expect it to be checked, not taken on faith.

That is the distinction between an argument and an accusation, and it is one this publication insists on holding itself to even where — perhaps especially where — the conclusion is damning.

WHERE THE DEFERENCE LANDS

None of this financial architecture directly funded the Transport and Harbours Department, and this publication will not claim otherwise. What can be documented is a government that, across the same period it declined even a modest participation mechanism in record oil profits, allowed the maritime safety apparatus responsible for the nation’s ferry fleet to run on a skeleton crew.

MARAD disclosed as far back as March 2022 that it had only six certified marine surveyors for more than 2,000 vessels. The ministry vowed then that this “cannot be business as usual.” The department was still advertising a vacant surveyor post as late as December 2025 — weeks before the MV Barima, an 87-year-old vessel, sank on July 18, 2026, killing more than a hundred people, the majority of them Indigenous Guyanese from riverain and hinterland communities the ferry existed to serve.

We do not assert a direct causal line between a specific undeclared windfall tax dollar and a specific safety failure aboard that vessel.

We do assert this: a government that treats a foreign oil consortium’s comfort as a fixed constraint, and its own citizens’ safety infrastructure as a discretionary line item, has made a choice about whose interests bend first. Guyana is the resource’s true owner. It has spent 2026 collecting a fraction of the windfall its own resource produced, while the vessels carrying its poorest and most remote citizens sailed on borrowed time.

The oil will not last this generation, by Ram’s own reckoning. Neither, evidently, will the government’s patience for the people it was elected to serve first.

— The Board

The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

EDITORIAL

A response to state media’s answer to Bloomberg Opinion’s “resource curse” assessment of Guyana

The government’s mouthpiece has taken it upon itself to answer Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto, who, after visiting Georgetown, concluded that Guyana displays weak state capacity, fragile institutions, labor shortages and a trajectory some analysts compare to Venezuela, Nigeria and Chad.

Rather than engage that critique, the Chronicle offers a different exercise: a column built entirely on gross figures, silent on every number that would complicate the story.

We correct the record.

WHAT THE CHRONICLE COUNTED, AND WHAT IT DIDN’T

The op-ed states, accurately, that more than US$9 billion in cumulative petroleum receipts has flowed into the Natural Resource Fund since first oil. It does not state the fund’s current balance.

That omission is not incidental — it is the entire trick.

As of end-May 2026, the Bank of Guyana reported the NRF holding approximately US$3.96 billion. Of the roughly US$9.3 billion deposited since 2020, more than US$6 billion has already been withdrawn to finance annual budgets.

Put plainly: for every nine dollars this country has earned from its oil, six are already spent. What remains in trust for a nation of fewer than 800,000 people sits under US$4 billion — roughly US$4,000 per citizen, by one recent estimate submitted directly to the National Assembly

A sovereign wealth fund that pays out two-thirds of its lifetime deposits within its first six years is not building a legacy. It is running a budget subsidy with an oil-fund label attached.

THE $60 BILLION QUESTION

The Chronicle cites, with evident pride, more than US$60 billion in contractor investment across seven sanctioned Stabroek Block projects. What it does not explain is what that investment buys the contractor — and what it leaves Guyana.

Under the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement, up to 75 percent of gross production each month is set aside as “cost oil” — revenue that returns to ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to recover their investment before Guyana sees a cent of profit. The remaining 25 percent, “profit oil,” is split evenly: 12.5 percent to the consortium, 12.5 percent to Guyana. Add the 2 percent royalty, and the state’s confirmed take — stated by the Minister of Natural Resources himself — is approximately 14.5 percent of gross revenue.

That is not an opposition estimate. It is the government’s own defense of the deal, offered after ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC posted a combined US$12.5 billion in profit for 2025 against roughly US$2.5 billion that reached Guyana’s account — five times the state’s share, by the ministry’s own arithmetic.

Separate published analysis of the Liza 1 project estimates that the absence of ring-fencing on cost recovery alone has cost Guyana on the order of US$9.7 billionin captured revenue that a fairer contract structure would have secured for the state.

