NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

The Kurupung Uranium Project and Guyana’s Regulatory Blind Spot

 Opinion By: The Board  ·  August, 2026

THE STATE NEGOTIATES WHAT IT HAS ALREADY GIVEN AWAY

Company filings on the Kurupung Uranium Project confirm what this news-media has long argued about Guyana’s extractive governance: the royalty owed to the Government of Guyana from any future uranium production has not been fixed. It will be “negotiated at the time that application is made for a mining permit” — a negotiation that can be deferred indefinitely, since applications may be filed “at any time during the term of a PL.”

Read plainly, this means the State of Guyana currently has no claim to any share of a resource historically estimated at 20.6 million pounds of uranium, sitting under 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven, until the holder of the prospecting licence decides the moment is right to ask.

The contractor sets the clock. The regulator waits for it to ring.

We have written before about the opacity surrounding how exploration rights to Kurupung changed hands — from LIA Industries Pte. Ltd. of Singapore to U92 Energy Corp. of Canada — without the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) exercising any visible control over the transaction.

That finding stands. What follows extends it: the royalty vacuum is not an isolated omission. It is one symptom of a licensing framework that structurally cedes leverage to the licensee at every point where leverage should belong to the State.

PILLAR ONE: A ROYALTY WITH NO FLOOR

Guyana’s petroleum sector, for all its own well-documented deficiencies, at least operates within a negotiated framework anchored by precedent — the Stabroek Block production-sharing agreement, whatever its flaws, is a public, referenceable instrument.

Large-scale mineral mining under the Mining Act 1989 has no equivalent anchor. There is no statutory royalty rate for uranium. There is no benchmark percentage that GGMC or the Minister must not go below.

The rate is whatever is negotiated, whenever negotiation occurs, between the State and a single counterparty who has spent years — and by the time of application, potentially millions of dollars in drilling and evaluation — building the case for terms favourable to itself.

This is not a technicality. It means the government of Guyana’s return on a strategic, security-sensitive mineral is a function of negotiating leverage at a moment of the company’s choosing, not a matter of law.

 

PILLAR TWO: AN OFF-TAKE DEAL STRUCK WITHOUT THE REGULATOR IN THE ROOM

Before any royalty framework has been discussed, Gibraltar-based ROPA Investments Limited has already secured the contractual right to purchase up to 50 percent of the first 40 million pounds of uranium oxide produced from Kurupung — an option on 20 million pounds of production from a resource that has not yet cleared a mining permit, let alone entered production.

This news-media has previously established that ROPA and LIA Industries are related parties structured to present as arm’s-length counterparties in U92’s own acquisition filings.

GGMC was not a party to that transaction. It had no visibility into its terms and no opportunity to weigh how a privately negotiated off-take arrangement, agreed between related parties, might shape the economics of the very royalty the State will eventually sit down to negotiate.

A regulator that is absent from the deal that structures the resource cannot credibly claim to hold leverage over the value extracted from it.

PILLAR THREE: THE NATIONAL REPOSITORY THAT ISN’T REQUIRED TO RECEIVE THE DATA

GGMC describes itself, in its own institutional language, as the national repository for geoscientific data relating to Guyana’s mineral resources. The Mining Act 1989 does not build a mechanism equal to that mandate.

A prospecting licensee is obliged to submit work programmes and quarterly and annual operational reports. On relinquishment of licensed ground, the licensee must submit an evaluation report on the work undertaken. None of these obligations is the same undertaking as surrender of the underlying dataset — the drill logs, assay certificates, geophysical surveys, and resource modelling that constitute the actual commercial and scientific value of exploration.

The only point in the statute where “reports, analyses, and data resulting from investigations and studies” are explicitly required in full is at the application for a mining licence — the same discretionary juncture at which the royalty itself is negotiated.

Guyana’s only clear statutory mechanism for compelling both a royalty and a complete geological dataset from a uranium licensee is a single, optional filing that the licensee alone controls the timing of.

 

PILLAR FOUR: WHAT HAPPENS IF THE STATE SAYS NO

Consider the scenario a functioning regulatory framework should have already answered. GGMC and U92 sit down to negotiate a royalty rate. The company, having already sold forward an option on half its first 40 million pounds of production to a related party, has calculated its economics around a particular return threshold. GGMC, exercising the public interest it is charged to protect, holds out for a higher rate. Talks stall.

What then? The Mining Act offers no compulsory arbitration mechanism for this scenario, no statutory floor the Minister can fall back on, no default rate that applies absent agreement.

The Prospecting Licences run until 18th April 2027, extendable to 18th April 2029. The company can simply wait. It can let the clock run. If the licence lapses without a mining permit application ever being filed, the one statutory trigger that would have compelled surrender of the exploration dataset to the State never fires.

The company walks away — potentially still holding, through its corporate structure, a fully modelled uranium resource derived entirely from exploration conducted under a Guyanese state licence — while GGMC is left with quarterly activity reports and an evaluation summary.

No royalty. No enforceable claim to the data. No mining. And no accountability mechanism requiring anyone to explain why.

PILLAR FIVE: THE COMMUNITIES WHO WERE NEVER ASKED

None of the above accounts for the constituency this publication regards as the first and most fundamental stakeholder: the Indigenous and local communities of Region Seven. The Amerindian People’s Association has called for the Kurupung project to be halted outright, citing the total absence of public and community-level consultation before exploration rights were granted, transferred, and drilled against.

A regulatory framework that permits a foreign-held uranium resource to change corporate hands twice, secure a related-party off-take agreement, and commence a 5,000-metre drilling programme — all before Region Seven’s own residents have been meaningfully consulted — is not a framework failing at its edges. It is failing at its centre.

WHAT THIS NEWS-MEDIA DEMANDS

The pattern here is not new to readers of this news outlet’s ongoing accountability coverage: a regulator structurally absent from the transactions it is meant to police, a State whose return on a strategic mineral is deferred to a moment the extractor controls, and communities treated as an afterthought rather than a precondition. Kurupung differs only in the commodity — uranium is not gold, and the stakes of a genuinely opaque radioactive-minerals sector, in a country with no established uranium regulatory precedent, are of a different order entirely.

This publication calls on the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and the Minister responsible for Natural Resources to state publicly, and without further delay:

◊ Whether a minimum statutory royalty framework for large-scale uranium and radioactive-mineral production is under consideration, and if not, why not;

◊ What legal instrument, if any, compels U92 Energy Corp. or its subsidiaries to surrender full exploration data to GGMC in the event the Prospecting Licences lapse or are relinquished without a mining permit application;

◊ Whether GGMC was consulted on, or was even made aware of, the ROPA Investments off-take agreement prior to its execution; and

◊ What steps have been taken, or will be taken, to conduct genuine community-level consultation with the Indigenous residents of Region Seven before any further drilling proceeds.

The people of Guyana own these minerals. The law, as it stands, has not yet caught up to that fact.

— The Board

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA 

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

Guyana is entering a season that demands more than warnings about heat and dryness. The Hydrometeorological Service has already said the country should prepare for strengthening El Niño conditions, hotter-than-normal weather, fewer wet days, and as many as 80 hot spell days this year, with the greatest exposure in Regions 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10. 

The same advisory warns that reduced rainfall and higher temperatures are likely to stress crops, weaken pasture quality, raise livestock water needs, and increase the risk of water shortages.

El Niño is a Governance Test, not just a Weather Event That means this is not simply a climate bulletin. It is a food, income, and governance problem. If government response remains narrow, delayed, or rhetorical, then the burden will fall on citizens through higher prices, reduced production, and weaker household purchasing power.

 The public has a right to know whether the State is treating this as a serious national emergency or merely as another seasonal inconvenience. The evidence suggests that the risk is already visible. Hydromet has warned of drier conditions, prolonged dry spells, elevated temperatures, and short-term drought conditions in parts of Regions 8 and 9, with localized flooding still possible in low-lying areas. 

