WHEN THE STATE BECOMES THE THREAT!

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The 592 Guardian | Editorial , June 2026

 

When the State Becomes the Threat: The Killing of Altaf King

On the evening of June 25, 2026, a 16-year-old boy rode his motorcycle along the Princetown Access Road in Corentyne, Berbice. He had no weapon. He had committed no crime against any person. By the account of his own mother, he ran because he feared being caught riding without a licence — the kind of infraction that earns a ticket, not a death sentence.
Altaf King never made it home. He is dead. And the Guyana Police Force, through its Office of Professional Responsibility, is now investigating itself.

That alone should tell you everything you need to know about where this is headed.

What the Police Say

The GPF’s account is terse and clinical. Enquiries disclosed, they say, that King was riding motorcycle #CL 5607 when he attempted to evade a police patrol, lost control of the motorcycle, and collided with a utility pole. He sustained injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at the No. 75 Regional Public Hospital. The OPR has commenced an immediate investigation. Appropriate action will be taken should criminal or disciplinary culpability be established.
Note what that statement does not say. It does not say the patrol vehicle maintained a safe following distance.

It does not say officers rendered immediate assistance after the crash. It does not say anyone on that patrol has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation. It says the institution will investigate itself and will act if it finds itself culpable.

 The Guyana Police Force has issued a statement so carefully constructed that it forecloses nothing and admits nothing — while the boy’s mother is still screaming at the memory of finding her only son lying motionless on a hospital bed, his foot broken, his neck broken, blood covering his head.

What the Witnesses Say

The eyewitness account diverges from the police version at the single most consequential point: contact.
Scores of residents who converged on the scene allege that the pursuing patrol vehicle struck King’s motorcycle, sending him into the utility pole. They say officers then stepped out of the vehicle, looked at the boy bleeding on the road, and drove away to the station. They returned later in a second vehicle. And then, in the words of Padmini Megnauth — the mother who will spend the rest of her life trying to unsee what she saw at the No. 75 hospital — officers picked her son up and threw him into the van “like some dead dog.”

This is not rumour. This is sworn grief, spoken on the record, corroborated by multiple community witnesses, and consistent with video footage circulating on social media that shows King lying in a pool of blood while onlookers describe the manner in which officers eventually handled his body as callous and contemptuous.

The utility pole, multiple reports indicate, cracked in two. That is a physics question as much as an eyewitness question. The OPR’s investigators — if they are serious — need to answer it. Was the force consistent with a solo motorcycle losing control? Or with a vehicle impact?That is precisely the kind of forensic question that an internal investigation, with every structural incentive to produce a favourable conclusion, should not be trusted to answer alone.

The Proportionality Failure

Let us be precise about what preceded this chase, because it is the moral foundation of this entire editorial.
Altaf King was not suspected of robbery. He was not fleeing a crime scene. He was not armed. He was a 16-year-old boy — a former student of Skeldon Line Path Secondary School who had sat his CSEC examinations and was awaiting his results, a young mason learning a trade, his parents’ only child — riding a motorcycle without a licence.

A traffic infraction. An administrative matter. The kind of thing that, at most, should have resulted in a stop, a ticket, and a court date.

Instead, a police patrol vehicle engaged in a high-speed pursuit on a public road. The pursuit ended in the death of a child.
This is the proportionality failure that must anchor every demand for accountability that follows. The GPF did not pursue Altaf King because he posed a threat to the public. They pursued him because he tried to avoid them. And in their pursuit of a boy who posed no danger to anyone, they created the conditions — whether through direct contact or through reckless high-speed chase tactics — in which he died.

A bystander at the scene put it plainly: “The police them chase down a young school boy. Not like he’s a thief man that rob people or something. An innocent youth.”

That framing is not merely emotional. It is the correct legal and ethical frame. Lethal force — whether direct or consequential — requires proportionate justification. There is no proportionate justification for what happened on Princetown Access Road on June 25.

The Abandonment

It is not enough to examine the crash. We must examine what came after it.
If the witness accounts are accurate — and they are consistent, numerous, and corroborated by at least one opposition party whose representatives are on the ground with the family — officers at the scene of a critically injured teenager did not immediately render aid. They did not call for an ambulance. They left.
PNCR/APNU, in a formal statement, raised specific concern over allegations that King was left bleeding at the scene without receiving prompt assistance. That is not a fringe allegation. It is a documented concern raised by a constituted political party with representatives physically present in the community.

The GPF statement makes no mention of whether first aid was rendered. It makes no mention of response time. The silence is, in the prosecutorial tradition of this publication, evidence of what the institution does not want examined.

If it is established that officers struck this boy, saw him bleeding, and drove back to the station — that is not dereliction. That is abandonment. That is a level of contempt for human life that must be named as such.

The OPR Cannot Investigate This

Minister of Home Affairs Oneidge Walrond issued the required statement. She extended condolences. She assured the public of a thorough, impartial, and transparent investigation. She called for calm.