Whatever return the contractor group is realizing on its US$60 billion — and independent estimates place it well above what Guyana receives per dollar produced — it is not disclosed in the pages that celebrate the investment figure.

Scale of spending is not evidence of a fair contract. It can just as easily be evidence of a favorable one, for whoever is doing the spending.

“THE RESOURCE CURSE IS NOT INEVITABLE” — ACCORDING TO WHOM?

The Chronicle piece closes by insisting the resource curse can be avoided through “strong institutions,” “transparency” and “careful planning” — without naming a single institution currently failing to deliver any of the three.

This is the genre at its purest: solemn abstraction standing in for accounting.

The Bloomberg piece it purports to answer was considerably less generous than the Chronicle’s framing suggests. Spinetto’s reporting found Guyana falling short on transparent and competitive rights allocation, local content participation, and structuring contract terms to capture a fair share of resource value — the precise indicators the Natural Resource Charter uses to flag countries at risk.

It was not a piece about fiscal space. It was a piece questioning whether execution can match ambition.

If the Chronicle wishes to rebut that assessment, the honest way to do it is with the balance sheet — the actual NRF balance, the actual profit-oil split, the actual pace of expenditure against the actual pace of intake. Not a column that cites the top-line inflow number and stops before the number that matters: what’s left.

THE STANDARD WE’RE HOLDING THIS TO

This publication does not dispute that oil has changed what Guyana can finance. It disputes the claim, made by implication rather than argument, that spending has kept pace with wisdom.  years into a Natural Resource Fund that has already disbursed nearly two-thirds of everything it has ever received, with the state’s own minister confirming a 14.5 percent take on a resource that belongs constitutionally to the Guyanese people, it will take more than lofty prose to make this windfall outlast the wells.

We will keep publishing the numbers the state paper leaves out.

— The Board

SOURCES

Bank of Guyana, Natural Resource Fund monthly reports (April–May 2026)

Ministry of Natural Resources, public statement on Stabroek Block PSA revenue share (June 2026)

Natural Resource Fund Act 2021, Production Sharing Agreement (2016), Articles 11 and 15.6

Bloomberg Opinion, “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana,” Juan Pablo Spinetto (July 29, 2026)

You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA & DIASPORA

FACT CHECK · FISCAL GOVERNANCE

You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

Peter Ramsaroop’s essay on escaping the resource curse reads well on a podium. It does not survive contact with the Auditor General’s numbers, the IMF’s own tables, FIFA’s Golden Handshake Is a Governance Emergency, Not an Investment Strategy or the bill Parliament passed without debate three days before he published it.

The 592 Guardian Board 

There is an old vernacular truth that predates every consultancy deck and every Go-Invest slideshow: you can fool some of us sometime, but not all of us all the time. Peter Ramsaroop, Chief Investment Officer at Go-Invest, has published an essay this week insisting Guyana is “writing a different story” than the resource-cursed petrostates of history.

He cites the Natural Resource Fund. He cites parliamentary oversight. He cites diversification, institution-building, and a people-centred development model.

We took him at his word and went to the primary sources — the Auditor General’s findings, the IMF Article IV reports, the Bank of Guyana’s own fund disclosures, and the Hansard record of what Parliament actually did this week.

What we found is not a different story. It is the same story, told with better production values.

CLAIM ONE: “PARLIAMENTARY OVERSIGHT AND TRANSPARENT REPORTING”

It is true that the Natural Resource Fund Act requires parliamentary approval before withdrawal, and that the Bank of Guyana publishes quarterly disclosures. Mr. Ramsaroop is not lying about the statute. He is simply not telling readers what independent analysts say happens after the statute is satisfied.

Stabroek News’s own Budget Focus 2026 analysis is blunt on this point: oversight mechanisms remain weak, parliamentary committees are ineffective or dormant, and the Public Accounts Committee is years behind in examining the public accounts it exists to examine.