In other words, Guyana must prepare for both drought and flood stress at the same time.

 The Budget Must Now Be Tested

The government has repeatedly presented Budget 2026 as a major investment in food security and resilience. In January, the administration said agriculture would receive $113.2 billion, with $81.9 billion going to drainage and irrigation, $3.3 billion for other crops and technical support, and $745 million for agro-processing and storage-related support.  It also said agriculture and water spending was part of a broader effort to strengthen food security and drainage systems.

Those allocations are now under public scrutiny. A budget is not a talking point; it is a contract. If the country is now facing known El Niño risks, then citizens are entitled to ask whether the money was spent on genuine preparedness, and whether the promised infrastructure and support systems are operational.  

That question matters because the same government has claimed Guyana can fully feed its population and that agriculture is central to national resilience.  Such claims cannot be made while the country remains vulnerable to predictable climate shocks without a visible, funded, public response. Resilience is proved in action, not in slogans

What Authorities Must Explain

The Ministry of Agriculture must explain what specific El Niño measures were funded under Budget 2026, how much has been released, and where the projects are active. Farmers need to know whether there is drought-resistant seed distribution, irrigation support, technical extension, and region-by-region advisories. Hydromet has already made clear that crop stress and reduced pasture quality are expected outcomes, so the ministry cannot wait for losses to occur before reacting.

The Ministry of Finance must disclose what contingency planning exists for inflation, food-price spikes, and support to vulnerable households. If imports become more expensive because of global weather disruption, transport costs, or tighter regional supply, then the public should know what fiscal buffers are in place.

The absence of a public protection plan would amount to a policy failure, not a natural inevitability.  

The Ministry of Trade and Commerce must state how it will monitor food prices, prevent hoarding, and ensure that market behavior does not exploit scarcity. Citizens should not be left to discover that the price of basic food has risen only after the damage is already done.

Transparency on monitoring is as important as the monitoring itself.  

Hydromet, the Guyana Water Incorporated, the local government authorities, and the disaster-management system must also stop operating in silos. Hydromet has already described the likely impact on water resources, agriculture, heat stress, and wildfire risk.  That information must be converted into coordinated national action, not left as an isolated technical bulletin.

 What Citizens Should Watch

Citizens should insist on a public action plan that names the lead agencies, the budget lines, the geographic hotspots, and the trigger points for intervention. The plan should show what happens if rainfall falls below a threshold, if food prices spike, if water levels decline, or if crop stress becomes severe. Without trigger points, response becomes improvisation.  

They should also demand regular public updates, not occasional reassurance. The government should publish food-security information, price trends, farmer advisories, and water-risk updates in plain language. That is especially important because the most severe effects will not arrive all at once. They will accumulate quietly through rising costs, shrinking supply, and tighter household budgets.

This is also why local communities must be engaged early. Small farmers,hinterland residents, market vendors, household gardeners, school administrators, and public-health officials all need targeted guidance.

Heat stress, water scarcity, and transport disruption are not abstract risks; they are practical problems that will affect daily life.  

 The Failure That Must Be Avoided

The greatest danger is not only El Niño itself, but a familiar national habit: waiting for the crisis to become visible before treating it as urgent. That approach is costly, unnecessary, and unfair to the people who can least absorb the shock. If food prices rise, if water becomes harder to secure, or if farmers lose productivity, then citizens should be able to trace the failure back to specific offices that had both warning and budget.  

The public should not be told that all hardship is weather-related. Weather is the trigger; policy determines the depth of the damage. Guyana now has enough warning to act, enough money allocated to justify action, and enough institutional responsibility to be held accountable.

This is the moment for the authorities to prove that their promises mean something. The nation does not need more declarations of resilience. It needs a visible plan, disciplined execution, and honest public reporting so that families, farmers, and businesses can prepare together and weather the fallout with less pain.

THE VENDOR WAS NEVER ARM’S-LENGTH

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA                                   

THE VENDOR WAS NEVER ARM’S-LENGTH

What
By Staff -Writer.| The 592 Guardian | July 2026

When U92 Energy Corp. filed the paperwork describing its January 2026 acquisition of LIA Industries Pte. Ltd. — the Singapore holding company that controls Guyana’s only uranium project — it described the seller of the historical technical dataset that anchored the deal as an “arm’s-length vendor.” That phrase does real work in a corporate filing. It tells shareholders and regulators that the two sides of a transaction had no prior relationship, no shared ownership, no reason to trust one another’s numbers except the numbers themselves. It is the language of a clean transaction between strangers.
It does not appear to be true.

Following the footer
Gibraltar-based ROPA Investments Limited is the firm that, according to Kaieteur News’ reporting on the acquisition filing, secured off-take rights to 50% of the first 40 million pounds of uranium oxide produced at Kurupung — an option on up to 20 million pounds — plus a 2% net concentrate royalty over the prospecting licences that runs indefinitely, regardless of whether those licences are ever converted into a mining licence. That much was already public. What wasn’t yet connected in the coverage is who ROPA actually is, and what it already owned before the ink dried.

ROPA’s own website lists its uranium holdings under a section titled “Offtakes & Streams,” which includes a line item called “Lia energy fuels (Uranium).” That line links directly to lia.energy — the website of LIA Energy, whose homepage names five projects: Skull Creek, Kurupung, Firawa, Warmbad, and Virka. LIA Energy’s footer credits “ROPA INVESTMENTS” as its parent, and the site’s contact address routes through an @ropa.gi email domain — the same corporate family, not a separate counterparty.

Separately, ROPA’s own “Mining Verticals” page states plainly that since 2020, ROPA has owned and developed nearly 600 million pounds of global uranium assets, some of which have since been joint ventured, listed, or sold to other strategic parties.
Put together, this means the entity U92 described in its filing as an “arm’s-length vendor” of the Kurupung dataset was, in substance, ROPA’s own uranium platform — the same group that simultaneously walked away from the transaction holding a 50% off-take on first production and a perpetual 2% royalty.

LIA Industries wasn’t a disinterested seller cashing out of an asset. It was the vehicle through which ROPA built the position, before restructuring the ownership through a Canadian TSX Venture Exchange shell to give the project a public listing, a share price, and access to retail and institutional capital markets — while ROPA retained the economic upside on the ground in Guyana.
This is not necessarily improper under Canadian securities law — “arm’s length” is a defined term with its own tests, and it is possible for related parties to satisfy it depending on control thresholds and disclosure. But the pattern matters for a Guyanese readership for a different reason: it changes who was actually negotiating on the other side of the table when Guyana’s own regulatory involvement was limited to issuing an exploration licence.

GGMC’s role, precisely stated
To answer the direct question: nothing in the public record indicates GGMC had any role in structuring, reviewing, or approving the ROPA off-take agreement, the royalty, or the LIA/U92 share purchase. GGMC’s documented involvement begins and ends with the issuance of two Exclusive Prospecting Licences — GS14: L-1003/000/23 and GS14: L-1003/001/23 — to LIA (Guyana) Inc. on 19th April, 2024, granting exclusive rights of occupation and exploration for uranium, other radioactive minerals, and rare earth elements through 18th April, 2027, extendable to 2029.

Everything else — the 18th June, 2026 off-take agreement, the LIA/U92 share purchase, the dataset acquisition, the royalty buyback terms — occurred entirely at the level of corporate ownership, offshore, across Singapore, Ontario, and Gibraltar. GGMC licenses the ground.

It has no evident mechanism to review who owns the company holding the licence, what that company has promised third parties about future production, or whether the “vendor” in a related-party transaction is actually related. That is a structural gap in how Guyana’s minerals licensing regime interacts with international corporate finance — not a matter of any individual official’s judgment.

The filing is explicit that any royalty payable to the Government of Guyana will only be negotiated when a mining permit application is submitted — which can happen any time during the life of the prospecting licence. In practical terms: private, offshore claims on Kurupung’s output were locked in during 2025, ahead of Guyana’s own royalty ever being fixed. The state negotiates last, against a resource base a quarter of which — the first 40 million pounds — already carries a standing 50% claim from a single foreign investor.

Why this fits a pattern worth building on
Sharma Solomon of APNU raised the transparency question in June, calling for public disclosure and informed national debate on Kurupung. The government’s response, as far as the record shows, has been silence — consistent with the pattern this desk has already documented around GECOM commissioner appointments and the “no vacancy” stonewalling under Article 161(3)(b): oversight questions raised, met with executive non-response rather than engagement.

The uranium file adds a second, structurally different case to that thesis. It isn’t about a constitutional appointment being blocked. It’s about whether Guyana’s minerals-licensing framework has any visibility at all into beneficial ownership and related-party transactions layered on top of a prospecting licence — before a single ounce is mined, before the state’s own royalty is even negotiated. If GGMC’s mandate stops at the licence and does not extend upstream into who controls the licensee, that gap is available to be used again, on the next strategic mineral, by the next offshore platform.

Worth verifying next: GGMC’s file on beneficial ownership or change-of-control disclosure requirements attached to prospecting licences, if any exist; whether the Ministry of Natural Resources was informed of or consulted on the ROPA off-take prior to the filing becoming public; and whether GRA has visibility into transfer-pricing exposure on a future export stream that is already half spoken for by a related party.

The 592 Guardian will continue tracking the Kurupung file, including any government response to APNU’s disclosure request and further SEDAR+ filings from U92 as the drilling programme advances.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Green Mask Slips

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THE 592 GUARDIANEDITORIAL · INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS

The Green Mask Slips: Guyana’s 2026 Environmental Performance Index Score Exposes the Gap Between Biodiversity Branding and Climate Reality

While the Ali administration markets Guyana abroad as a biodiversity partner and low-carbon development model, Yale’s 2026 Environmental Performance Index ranks the country dead last of 177 nations on climate change mitigation — the single steepest ten-year decline in the entire index.
Guyana ranks 151st of 177 countries in the 2026 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), published by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy in partnership with Columbia University — a score of 30.32, nearly 12 points below the Latin America & Caribbean regional average of 42.07, and 30th of 31 countries in the region. The figure has circulated widely in recent days, framed as proof that Guyana now trails even Haiti in environmental standing. That comparison is true on its face. But it is also the least interesting fact in the dataset.

The real story is not the overall rank. It is what sits beneath it: a country that performs credibly on the metrics tied to its standing forest, and catastrophically on the metrics tied to its oil economy. Those two facts sitting side by side, in the same government’s official messaging, in the same fiscal year, are the actual scandal — and they are Yale’s numbers, not ours.

The Number the Government Won’t Be Citing

Buried inside Guyana’s aggregate score is a single category result that deserves to be the headline: Guyana ranks 177th of 177 countries — dead last, full stop — on Climate Change Mitigation, the policy objective that measures a country’s trajectory on greenhouse gas emissions. Guyana’s score in that category is 3.67. Its ten-year change is -20.77, the steepest decline recorded for any country in the 2026 index — worse than Mongolia, worse than Laos, worse than any of the traditional laggards this ranking usually surfaces.
A related indicator, greenhouse gas emissions trend adjusted per capita, tells the same story from a different angle: Guyana scores 0.0, tied for the worst rank in the world (171st of 177), with a ten-year swing of -18.25. This is not a measure of how much a country emits in absolute terms — small, low-population states are structurally protected from that comparison. It is a measure of trajectory: whether a country’s per-capita emissions, adjusted for economic growth, are rising or falling. Guyana’s are rising faster, relative to its own growth, than almost anywhere else measured.

Forests: 36th of 177. Climate Change Mitigation: 177th of 177. Same country, same year, same government.

That divergence is the anomaly this report should be built around — not Guyana-versus-Haiti, but Guyana-versus-Guyana. On Forests, the country ranks a respectable 36th of 177, a score of 30.42 that reflects the genuinely low deforestation rate and the intact landscape integrity that has anchored every LCDS and carbon-credit pitch this government has made since 2009. The rainforest claim is not manufactured.

What is manufactured is the impression, cultivated in international forums and glossy biodiversity-partnership announcements, that this forest performance describes the country’s environmental trajectory as a whole. It does not. It describes one category out of twelve — and it is being used to paper over the worst-performing category in the entire index.

Reading the Category Breakdown

The table below sets out where Guyana’s 2026 EPI performance actually sits, category by category, against the field of 177 countries scored under this edition’s methodology (47 indicators across 12 issue categories, spanning three policy objectives: Environmental Health, Ecosystem Vitality, and Climate Change).

Category Guyana Rank Score 10-Yr Change
Overall EPI 151 / 177 30.32 -4.13
Climate Change Mitigation 177 / 177 3.67 -20.77
GHG Emissions Trend (per capita, adj. 171 / 177 0.0 -18.25
Forests 36 / 177 30.42 n/a

Source: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy / Columbia University, 2026 Environmental Performance Index, epi.yale.edu. Regional average (Latin America & Caribbean): 42.07.

The pattern is unambiguous. Guyana’s ecosystem assets — the forest it did not build, only declined to destroy — are propping up an aggregate score that would otherwise sit even lower. Strip Forests out of the picture and weigh Guyana purely on the categories shaped by government policy choice — energy procurement, emissions trajectory, industrial permitting — and the picture is one of the worst-performing petrostates measured anywhere in the 177-country field.

The Con: Selling Biodiversity While Failing Climate

This publication has tracked, across the Wales Gas-to-Energy project, the Karpowership rate escalation from 7.06¢ to 9.5¢ per kWh, and the broader energy dependency thread, a pattern of procurement decisions that entrench fossil generation rather than displace it.

The 2026 EPI’s Climate Change Mitigation collapse is the statistical signature of exactly that pattern.

A country cannot credibly market itself as a biodiversity and low-carbon partner to sovereign wealth funds and COP delegations while its own emissions trajectory — independently measured, methodologically transparent, published by one of the most cited environmental research institutions in the world — is rated the single worst of any nation on earth.

The Long Creek estate controversy, the Former Presidents Benefits Bill, and the GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract are, on their face, governance stories about land, money, and procurement law. The EPI data gives them an environmental dimension that has been largely absent from the public conversation: every one of those threads sits downstream of the same executive posture — extraction and consumption decisions made with minimal independent oversight, dressed in the language of climate leadership abroad.

What This Is Not

Fairness requires two caveats, both of which strengthen rather than weaken the case.    First, Yale’s own FAQ states plainly that EPI scores should not be compared across editions as a time series, because methodology and indicator counts change with each release — the 2026 edition uses 47 indicators across 12 categories and 177 countries, versus 58 indicators, 11 categories, and 180 countries in 2024. Any claim that Guyana has “fallen” some number of places since the last edition is not supportable from this data and should not appear in this publication’s coverage. The story is not a decline narrative. It is a snapshot — and the snapshot alone is damning enough.
Second, the Forests and land-use performance is real and should be stated as such without qualification. The case here is not that Guyana’s environmental record is uniformly poor. It is that the government’s public messaging leans entirely on the one category where performance is strong, while remaining silent on the category — climate mitigation — where performance is, by Yale’s own numbers, the worst measured anywhere in the world.

The Accountability Question

Every biodiversity partnership announcement, every ART TREES carbon-credit sale, every appearance at an international climate forum trades on the credibility of Guyana’s forest numbers. None of that messaging, to date, has had to answer for the 177th-place climate mitigation score sitting in the same index. That is the question this newsroom will be putting to the relevant ministries: how does a government reconcile marketing itself as a global biodiversity and climate partner while its own independently measured emissions trajectory is rated worst in class among 177 nations?