Accountability architecture that cannot keep pace with the money flowing past it is not oversight. It is a building with the lights on and nobody inside.

More damaging to Mr. Ramsaroop’s framing: opposition parliamentarian Dr. Terrence Campbell has filed legal proceedings arguing the government’s headline NRF balance figures conceal roughly US$2.61 billion in withdrawals over three years that he says were routinely used to fund ordinary government operations rather than the national-development and emergency purposes the Act specifies.

That dispute is now before the courts. You do not litigate transparency you already have.

“Oversight that produces a lawsuit over what the numbers mean is not the safeguard the essay describes.”

CLAIM TWO: “OIL IS NOT OUR DESTINATION; IT IS OUR CATALYST”

The 2026 approved NRF withdrawal — US$2.37 billion — will finance roughly one-third of the entire national budget. Stabroek News’s fiscal analysts go further, and we agree with them: they dispute the very accounting convention of booking NRF withdrawals as current revenue at all, calling it a classification that masks how dependent the Budget already is on oil-financed transfers.

A country financing a third of its national budget from an oil fund is not treating oil as a catalyst. It is treating oil as the operating account.

CLAIM THREE: THE DIVERSIFICATION NUMBERS, READ IN FULL

Here Mr. Ramsaroop is on his firmest ground, and fairness requires us to say so plainly. The IMF’s most recent Article IV consultation found real non-oil GDP expanded over 13 percent in 2024, and projects non-oil growth averaging roughly 6.75 percent annually over the medium term — genuinely above Guyana’s pre-oil decade average.

Construction, manufacturing, and agriculture are all posting real gains.

But context is not the same as contradiction. In the same years the non-oil economy grew by low double digits, oil-sector GDP grew by 17 to 58 percent. Diversification is occurring at the margins of an economy whose center of gravity is moving further toward petroleum, not away from it.

An essay that leads with diversification and never mentions the growth differential between oil and non-oil sectors has chosen its numbers, not reported them.

THE “NEW GROWTH PILLARS”, SECTOR BY SECTOR

Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay names business process outsourcing, agriculture, and tourism as three of Guyana’s emerging growth pillars alongside oil. Each deserves its own scrutiny, because each is doing very different work than the essay claims.

Business process outsourcing is not a growth pillar. It is a retreating sector dressed as one. More than 2,000 BPO jobs were shed in Guyana within a matter of months, against a government target of 15,000 contact-centre jobs that remains nowhere in sight.

Itel — a company that had only recently announced ambitious expansion plans — shut down entirely, laying off over 400 workers and citing client losses and rising costs in Guyana. French BPO giant Teleperformance closed a facility as well. Asked directly about the sector’s health, Mr. Ramsaroop himself dismissed concerns that oil-sector poaching was driving the exodus, telling one industry outlet that call-centre workers “wouldn’t necessarily be looking to join an oil company.” That may be true, but it does not explain where the workers — or the companies — actually went.

An industry that is losing its anchor tenants is not a pillar. It is a hole in the floor with a press release taped over it.

Agriculture’s growth has nothing to do with Go-Invest. The sector is real and it is expanding — the Ministry of Agriculture reported a $106.6 billion budget allocation for 2026 and cites $7.4 billion invested in hinterland agriculture over five years. But that money moves entirely through Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s ministry — drainage and irrigation, livestock, fisheries, rice-farmer relief grants — not through Go-Invest’s investment-attraction apparatus.

When Mr. Ramsaroop lists agriculture as evidence of his office’s diversification strategy, he is claiming credit for a ministry’s budget line his own agency does not administer.

Guyanese farmers know exactly whose office they walk into for support, and it is not the one that wrote this essay.

Tourism’s growth is real, and still tiny. Guyana closed 2025 with 453,489 visitor arrivals, a genuine 22 percent year-on-year increase, and the Guyana Tourism Authority projects 550,000 by the end of 2026. Those are honest numbers and we report them as such.