Guyanese taxpayers, and the international partners being asked to fund and endorse these biodiversity arrangements, deserve an answer grounded in the same data the government cites when the numbers run in its favour.
THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM. GUYANA

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Independent Accountability Journalism  ·  Guyana

EDITORIAL

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part IV of IV  ·  Pollute As Much As You Want

Pollute As Much As You Want, Provided You Can Pay For It

Guyana was promised zero flaring at the Stabroek Block. Instead, ExxonMobil has burned off more than a billion cubic feet of gas into the Atlantic sky, paid a fraction of what independent analysts say the pollution is worth, and won in court when Guyanese citizens tried to force a stricter permit. This is the enforcement gap at the heart of Guyana’s oil era — and the final installment of this series.

Parts I through III of this series traced the arithmetic of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), the stability clause that froze that arithmetic beyond Parliament’s reach, and the decommissioning liability Guyana is quietly pre-funding with no guarantee the money will still exist when it is needed. Part IV closes the series by asking a simpler question: when the Contractor breaks its own environmental promises, what actually happens?

The answer, on the public record, is: not very much

The Promise: Zero Flaring

When the Government of Guyana approved the environmental permit for the Liza Phase 1 project, it did so on the strength of a specific commitment. ExxonMobil’s own environmental impact assessment represented that the project could achieve zero non-routine gas flaring — that associated gas produced alongside crude oil would be captured and reinjected into the wells rather than burned off into the atmosphere. The Minister of Natural Resources at the time stated unequivocally that under no circumstances would there be flaring of the gas.

“That promise did not survive first production. Faulty compression equipment aboard the Liza Destiny FPSO caused ExxonMobil to begin flaring within weeks of the field coming online in December 2019, and it has continued in one form or another ever since.”

What the Satellite Data Shows

Independent verification, rather than company self-reporting, has driven most of what the public knows about the scale of the problem. Satellite monitoring compiled through the Every Last Drop project using SkyTruth data, cross-referenced with figures from the environmental rights organization Arayara Institute, documented 1,298 separate flaring events at the Stabroek Block between 2019 and 2023 alone, releasing an estimated à 1.32 million tons of CO2 — comparable to the annual emissions of roughly 287,000 cars. The analysis found the block’s flaring had made Guyana the second-largest gas-flaring emitter in the entire Amazon basin, trailing only Ecuador.

By July 2021, the Government’s own figures put cumulative flared gas at more than 15.1 billion cubic feet. That volume represents energy roughly equivalent to Guyana’s entire national electricity consumption for a year, burned into the sky rather than captured.

The Permit Was Weakened, Not Enforced

The regulatory response to this pattern was not tightening. It was loosening. In April 2021, environmental activists including Sherlina Nageer, using satellite evidence they had gathered independently, formally alerted the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the scale of ongoing flaring. Within a month of that complaint, the EPA revised ExxonMobil’s environmental permit — not to strengthen the zero-flaring requirement, but to extend the allowable flaring period from three consecutive days to sixty.

– The Permit Modification (as reported by multiple independent outlets)

 

Following a 2021 activist complaint documenting extensive non-routine flaring, the EPA revised EEPGL’s environmental permit to extend the allowable continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days, without conducting a fresh Environmental Impact Assessment.

Citizens challenged the legality of that modification in court, arguing that a permit change of this magnitude, made without a new environmental impact review, was unlawful. In 2023, Chief Justice Roxanne George ruled in ExxonMobil’s favour, finding that it had not been proven the modified permit was causing additional adverse environmental effects, and that nothing in Guyanese law prevented the issuance of a modified permit on those terms.

“The government is basically saying: pollute as much as you want, provided you can pay for it.”

That assessment came from Dr. Vincent Adams, the former Head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a thirty-year veteran of the US Department of Energy, responding to the court’s ruling. Dr. Adams has been a recurring, credible critic of the regulatory posture Guyana’s institutions have taken toward ExxonMobil throughout this series’ reporting, and his assessment of the flaring permit fits the broader pattern: technically lawful concessions, made in response to the Contractor’s operational failures, that leave the public paying the environmental cost while the Contractor pays a fee calibrated well below the damage.

The Fines Do Not Match the Harm

Guyana calculates flaring penalties under the Polluter Pays Principle set out in its 1996 Environmental Protection Act. The rate has increased over time — from US$30 per tonne of CO2-equivalent under the original permit, to US$45, and now to US$50 under the renewed five-year Liza 1 permit issued in 2025. By late 2021, the EPA confirmed it had collected approximately G$930 million, or roughly US$4.5 million, in cumulative flaring payments from ExxonMobil.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that figure hard to square with the scale of the pollution. Using a benchmark rate of US$75 per tonne — a level IEEFA characterized as more realistic — the organization calculated ExxonMobil should have paid closer to US$26 million for the flaring recorded through mid-2021: roughly six times what it had actually paid. ExxonMobil separately paid an US$8.4 million penalty in 2022, a sum that registers as a rounding error against a company that recorded tens of billions of dollars in global annual profit in the same period.

For comparison, when ExxonMobil flared gas on American soil, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice fined the company US$2.5 million in 2017 and required a further US$300 million outlay for pollution-control technology at its domestic facilities. Guyana’s cumulative flaring collections, spread across years and multiple incidents, remain a fraction of what US regulators extracted for a single enforcement action.

A Pattern Consistent With the Rest of the Series

Read against Parts I through III, the flaring record is not an isolated environmental footnote. It is the same structural imbalance this series has documented in the fiscal terms, the stability clause, and the decommissioning liability, now visible in environmental enforcement:

A Contractor whose commitments were not met, a regulator whose response was to relax the rule rather than enforce it, a judiciary that found the relaxation lawful, and a public that bears the atmospheric and reputational cost while the financial penalty remains, by independent estimate, a fraction of the damage.

The scale of what is now at stake is only growing. Stabroek Block output surpassed 918,000 barrels per day in February 2026, with the consortium targeting 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030 and ExxonMobil now seeking environmental authorization for a further 35-well exploration campaign running through 2033. Guyana’s environmental regulator has, for the first time, requested a cumulative impact study covering that new campaign alongside all other offshore activity — a modest but real acknowledgment that project-by-project review has not been sufficient. Whether that acknowledgment translates into enforcement, rather than another accommodation, is the question this series leaves the public, and the Government, to answer.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

In concluding this series, we are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Department of Energy:

  1. What is the current cumulative total, in both Guyana dollars and US dollars, that ExxonMobil and its partners have paid in flaring penalties since December 2019, broken down by year and incident?
  2. What analysis, if any, did the EPA conduct before extending the permitted continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days in 2021, and will that analysis be published?
  3. Does the Government consider the current US$50-per-tonne flaring penalty rate to reflect the actual environmental and climate cost of the emissions, and if not, what rate would it consider adequate?
  4. In light of the cumulative impact study now being requested for the proposed 35-well exploration campaign, will the EPA apply the same cumulative standard retroactively to the flaring record of the currently producing FPSOs?

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial.

This concludes The Stabroek Surrender. Across four parts, this series has examined the fiscal terms, the stability clause that locked them in place, the decommissioning liability Guyana is pre-funding without safeguard, and the flaring record that has outpaced enforcement. ,The throughline is consistent: a Government that entered a defining national contract from a position of weakness, and has since treated every mechanism for correcting that weakness — renegotiation, arbitration exposure, financial safeguards, environmental enforcement — as a fixed cost of doing business rather than a lever available to a sovereign state. The 592Guardian will continue reporting on the audit void and the question of government complicity in a future series.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

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“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

OP-ED BY DR.VINCENT ADAMS

Laboratory analysis confirms contaminant concentrations in local water supplies at 630 times the safe regulatory limit, a finding that public health experts say makes Guyana Water Inc.’s recent statement appear irresponsible and dangerously dismissive.