But independent tourism trackers place Guyana as the least-visited country in South America even as that growth continues — a 22 percent increase off a small base is still a small number. Presenting a percentage without its denominator is a favourite trick of every government relations office in the world, and it is the same trick at work here.

THE OMISSION THAT MATTERS MOST: DEBT

Nowhere in Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay does the word debt appear. Here is what he left out. Domestic public debt rose from G$80.0 billion in 2019 to G$1,004.3 billion in 2025 — an increase of 1,155 percent — and is projected to reach G$1,245.1 billion in 2026. External debt rose from US$1.305 billion to US$2.920 billion over the same stretch, a 124 percent increase, projected to hit US$4.355 billion in 2026, a further 49.1 percent jump in a single year.

An essay invoking “disciplined management” and “responsible leadership” while debt compounds at quadruple-digit percentage growth is not describing fiscal discipline. It is describing its absence, in the register of a press release.

CLAIM FOUR: “INSTITUTION BUILDING IS EQUALLY CENTRAL”

This is the claim that collapses fastest against our own reporting.        In the same week Mr. Ramsaroop published his essay, Parliament passed the Guyana Development Bank Bill — without debate — concentrating discretion over roughly $40 billion in lending authority in the Finance Minister’s office alone.

The Bill’s Section 5(2) quietly permits collateral and interest terms at ministerial discretion, contradicting the public pitch of “interest-free, no collateral” financing. Section 23 sets no Guyanese-citizenship eligibility requirement.

The board is appointed entirely at the Finance Minister’s discretion, with no reserved seats for opposition or civil society. And the Bill’s offence provisions criminalize borrower misconduct while specifying no offence at all for insider self-dealing among the funds it controls.

You cannot cite institution-building as evidence against the resource curse in the same week your own Parliament builds an institution with none of the institutional safeguards the resource-curse literature actually calls for.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

2026 NRF withdrawal

 US$2.37B — approx. 32% of the national budget
Domestic public debt, 2019→2026(p)

 G$80.0B → G$1,245.1B (+1,155%)
External debt, 2019→2026(p)

 US$1.305B → US$4.355B (+124%, +49.1% in 2026 alone)
Non-oil GDP growth, 2024

 13%+ (IMF) — vs. oil-sector growth of 58%
Disputed withdrawals under legal challenge

 ~US$2.61B, 2022–2024 (Campbell v. Government)
Development Bank Bill

 $40B in Finance Minister discretion, passed without debate, July 27 2026
BPO sector jobs lost

 2,000+ in months; Itel and Teleperformance both exited; 15,000-job target unmet
Tourism, in context

 453,489 arrivals in 2025 (+22%) — still least-visited country in South America

OUR ASSESSMENT

Mr. Ramsaroop is not wrong that Guyana has written more safeguards into law than most first-generation petrostates managed. The Natural Resource Fund Act is a real statute with real mechanics. Non-oil growth is real. None of that is fiction.

What is fiction is the picture assembled from only the safeguards that flatter the government and none of the numbers that don’t. A resource-curse defense that omits the debt trajectory, omits the pending litigation over fund transparency, omits a $40 billion bill passed without debate in the same news cycle, and lists a collapsing BPO sector and a ministry budget it does not administer as evidence of its own strategy is not analysis.

It is advocacy wearing analysis’s clothes — and Go-Invest’s Chief Investment Officer is not a neutral narrator of Guyana’s fiscal health. He is paid to sell it.

Our readers are academics, professionals, and an informed diaspora who do not need the pitch. They need the numbers Mr. Ramsaroop left out of his own essay. We have supplied them here, sourced and citable, so that the next time this argument is made — and it will be made again — it can be made honestly, or not made at all.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

How the Guyana Development Bank Bill Was Passed Without Debate

Parliament used the Barima crisis as cover to wave through a bill built to concentrate control

OPINION♦July, 2026

On July 27, while the Joint Opposition was inside the National Assembly demanding the resignations of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and Minister within Public Works Deodat Indar over the MV Barima disaster, the government moved the Guyana Development Bank Bill to a second reading and passed it — 52 days after it was tabled, and without a single substantive contribution from the Opposition benches.

The same sitting passed a $54.9 billion bill and observed one minute of silence for the 73 confirmed dead. The Development Bank Bill received considerably less scrutiny than the moment of silence.

This is not incidental. A chamber consumed by grief and protest is a chamber that cannot read a bill clause by clause.

The government’s own contributions to the “debate” — from Minister of Culture Youth and Sport Charles Ramson, Minister Zulfikar Ally, and MPs Lenox Shuman and Alister Charlies — proceeded while Opposition MPs stood near ministers mid-presentation and the Speaker suspended the sitting twice to restore order. Whatever this was, it was not deliberation.

THE SALES PITCH VERSUS THE STATUTE

The Guyana Development Bank was publicly marketed as a facility offering interest-free loans of up to $3 million to Guyanese entrepreneurs, with no collateral required. The legislation says something narrower. Section 5(2) permits the Bank to provide loans “with or without collateral and with or without charging interest” — discretionary language that leaves the government free to impose collateral and interest on some or most applicants, with no criteria in the Bill specifying which projects qualify for the interest-free, collateral-free terms that were used to sell this to the public.

The eligibility gap runs deeper. Part V does not restrict financing to Guyanese nationals. Section 23 requires only that an applicant “provide such information, documents and statutory declarations as may be prescribed” — language vague enough that a foreign-owned enterprise could plausibly qualify under the same terms as a Guyanese small business the fund was announced to serve.

ONE MINISTER, TOTAL DISCRETION

The structural core of this Bill is Section 5 and the governance provisions that follow it.

Up to $40 billion — roughly US$200 million, a figure that can be revised upward by Parliament — will be administered by a board of five to nine directors appointed entirely by the Minister of Finance. The Minister appoints the chairperson, the deputy chairperson, sets director remuneration, and the board in turn appoints the CEO. Directors serve three-year terms and may be reappointed at the Minister’s discretion.

“No seat is reserved for the Opposition. No seat is reserved for civil society. No seat is reserved for a transparency body. This is not an oversight — it is the single most consequential design choice in the Bill.”

A development bank distributing this scale of public capital without a single independently-nominated director is a bank answerable to one office and one office alone.

PENALTIES THAT MISS THE ACTUAL RISK

The Bill enumerates five offences:

⇒providing false information to the Bank

⇒obstructing the Bank’s functions

⇒falsifying records

⇒improperly disclosing confidential information 

⇒willfully misapplying Bank funds or assets.

Every one of these is oriented toward the borrower — the person seeking or holding a loan.

Nowhere does the Bill create a specific offence for unauthorised withdrawal or self-dealing by the officials entrusted with managing the $40 billion pool itself.

The “connivance” clause — imposing fines of $5 million to $10 million on a director, manager, or officer who consents to or connives in one of the five listed offences — is derivative. It requires an underlying offence to attach to. It does not independently criminalise a Finance Minister appointee steering approvals toward political allies, because favouritism in loan approval is not on the list of offences at all.

Combine this with the appointment structure above: a board selected without external check, operating under a penalty regime that does not contemplate insider misconduct as its own offence. The Auditor General will audit annually, and the Annual Report will be tabled in the National Assembly — but after-the-fact reporting is not a substitute for structural safeguards at the point of decision.

THE PATTERN

This joins a growing list of instruments — the GECOM Article 161(3)(b) dispute, the Former Presidents Benefits Bill — that share a common architecture: broad ministerial or executive discretion, minimal independent check, and passage timed to avoid the scrutiny the moment would otherwise attract. On July 27, that moment was Barima. The country was watching a grieving Opposition Leader’s sister confronted in the halls of Parliament and a Prime Minister proclaiming salvage conditions “not favourable” for recovering a vessel with the dead still aboard.

Forty billion dollars changed hands, procedurally, in the same sitting.