Upon reading the July 5, 2026 edition of THE 592 GUARDIAN summarizing the Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC) 2025 findings on drinking water quality in Regions 4, 7 and 10, I was embarrassed and astounded by the Guyana Water Inc’s (GWI) statement reported in the July 3, 2026 Kaieteur News article that “Water quality issues flagged by PUC affect only taste, colour and appearance, not safety”.

True to the Govt’s code of conduct, GWI attempts to deceive the people, not only by leaving out the actual measurements that would make it impossible to back up their ludicrous claim, but also insultingly tells the people not to believe the coffee coloured water they see with their own eyes. This GWI statement is nothing but irresponsible, callous and dangerous to the people’s health.

This issue is close to home for yours truly, since I happen to be one of the 11 Engineers specially trained by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to establish and run the GWI (originally GUYWA) initiated in 1972; so, knows first-hand of the world class Water Authority handed over to the PPPC Govt in 1992, only to see it descend to this abbys of incompetence and neglect of its sacred mandate to provide reliable, clean and safe water to the public. Instead, the people are heartlessly advised that it is no big deal for them to drink water that is perilous to their health, while certainly not the same water consumed by Govt officials and their families.

In a normal country, it would have been an oxymoron for a country to be dubbed “the land of many waters” with “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” (Poet Samuel Coleridge).

The data analyses and facts – Human beings can survive without oil, electricity, etc., but never without water! A safe water supply is guided by scientifically developed safe standards and undoubtedly the most essential substance for the sustenance of human life. Consequently, let’s address the three contaminants highlighted by the PUC that falls out of the range of safe standards. They are: pH, turbidity and iron.

pH – The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with lower pH values corresponding to higher acidity. However, it is most important to note that the pH scale is logarithmic and not linear, meaning each unit change represents a 10-fold change in acidity. For example, a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 5, and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 6. This means that the 3.7 pH measured at Linden is 630 times more acidic than the World Health Organization (WHO) safe pH limit of 6.5.

Highly acidic water at 630 times the safe limit is corrosive and can dissolve toxic heavy metals such the copper and lead from the plumbing lines, which wind up in your drinking water. Ingesting these metals can cause serious health problems such as cancer, stroke, kidney disease, memory loss, high blood pressure, reduced bone density, etc. It is more toxic for children, as their growing bodies absorb these metals much quicker. Further, water with a high acidity has likely not gone through proper filtration and may still contain pollutants like pesticides and chemicals making the water unsafe to drink.

Turbidity – As clearly defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “Turbidity is a measure of the cloudiness of water, and the higher the levels the more particles (which carry the pollutants) are present. It is used to indicate water quality and filtration effectiveness (such as whether disease-causing organisms are present) and higher levels are associated with higher levels of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria.”

Notwithstanding that one doesn’t need a measurement to verify the obvious that coffee coloured water at Grove means extremely high turbidity, the actual measurement of 29 times the US EPA and WHO limits plainly points out the grave health risk of consuming such water that may indicate presence of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria. Substantively, owing to constant flooding, flood water with disease-causing microorganisms from latrines, septic tanks, manholes and pipes transporting raw city sewage, will most likely leak into the drinking water pipe network; thus, testing for the presence of these microorganisms must be conducted, especially during and after floods.

Iron – Though at a high level of 3.35 mg/l, or 11 times the WHO guideline, high iron content is not a major health concern, and high levels are expected from the upper of the two major aquifers supplying Georgetown and the East Coast of Demerara. However, high iron levels may create operational and cosmetic problems, staining plumbing fixtures, sinks, dishes, and laundry with a rust color; and can build up inside pipes, reducing water flow and clogging appliances like dishwashers and water heaters.

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

I hope this missive will implore the GWI to immediately do the right and responsible thing to apologetically retract their advice to consume such unsafe water, and to follow-up with urgent actions to satisfy its only mandate to provide the nation with mankind’s most precious substance and basic need for a safe water supply, especially in a nation with the highest GDP.

In the meantime, I humbly wish to dissuade the public from following GWI’s inexplicably advice that the water is safe, despite its irrefutable scientific indications of being hazardous to human health.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ FOR GUYANA

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

As a Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive seasons in recent memory, a provocative scientific paper asks a difficult question: if we can’t stop the planet from warming fast enough, should we consider temporarily dimming the sun to blunt the worst impacts?

A team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography used climate models — and lessons from the 2019–20 Australian “Black Summer” fires — to test whether marine cloud brightening, a form of solar geoengineering, could tamp down a powerful El Niño. The idea is simple in concept and fiendishly complex in execution: spray sea-salt aerosols into low ocean clouds so they reflect more sunlight, cool the tropical Pacific, and reduce the spike in global temperatures that a Super El Niño would bring.

Their models show it might work — at least partially. Targeted cloud brightening applied early could shave roughly 40 percent off peak El Niño warming in the simulations. That could translate into fewer heatwaves, smaller wildfires, reduced crop failures, and less pressure on overstretched health and emergency systems. For regions like the Caribbean and Guyana, where livelihoods depend on stable rainy seasons, fisheries and agriculture, and where disasters quickly overwhelm limited response capacity, any tool that lowers immediate harm is tempting.

But temptation is not policy. The paper is a proof of concept, not a policy prescription — and for good reason. The gulf between a model result and a safe, effective technology is vast. Engineers currently lack sprayers capable of delivering the right quantity and size of particles over the required ocean areas. Models still struggle to predict the cascading, remote effects of changing cloud reflectivity on global rainfall patterns. And there is real risk of overcorrection: a “too strong” intervention could trigger a mega La Niña with its own catalogue of floods, storms and agricultural disruption.

Beyond technical uncertainty lie profound ethical and geopolitical questions. Who decides to dim the sun for months or years? A handful of wealthy states, private funders, or an international process that includes the most vulnerable voices? The distributional stakes are enormous: a change that reduces heat in one place might reduce rain in another, hitting small island states, farmers, or urban poor who already carry the heaviest climate burdens. Then there’s the moral hazard: the more credible a techno-fix becomes, the more it risks blunting the political urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the only durable solution to the climate crisis.

So what should policymakers, civil society and the public in the Caribbean and Guyana take from this study? First: don’t be distracted. Geoengineering research must be watched, regulated and debated transparently, but it is not a substitute for rapid emissions cuts or for costly, necessary adaptation. Second: demand a voice. Any international discussion of geoengineering governance must include the countries most at risk. We cannot allow decisions about global sunlight to be taken behind closed doors by institutions or corporations with little stake in our futures. Third: invest in readiness. Whether or not marine cloud brightening ever becomes viable, this decade will bring some of the highest-stakes weather in living memory. Strengthening water management, resilient agriculture, early-warning systems and health infrastructure is non-negotiable.

Finally, treat this science as what it is: an alarm bell. The study underlines a brutal truth — climate change is not a gradual nuisance; it is pushing natural systems like El Niño into new, more dangerous regimes. If a high-tech intervention is even being discussed as a possible emergency tool, that is evidence of failure, not ingenuity. Our response should be proportionate: accelerate deep emissions cuts, fund adaptation where lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, and build inclusive, binding governance for any research into planetary-scale interventions.

We cannot let the lure of a quick technical fix derail our political will. The choice before us is stark: commit to the long, difficult work of decarbonisation and resilience now, or gamble with untested manipulations of the very system that sustains life on Earth.

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD, JULY 2026

The Uranium Blindspot.Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate

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 THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Independent Accountability Journalism♦Governance, Politics & Extractive Industry
 July 2026

The Uranium Blindspot: Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate
As U92 Energy Corp. advances drill programmes at the Kurupung uranium project, the government has yet to answer a foundational question: who, in Guyana, can actually tell if something is going wrong?

I. THE WARNING CANNOT BE DISMISSED
Dr. Vincent Adams is not a critic of mining. He is a former head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a professional who has overseen uranium remediation programmes in the United States — a country that spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars confronting contamination legacies it did not anticipate when licences were first issued. He has chaired international conferences on uranium mining’s environmental footprint, drawing participants from more than sixty countries, including Kazakhstan, one of the world’s largest uranium producers. When Dr. Adams says Guyana does not have what it takes to regulate uranium mining — that the country’s institutions have no clue what they are getting into — he is not raising a theoretical concern.
He is delivering a professional judgment grounded in direct comparative experience. And this government has not answered it.