The Guyana Development Bank may yet do real good for small business owners who cannot access commercial credit.

That possibility does not answer the structural question this Bill leaves open: who decides who gets the money, on what terms, and who answers for it if the decision is made badly. As written, the answer to all three is the same person.

— The Board

Guyana’s Boom Shouldn’t be Built on the Backs of Unprotected Workers

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL•ACCOUNTABILITY •LABOR POLICY

Guyana’s Boom Shouldn’t be Built on the Backs of Unprotected Workers

This week, Amy Pope, Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), visited Guyana to discuss opportunities to strengthen IOM’s support to the Member State in managing migration to help power that growth.

Guyana’s headline GDP numbers — nearly 20 percent growth last year — have been celebrated as proof that the country has arrived. But beneath the gloss of construction cranes and energy deals is a labour landscape fraying at the edges: a rapidly expanding demand for workers met, in far too many places, by ad‑hoc recruitment, opaque contracts, and an almost complete absence of formal policy or oversight. The result is predictable: migrant workers filling key roles without basic protections, Guyanese workers exposed to wage pressure, and public institutions scrambling to catch up after harm has already occurred.

 My reporting for the 592 Guardian uncovered two patterns that make this crisis neither theoretical nor incidental:

First, in the so‑called Cuban situation, groups of foreign nationals were brought in under promises of secure housing and formal employment but ended up living in overcrowded camps, paid in cash below the legal minimum, and prevented from freely leaving by recruiters who retained passports.

Second, an influx of Indian nationals recruited through a firm operating under the trade name Ekaa HRIM revealed systemic use of upfront recruitment fees, opaque contracts tied to single employers, and layers of subcontracting that insulated primary contractors from responsibility when conditions deteriorated. In multiple cases, workers described being charged sums that created de facto debt obligations, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and unable to press complaints.

 These are not isolated anecdotes. Across project sites and company camps, employers desperate for labour lean on recruiters — some legitimate, many not — who deliver foreign nationals under verbal arrangements. Work permits and formal contracts are inconsistent; where documents exist they are often confusing, short‑term, or tied to a single employer. Wages are sometimes paid late or in cash below legal minimums. Complaints to labour offices take months, if they are logged at all. Vulnerable workers, lacking legal knowledge and language access, face intimidation and threats of deportation when they try to assert rights.

 This is not a peripheral problem. The sectors driving Guyana’s growth — construction, energy, and healthcare — are precisely those where rushed hiring and subcontracting are most common.

When the state tolerates informal labour supply chains, it enables exploitation and corrodes labour standards across the board.

Local workers see downward pressure on wages and weaker bargaining power. Communities absorb strains on housing, health services and infrastructure with no compensatory planning or investment. The political fallout is real: where officials appear to side with employers or large projects, resentment builds and scapegoating of migrant populations becomes likely.

 International agencies such as the IOM position migration as a development tool when “managed well.” That is correct in principle; what is missing here is management that is anchored in enforceable rules and institutional capacity. Guyana has received technical assistance for migration governance since 2009, yet the practical mechanics of matching labour demand to supply — transparent recruitment, standard contracts, occupational credential recognition, regularised temporary work permits, and accessible complaint mechanisms — are still woefully underdeveloped.

What must happen now

 1) Formalise and fast‑track sectoral work permits with safeguards. Implement clear, time‑limited permits for high‑demand sectors that require signed employment contracts, defined wage floors, social protection contributions, and portability clauses allowing workers to change abusive employers.

 2) License and audit recruiters; criminalise exploitative fees. All recruitment agencies and brokers must be licensed, publicly listed, and subject to independent audits. Charging workers recruitment fees that create debt bondage should attract criminal penalties and immediate repatriation support. Investigations like those published in the 592 Guardian show how firms operating under trade names such as Ekaa HRIM exploited regulatory gaps; licensing and audits would expose these networks and their subcontracting chains.

 3) Strengthen labour inspection and access to justice. Increase the number and capacity of labour inspectors, fund legal aid for migrant and low‑income workers, and provide complaint channels in relevant languages with protections against retaliation. Inspectors must have the authority to demand payroll records, housing logs, and recruiter contracts when evidence of abuse surfaces — as it did in the Cuban camps we documented.

 4) Create interoperable migration‑labour data systems. Permits, payroll registration, social security contributions and complaints must be tracked in an integrated database to flag abuse patterns, sectoral shortages, and illegal hiring practices.

 5) Protect public services and host communities. Require companies hiring large numbers of foreign workers to contribute to local infrastructure (housing, clinics, schools) through transparent levies tied to project approvals.

6) Pursue accountability in procurement and contracting. Public and private project approvals must require disclosure of labour supply chains and proof of lawful recruitment. Where Ekaa HRIM and similar intermediaries were involved in supplying labour, contracts should be reviewed and sanctions applied if evidence shows evasion of employer responsibilities.

7) Negotiate regional mobility protocols with safeguards. CARICOM‑level mobility must be coupled with mutual recognition of credentials, social benefit portability, and joint anti‑trafficking enforcement.

 Who benefits from inaction

In the gaps left by weak policy, private interests and middlemen prosper. Recruiters charging fees, unscrupulous subcontractors who ignore safety and labour laws, and, occasionally, complicit local officials benefit from informality. That dynamic must be disrupted not only for moral reasons but also to safeguard long‑term development: a workforce that is exploited, underpaid, and politically alienated cannot sustain inclusive growth.

 A test for leadership

Guyana’s leadership faces a choice. It can treat migration purely as a technical matter to be outsourced to consultants and international agencies, or it can own the politics and create enforceable systems that protect workers and communities alike. Implementing the measures above requires political will: funding for inspectors, legal reforms, and the courage to sanction powerful actors who flout the law.

 Time is short. As construction projects multiply and the energy sector scales up, the number of migrant workers in Guyana will grow.

If policy does not catch up, we will watch inequality widen and labour standards erode — a grim irony for a country touting exceptional growth.

Guyana’s boom must not become a business model built on unregulated migration. Sound governance, transparent recruitment, and enforceable protections are not optional niceties — they are the price of sustainable development.

Guyana Absorbs 12.5% US Tariff as Forced Labour Framework, Not Findings, Becomes the Standard

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ OPINION ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ TRADE POLICY

Guyana Absorbs 12.5% US Tariff as Forced Labour Framework, Not Findings, Becomes the Standard

July, 2026

Guyana’s exports to the United States will carry a 12.5 percent additional tariff under final action taken by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) on July 23, placing the country among 46 economies deemed to have failed a specific legal test: the absence of an enforced prohibition on importing goods made with forced labour.

The determination closes out a Section 301 investigation opened on March 12, 2026, at President Trump’s direction, covering 60 trading partners. USTR concluded in June that all 60 economies under investigation had failed to impose and effectively enforce such a prohibition, and invited written comment and testimony before finalising the applicable rate. Guyana was never among the candidates for the lower 10 percent tier — Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom qualified there by holding an existing import ban, a partial enforcement regime, or a firm commitment under an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade. Guyana had none of the three, and so was assigned to the residual 12.5 percent bracket alongside 45 other economies, including Brazil, India, South Korea, Japan, and Trinidad and Tobago’s Caribbean neighbours the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.

WHAT GUYANA ARGUED, AND WHERE IT FELL SHORT

Guyana did not go to Washington empty-handed. Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud confirmed ahead of the July 7–9 hearings that the Ministry of Labour and Manpower Planning had submitted a request for Guyana to appear and respond directly to the USTR findings.

When the government’s case was ultimately delivered, it was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sharon Roopchand-Edwards, who spoke for Guyana at the hearing — a detail that raises a fair question about which ministry actually led the country’s defence on a matter of labour enforcement.

USTR’s final determination was only released Thursday evening, and this publication has not yet had the opportunity to put that question to either ministry; it is one worth pursuing as reaction to the tariff decision develops.