“Guyana just based on their track record do not have it, they do not understand what it takes to have it, and they have no interest in providing that capacity to take on such an operation. They have no clue what they are getting into. Have no clue whatsoever.” — Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Head

That silence is the story. Not because uranium mining is inherently incompatible with Guyana’s development — Dr. Adams himself does not argue that — but because the government has issued licences, approved exploration, and allowed a foreign junior mining company to consolidate a decadeof technical data on Guyanese soil without publicly demonstrating that any regulatory body in this country can independently verify what that company is doing, or will be doing, in the interior of Region Seven.

II. WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN LICENSED
The facts on the ground are specific and deserve to be stated precisely. On 19 April 2024, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission granted Exclusive Prospecting Licences to LIA (Guyana) Inc. — a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore-registered LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Guyana in March 2023, just one month before the licences were issued. Those licences cover not only uranium but other radioactive minerals and rare earth elements across 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven.
The licences run for three years to 18 April 2027 with the possibility of two additional one-year extensions — meaning this project could remain active and expanding through April 2029 without any new licensing decision by the government.

Adam Clode CEO – U 92 Corp.

Canada-based U92 Energy Corp. has since acquired the complete historical technical and exploration dataset for the Kurupung project, which it describes as carrying a historical resource estimate of 20.6 million pounds of uranium. This is U 92’s only listed project. The company has finalised a commercial agreement for a Phase One 5,000-metre diamond drilling programme and submitted the required environmental application for drill pad preparation. The company’s entire commercial existence rests on this single Guyanese concession.
The GGMC issued licences to an entity incorporated one month before the grant date. It has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record.
The GGMC has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record prior to that April 2024 grant. The Environmental Protection Agency has not published any environmental impact assessment, baseline study, or radiation monitoring protocol for the Kurupung project. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority — the body nominally responsible for radiological matters — has not issued a public statement on the project’s regulatory framework. Parliament has not been briefed. The public has not been consulted.

III. THE REGULATORY INDEPENDENCE PROBLEM
Dr. Adams identified the core structural failure with precision. It is not simply that Guyana lacks technical personnel with uranium expertise — though that is true. The deeper problem is the absence of what he calls regulatory independence: the institutional capacity for the government to independently verify what an operator is doing, rather than relying on operator-reported data.
In every sophisticated resource jurisdiction, regulatory independence is the foundational safeguard. It requires trained government scientists and engineers who can read drill logs critically, interpret radiological readings independently, identify anomalies in waste management, and assess water contamination risks without being dependent on the company’s own consultants for their understanding of what is happening. It requires laboratory infrastructure, monitoring networks, and institutional knowledge built over time.
Guyana has none of this for uranium. It does not exist. It is not being built. No minister has announced a timeline for its construction. The 2024 licences were issued into a regulatory vacuum.

The government has adopted a model in oil and gas where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That same model, applied to radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut — it is a liability being transferred permanently onto the Guyanese people.
Dr. Adams drew explicit parallels to the oil and gas sector, where Guyana’s environmental governance record is already a subject of documented concern. The Environmental Protection Agency has been criticised by civil society and international observers for its limited capacity to independently audit Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC compliance data. The GGMC’s own audit trail is in a state of chronic disrepair — a matter this outlet documented in its investigation into the Commission’s nine-year audit backlog.

The pattern is institutional, not incidental.
The government has adopted a model in extractive industry governance where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That model, applied to uranium and radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut. It is a liability being transferred — permanently and multi-generationally — onto the Guyanese people.
IV. URANIUM IS NOT OIL
There is a reason Dr. Adams specified that countries which engaged in uranium mining decades ago are still spending heavily on contamination and rehabilitation today. Uranium mining’s legacy contamination problem is structural. Tailings — the waste material left after uranium extraction — remain radioactive for thousands of years. Acid mine drainage from uranium operations can travel through groundwater systems in ways that are difficult to predict, harder to reverse, and catastrophic in communities dependent on river water. Radon gas exposure poses chronic health risks to workers and surrounding populations. The Kurupung basin sits in a region of significant biodiversity and within watersheds that feed communities across Cuyuni-Mazaruni.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintain distinct, technically staffed regulatory bodies for uranium mining. Australia’s regulatory framework for uranium is administered under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act with site-specific environmental management plans, independent auditing, and bonding requirements calibrated to decommissioning costs. Canada — the country of U92’s own domicile — requires that uranium mining operators demonstrate financial assurance for the full cost of remediation before a single shovel breaks ground.
Guyana has no equivalent framework. It has not announced one. It has not committed to a timeline for developing one. It has issued the licences and proceeded.
V. WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
This editorial makes five specific demands of the government of Guyana, each proportionate to the scale of what is being licensed:
1. The GGMC must publish the full due diligence record supporting the April 2024 licence grant to LIA (Guyana) Inc., including financial assurance documentation, technical capacity assessments, and any independent environmental baseline studies conducted prior to the licence decision.
2. The Environmental Protection Agency must publish its environmental compliance framework for radioactive mineral exploration and extraction — if one exists. If it does not exist, the EPA must state that publicly and provide a timeline for its development before drill pad preparation proceeds.
3. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority must issue a public statement on its regulatory mandate over the Kurupung project, the staffing and laboratory capacity it currently possesses for uranium oversight, and what additional capacity it requires. This statement must be made before Phase One drilling commences.
4. The Natural Resources Committee of the National Assembly must convene a hearing at which Dr. Adams, the GGMC, the EPA, and the GNEA are required to appear together and answer questions about the regulatory gap on the public record. The opposition has both the right and the obligation to demand this hearing.
5. U92 Energy Corp. must be required to post full remediation bonding — calibrated to worst-case decommissioning costs by an independent environmental engineering firm — before any exploratory drilling occurs. A junior mining company whose sole listed project is this concession cannot be permitted to internalise the upside of resource extraction while externalising the remediation liability onto Guyanese taxpayers and communities.
VI. THE PATTERN THIS GOVERNMENT MUST ACCOUNT FOR
This is not the first time The 592 Guardian has documented the government’s approach of licensing what it cannot regulate. The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was advanced through procurement structures involving Venezuelan-linked entities and an intermediary payroll vehicle before any credible independent environmental audit of the site was published. The GGMC’s own institutional audit trail has not been reconciled in nearly a decade. The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract was executed without the competitive tendering that Guyanese law requires. The Guyana EITI validation process — meant to provide at least a minimum standard of extractive industry transparency — was convened under circumstances that this outlet documented firsthand as procedurally compromised.

The uranium sector is being opened in exactly this context. Not as an isolated governance failure but as a continuation of a documented institutional posture: licence first, regulate never, audit retrospectively if at all, and frame any accountability demand as an obstacle to development.

Dr. Adams did not frame his warning as opposition to development. He framed it as a prerequisite for responsible development. That distinction matters. It forecloses the government’s default deflection — that criticism of the regulatory framework is criticism of resource extraction itself. It is not. It is a demand that the government of Guyana demonstrate that it can protect its own people from the consequences of what it is authorising on their behalf.

If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung, then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.
If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung — to detect contamination before it becomes irreversible, to hold an operator accountable for radiological breaches, to protect workers and downstream communities from exposures they will never consent to — then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.