Roopchand-Edwards’s testimony was substantive on its own terms. She told USTR that the Government of Guyana was “not aware of evidence demonstrating that goods produced through forced labour are being manufactured in, imported into, or exported from Guyana,” and cited more than 2,000 labour inspections conducted across economic sectors as of June 2026 without substantiated findings of forced labour. She pointed to the Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act, constitutional prohibitions, Guyana’s obligations under ILO Conventions 29 and 105, and ministerial authority under the Customs Act to block imports “where credible evidence exists.” She also noted that Guyana and the United States are in active discussions toward an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade.(ART)

“The Government of Guyana is not aware of evidence demonstrating that goods produced through forced labour are being manufactured in, imported into, or exported from Guyana.”

— Sharon Roopchand-Edwards, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

None of this moved Guyana into the 10 percent bracket, and the reason is instructive rather than punitive. USTR’s tiering was not, on the public record, a verdict on any single country’s enforcement record measured against its neighbours. It was a binary test of legal architecture: does the country have a standing import prohibition, a partial regime, or a concluded ART commitment addressing forced labour goods specifically. Guyana’s ART discussions remain exactly that — discussions, not a concluded instrument — and its Customs Act authority to block imports is framed as reactive, triggered only once forced labour in a specific supply chain is “conclusively determined,” rather than a standing prohibition of the kind USTR credited elsewhere. Countries with comparably contested labour records, including Bangladesh and Cambodia, landed in the lower tier because they held the qualifying instrument, not because USTR found their enforcement superior to Guyana’s.

THE EXPOSURE BEHIND THE STATISTICS

Roopchand-Edwards’s inspection figures and legal citations describe a framework. They do not resolve the open domestic case most likely to be cited against Guyana’s position going forward: the Ministry of Labour’s ongoing investigation into Ekaa HRIM Earth Resources Management, the India-headquartered operator of a quarry at Batavia, Region Seven, where 38 Indian nationals alleged passport confiscation, unpaid wages, hazardous conditions, and confinement, and where the Ministry confirmed it is investigating the death of a worker, Sekhar Chhetri, on May 12, 2026. Ekaa HRIM has denied the allegations and stated it is cooperating fully with the Government of Guyana, the Guyana Police Force, the Trafficking in Persons Unit, and the High Commission of India.

The Ekaa HRIM matter was not cited by name in the USTR proceeding, and this publication is not asserting that it drove the 12.5 percent determination — the rate applies to 46 economies under a common legal test, most of which have no comparable case attached to them at all. But it stands as the clearest illustration available of the gap between Guyana’s stated framework and a live, unresolved allegation of exactly the practice the tariff regime is designed to penalise.

It is the kind of case a government pointing to “no substantiated evidence” would need to resolve convincingly, and quickly, if it wants its next hearing before USTR — or before Guyana’s own public — to land differently.

WHAT THE TARIFF MEANS GOING FORWARD

The 12.5 percent duty applies to substantially all Guyanese goods entering the US market, subject to product-specific exemptions USTR has reserved for raw materials where domestic US supply would otherwise be threatened, goods that cannot be sourced elsewhere in sufficient quantity, and cases where the tariff would cause broader economic disruption. Guyana’s US-bound exports are concentrated in commodities and extractive-sector output, some of which may qualify for exemption under those categories; the applicable Federal Register notice and its annex will determine exposure product by product, and this publication will report on that breakdown as it becomes available.

Roopchand-Edwards’s closing argument to USTR — that two decades of export growth and a significant American commercial presence in Guyana’s energy sector demonstrate that “U.S. commerce is neither restricted nor burdened in the Guyanese market” — is the argument of a government that sees itself as a trade partner in good standing being caught by a blunt instrument. It may well be.

But the instrument does not ask whether Guyana is a good partner. It asks whether Guyana has closed the specific legal gap USTR identified, and as of this week, the record shows that it has not.

— The Board