The burden of proof is on the government. It has not discharged it. The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until it does.
— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian
The 592 Guardian | Accountability Journalism for Guyana | www.592guardian.com

THE CONSENT VACUUM:How Guyana is Dismantling Indeginous Land Rights

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THE 592GUARDIAN♦Accountability Journalism forPublic Interest  EDITORIAL

The Consent Vacuum: How Guyana Is Dismantling Indigenous Land Rights One Mining Permit at a Time

Chinese Landing is not an isolated failure. It is the template.

 | The 592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026

The government of Guyana has done something remarkable in Chinese Landing, Region 1. It has managed to simultaneously insist that mining restrictions remain “in effect” while actively endorsing the operations of the outside tenure holders those restrictions were meant to constrain. Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat offered this contradiction without apparent discomfort to Kaieteur News on June 28, 2026, and the Ali administration has made no effort to reconcile it.

This is not semantic confusion. It is policy. And it represents one of the most consequential accountability failures in Guyana’s accelerating petrostate transition: the systematic hollowing of the legal architecture that was supposed to protect Indigenous land rights as extraction expands.

“The villagers are the true, lawful tenure holders of the area by virtue of being the absolute owners of the titled lands.” — Chinese Landing Village Council, June 2026

I.THE STRUCTURE OF THE BETRAYAL

The facts at Chinese Landing are not in dispute, except by the government that is facilitating the breach. The Chinese Landing Carib community holds titled land under Guyana’s Amerindian Act. Section 48 of that Act is explicit: no external miner may operate within titled Indigenous territory without a formal agreement with the resident Village Council. That is not a guideline. It is a statutory precondition.

The Chinese Landing Village Council has confirmed that no such agreement exists. No operators presented themselves to the council. No formal consultation was conducted. The Toshao, Nikita Miller, has confirmed that current operations are active and that the persons managing the worksites — Stephen Vieira, acting under power of attorney for Wayne Vieira — sought signatures from individual residents at the Tassawini airstrip for a proposed labour agreement, bypassing the legally mandated party entirely.

Nine residents and two non-residents reportedly signed. The Village Council — the only body with statutory authority to enter such an agreement — was not involved. Under any reading of Section 48, this means current operations at Chinese Landing are conducted without lawful consent. The Minister’s claim that “legitimate tenure holders” are operating lawfully is a legal fiction built on the deliberate confusion of state-issued mining permits with the community consent those permits do not and cannot replace.

II.THE CCJ RULING AND THE GAP THAT WAS NEVER CLOSED

The government’s position rests on a misreading — or a deliberate misrepresentation — of the Caribbean Court of Justice’s ruling in the Wayne Vieira matter. In 2010, a GGMC officer issued a Cease Work Order against Vieira for operating without a village agreement. The CCJ ultimately struck down that order. The government reads this as validation of Vieira’s underlying mining operations.

That reading is false. The CCJ’s ruling turned on narrow jurisdictional grounds: the Mining Act empowers the Minister to craft regulations tied to that Act, but does not authorise GGMC officers to enforce the separate provisions of the Amerindian Act through Cease Work Orders. The court did not validate Vieira’s permits. It did not extinguish the community’s titled rights. It found, precisely and only, that the enforcement mechanism used was ultra vires.

What the CCJ actually produced was a legal gap: Guyana’s primary mining regulator has no statutory mechanism to enforce Indigenous consent requirements.

That gap has been sitting in plain view since that ruling. The Ali administration — which has had years and a petrostate revenue windfall to address it — has legislatively done nothing. The gap is not an oversight. It is an operational feature.

The CCJ did not validate Vieira’s mining. It exposed a gap. That gap has never been closed. It is now being exploited daily.

III.THE IACHR RECORD AND THE PATTERN OF TARGETED AGGRESSION

Chinese Landing is not new to international human rights scrutiny. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights previously issued precautionary measures for the community, citing a “serious and urgent risk” of irreparable harm. The IACHR documented a pattern of targeted aggression: a 2018 incident in which a local family was allegedly expelled from their home by mine security and the police Tactical Services Unit; multiple accounts of residents subjected to searches at gunpoint.

These measures were issued because ordinary domestic remedies had failed. The community’s land rights had not been adjudicated on their substantive merits. The Court of Appeal has yet to issue a ruling on the community’s underlying claims. Chinese Landing residents have been excluded from past legal proceedings between the GGMC and external miners, leaving their rights unrepresented in proceedings that directly affected their land.

The IACHR’s precautionary measures carry legal weight under international human rights law. The government of Guyana has an obligation to respond to them. The 592 Guardian is not aware of any substantive government action to implement those measures or report compliance to the Commission. This editorial demands that the Ministry of Legal Affairs and the Office of the Attorney General publicly disclose their current posture on Guyana’s IACHR obligations in the Chinese Landing matter.

IV.THE PATTERN: CHINESE LANDING AS TEMPLATE

This editorial treats Chinese Landing not as an isolated case but as the current iteration of a structural pattern this Board has documented across Guyana’s extractive sector.                                The pattern is consistent: state-issued instruments — mining permits, environmental clearances, sole-source contracts — are used to confer apparent legitimacy on operations that bypass mandatory consent, regulatory oversight, or both

When legal challenges arise, the enforcement gap is invoked. When international scrutiny arrives, the government issues process statements that obscure the substantive breach.

The GGMC’s nine-year audit backlog, documented in the 2024 Auditor General’s report and reported by this Board, is not unrelated to Chinese Landing. An agency that cannot produce audited financial statements cannot credibly regulate consent compliance in remote interior communities. The PAC’s stalled oversight function, the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services’ reduced meeting schedule — these institutional failures do not occur in isolation from Chinese Landing. They are the environment in which Chinese Landing is made possible.

The EKAA HRIM quarry case in Region Seven — passport confiscation, debt bondage, a worker death, no criminal charges — follows the same structural logic: an extraction operation that bypassed labour and consent protections, proceeded under state-issued instruments, and faced no meaningful regulatory consequence. The 592 Guardian filed a formal ILO dossier on that matter. We note that the same enforcement vacuum that enabled EKAA HRIM is the enforcement vacuum that Minister Bharrat is now defending in Chinese Landing.

The extraction pace is blazing. The implementation and enforcement lag is not accidental. It is the policy.

 

V.WHAT MINISTER BHARRAT SAID AND WHAT IT MEANS

Minister Bharrat’s statement to Kaieteur News warrants close legal analysis. He said: “Restrictions for mining in Chinese Landing, outside of legitimate tenure holdings, continue to be in effect.” This formulation does two things simultaneously. First, it acknowledges that restrictions exist — conceding that not all external mining at Chinese Landing is permissible. Second, it carves out “legitimate tenure holdings” as exempt from those restrictions.

But the Amerindian Act does not create a carve-out for tenure holders. Section 48 applies to all external operators regardless of their tenure status. A GGMC-issued permit is not a substitute for the community consent the Act requires. The Minister’s formulation, if it reflects actual government policy, constitutes an executive interpretation of the Amerindian Act that is without statutory basis. It is the kind of interpretation that, if applied consistently, would render Section 48 a dead letter throughout titled Indigenous territories wherever a state-issued tenure exists.

The Minister further asserted that “community members have been receptive.” The Village Council flatly denies this. The Toshao flatly denies this. The broader community, per the council, remains deeply opposed. This Board notes that the government’s claim of community receptiveness is unsubstantiated, contradicted by the titled owners’ elected leadership, and structurally consistent with the government’s practice of identifying sympathetic individuals within Indigenous communities to produce the appearance of consent without its substance.

VI.ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

To Minister Vickram Bharrat:                                                  →Produce the legal opinion on which the government relies to characterise the Vieira operations as lawful under the Amerindian Act, Section 48.                                                        →Identify by name the “community members” whose receptiveness you cited. Explain whether the government considers an individual signature obtained at an airstrip to constitute compliance with the formal agreement requirement under Section 48.

To the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission:               →Disclose whether any formal notification was made to the GGMC that operations had resumed at Chinese Landing. Identify what enforcement mechanism, if any, exists for GGMC to act if the Village Council files a complaint. Produce the current status of Wayne Vieira’s tenure holdings and any conditions attached to those tenures.

To the National Toshaos Council:                                                  →This matter involves a titled community, a statutory consent requirement, active extraction without council approval, and a government minister publicly dismissing the community’s legal position. The NTC has a mandate to advocate for Indigenous land rights nationally. This Board demands a public statement on the Chinese Landing situation and a formal legal position on the government’s interpretation of Section 48.

To the Court of Appeal:                                                                            →The community’s substantive land claims remain undecided. Active, contested extraction is proceeding daily in the interim. This Board formally calls attention to the urgency of this matter and the real-world harm being inflicted during the pendency of proceedings.

To the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights:          →The government of Guyana has not, to this Board’s knowledge, provided a substantive compliance report on its obligations under the precautionary measures issued for Chinese Landing. Extraction has resumed. The community remains exposed. We call on the Commission to formally request a compliance update and to treat resumed extraction as a material change in circumstances.

VII. CLOSING: THE NOVEMBER ASSURANCE

As recently as November 2025 — seven months before Minister Bharrat’s statement to Kaieteur News — the government gave the Chinese Landing community assurances that mining restrictions would remain firmly in place. The community accepted those assurances. They were made by a government that knew, or should have known, that tenure holders it was already supporting were preparing to resume operations.

The reversal was not disclosed proactively. It was confirmed reactively, when Kaieteur News asked. The Village Council learned of the government’s changed position through press coverage, not through any formal notification from the Ministry of Natural Resources or any other state body.

This is the governance culture that Guyana’s oil boom has entrenched: assurances without enforcement, restrictions without mechanisms, consent claimed from individuals while the legally mandated collective body is bypassed. Chinese Landing’s titled Carib community did not lose their land rights through a court order. They are losing them through a process of institutional erosion — a budget here, a legislative gap there, a minister’s word that means less every time it is given.

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter. We are requesting from the Ministry of Natural Resources, the GGMC, and the Office of the Attorney General all communications related to Chinese Landing mining operations since January 2025.  

The Editorial Board—The 592 Guardian

 

THE ARSONIST AT THE TABLE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ EDITORIAL♦ENVIORMENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY

THE ARSONISTS AT THE NEGOTIATING TABLE

How the fossil fuel industry captured the world’s climate process — and what it means for everyone paying the price

I. The Heat Is Not Hypothetical Anymore
From late May 2026 onwards, Europe was struck by severe heatwaves that broke records in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom — with temperatures running 10 to 15 degrees Celsius above normal, causing deaths and arriving earlier than Central European summers have historically begun.
World Weather Attribution scientists found that fossil fuel-driven climate change made this heatwave the most severe and widespread in Europe’s recorded history. 
Spring 2026 was the hottest spring ever recorded in France since measurements began in 1900. In the United States, March 2026 was the warmest March on record for the contiguous 48 states.  These are not anomalies. They are trajectory.

The human cost compounds silently. A 2025 European analysis estimated nearly 63,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2024 alone. Heat-related deaths among older people have risen sharply according to the Lancet Countdown, and hundreds of thousands now die globally each year from heat. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that heat-related deaths among adults aged 65 and above have surged by an estimated 85% since the 1990s.                                                                   

This is what manufactured delay costs. Not in abstractions — in bodies

II. What Manufactured Delay Looks Like

The fossil fuel industry has not simply lobbied governments. It has embedded itself inside the very process designed to contain it.
Between 2021 and 2024, a minimum of 5,368 fossil fuel lobbyists attended UN climate talks, representing 859 different fossil fuel organisations, including 180 oil and gas corporations. Just 90 of those corporations produced nearly 60% of global oil and gas output in 2024 alone. 
At COP29 in Baku, more than 1,770 lobbyists — including the heads of major corporations — were granted access, many as guests of the host country Azerbaijan. Their numbers dwarfed almost every country delegation and threatened to drown out the voices of Global South nations, Indigenous peoples, youth, and those who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts. 
ExxonMobil alone sent as many delegates to COP29 as Guyana — a country at imminent risk from rising seas and one where ExxonMobil itself is engaged in offshore oil extraction projects. 

The symmetry is not coincidental; it is structural.

At COP30 in Belém, approximately 599 lobbyists gained access through Party overflow badges that give behind-the-scenes access to the inner workings of negotiations. Major trade associations remained a primary vehicle for influence, with the International Emissions Trading Association bringing 60 representatives, including delegates from ExxonMobil, BP, and TotalEnergies.

As one physician put it bluntly: “When 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists are allowed to influence our nations’ policies, these are no longer negotiations. It’s an industry convention.

III. The Process Has No Immune System
The structural problem is not just the lobbyists. It is that the UNFCCC process was never designed to defend itself against them.
The UN climate process still lacks a formal conflict of interest policy governing fossil fuel participation.  There is no rule barring a coal executive from sitting in a Party delegation. There is no requirement that participants disclose their financial relationships with polluting industries beyond basic organisational affiliation. Proposals to address this — requiring the exclusion of fossil fuel lobbies from state delegations and mandating full public disclosure of affiliations — have been urged but not adopted.
The June 2026 climate negotiations in Bonn closed amid growing concern over the ability of the UN climate process to deliver action at the required scale, with governments failing to make meaningful progress and in some cases pushing back on already established agreements. 
Decision-making rules allow a small number of states to block progress; representatives from climate-vulnerable communities continue to face obstacles to participation; and the absence of robust safeguards against corporate influence remains unaddressed. 
Meanwhile, the UN climate agency and the UK Met Office project a 75% chance that average global temperatures between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the very threshold the Paris Agreement was built to defend.

IV. The COP31 Test


COP31 convenes in Antalya, Türkiye in November 2026 under an unusual co-presidency between Türkiye and Australia, marking what is intended to be a critical transition from negotiation to implementation following the mandates of the Global Stocktake. 
The architecture of previous COPs has created real building blocks. COP30 produced a Global Implementation Accelerator, a Just Transition Mechanism, a climate finance work programme, and Presidency-led roadmaps on forests and transitioning away from fossil fuels. But as analysts observe, COP31 will need to move from frameworks to delivery — and that transition cannot happen while the actors most invested in preventing it are seated at the table.

The co-presidency must publish full team lists, disclose all funding and partnerships, adopt strict conflict-of-interest rules barring sponsorships or consultancies tied to fossil fuel or other high-polluting industries, and release summaries of meetings with external stakeholders.                                       

These are not radical demands; they are basic safeguards that would strengthen legitimacy and set a higher standard for future summits.

 The geopolitical context makes this more urgent, not less. The start of 2026 has demonstrated again how dependence on fossil fuels is closely linked to geopolitical instability — from US energy diplomacy to the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz — and how fossil fuel dependency remains a structural source of instability for energy systems and national economies. 

V. The Deeper Indictment
There is a phrase that deserves to be retired: “the energy transition.” It implies an orderly technical process, as though the world is simply upgrading its infrastructure. What is actually happening is a political confrontation between industries whose survival depends on continued extraction and a planetary system that cannot absorb it.
Over three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. High energy prices push up food costs. Inflation fuels political instability. Debt burdens deepen. The fossil fuel crisis has become a development crisis. 
The Caribbean, the Pacific, the Global South broadly — these are not bystanders to a crisis playing out elsewhere. They are its most concentrated victims. When fossil fuel lobbyists overwhelm the delegations of the most vulnerable nations in the negotiating rooms of Baku, Belém, and soon Antalya, they are not merely influencing trade policy. They are, in the most literal sense, determining the survivability of communities that did not cause the crisis.
This is what accountability journalism must name clearly: the delay is not failure. It is outcome. An industry that has operated with impunity inside the process designed to constrain it has extracted exactly what it came for — time.
COP31 is not another chance. It may be among the last ones that matter.

The 592 Guardian holds that verified facts must be stated as facts. The data cited here is publicly available, peer-reviewed, or sourced from credible intergovernmental bodies. The editorial position is our own.