The 592 Guardian calls for something more substantive: an investigation structure that is actually capable of producing the truth.
The Office of Professional Responsibility is an internal police body. It answers to the GPF command structure. It has investigated complaints of police misconduct before. The public record of those investigations — their timelines, their findings, their accountability outcomes — does not inspire confidence.                                The family’s attorney, civil society, and the political opposition should be demanding immediately that this investigation be placed in independent hands.

At minimum, that

→Means civilian participation in the investigative panel.              →It means independent forensic examination of both the police patrol vehicle and the motorcycle, conducted by experts with no institutional relationship to the GPF.                                                →It means preservation — under seal, by court order if necessary — of all communications from Springlands Police Station on the evening of June 25: radio logs, vehicle dispatch records, duty rosters, and any body-worn camera or dashcam footage, if such equipment exists and was operational.
→It means, above all, that the ranks on that patrol must be identified, suspended with pay pending investigation, and interviewed under caution — not as colleagues conducting a collegial inquiry, but as potential subjects of a manslaughter or unlawful killing investigation.

A Note on Circulating Allegations

This publication is aware of reports circulating on social media alleging that two eyewitnesses to the incident were subsequently arrested and granted $20,000 bail each. As of the time of this editorial, The 592 Guardian has been unable to verify this allegation through any named source, legal representative, or corroborating local news report. We therefore cannot publish it as established fact.

We can, and do, publish the demand that the GPF publicly account for every arrest made in connection with events on and after June 25 in the Princetown/Corriverton area. If witnesses to a police killing are being detained, the public is entitled to know. If they are not, the record should be cleared.   Silence on this point is not neutrality — it is pressure.

The Pattern This Cannot Be Separated From

Guyana has been here before. The architecture of impunity that allows a patrol to chase a child to his death, leave him bleeding in the road, and then issue a terse institutional statement is not the product of one bad shift at the Springlands Police Station. It is the product of decades of inadequate civilian oversight, a culture of institutional self-protection, and a political class that has consistently treated police accountability as a threat to order rather than a prerequisite for it.
The PPP/C administration, now in its second consecutive term following the 2025 elections, governs a security apparatus that has operated without meaningful independent oversight.

The Police Complaints Authority — where it has functioned at all — has been chronically under-resourced and structurally toothless. The OPR was designed to manage optics, not produce accountability.
This is not the first young man killed during a police pursuit in this country. It will not be the last — unless the institutional conditions that make such killings possible, and their coverups likely, are dismantled and replaced with something worthy of a democratic state.

What Justice Requires
Padmini Megnauth is not asking for much. She is asking for the truth about how her only son died. She is asking that the people responsible be held accountable. She is asking that official assurances not be allowed to substitute for official action.
The 592 Guardian stands with that demand, and we will continue to cover this case until the investigation’s terms, conduct, and findings are fully public.

We make the following demands of the relevant authorities, clearly and without qualification:

→The ranks attached to the patrol vehicle involved must be identified publicly and suspended pending investigation. The patrol vehicle must be subjected to independent forensic examination. All station records from Springlands for the evening of June 25 must be preserved by court order.

→An independent civilian panel must be established to oversee — not merely observe — the investigation. The findings must be released in full, without redaction, within a legally binding timeframe.

→And to the Minister of Home Affairs, whose assurances of transparency are on the public record: you have made a promise. This publication will hold you to it. The community of Corriverton will hold you to it. The mother of Altaf King will hold you to it.

He was sixteen years old. He sat his CSEC exams. He was learning to lay bricks. He had no licence and no weapon and no record and no reason to die on that road.

The least this country owes him is the truth.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, politics, and extractive industry. Editorials represent the position of the publication.

The Venezuelan Network

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EDITORIAL  |  JUNE ,2026

The Venezuelan Network at the Heart of One Guyana’s Flagship Project

While the PPP spent a year branding the opposition a Venezuelan security threat, it quietly handed Guyana’s most expensive infrastructure project to Venezuelan nationals, a former PDVSA operative, and a family bank the FBI raided for PDVSA money. That is not irony. That is a standard applied to enemies and abandoned for friends.

Let us begin with a bank almost no Guyanese has heard of.

Banco San Juan Internacional — BSJI — announced to the world, via a LinkedIn post, that it played an integral role in financing the US$759 million Gas-to-Energy plant at Wales, West Bank Demerara. It described itself as pivotal in supporting Lindsayca CH4 Guyana’s project for the Government of Guyana. It spoke of clean, affordable power for thousands of Guyanese.

Pleasant words. Incomplete picture.

BSJI is a Puerto Rico bank owned by a Venezuelan family. In February 2019, heavily armed FBI agents raided its San Juan offices, seizing documents in an operation tied to U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. Federal authorities suspected the bank of moving money for PDVSA — Venezuela’s state oil company, the same entity at the centre of the Maduro regime’s financial architecture. The then-U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton publicly described the raid as part of Washington’s campaign to cut off funds to Nicolás Maduro. The Department of Justice seized US$53 million.

A 2020 settlement returned most of it. BSJI paid a US$1 million penalty to close an investigation into the adequacy of its anti-money-laundering controls. That settlement did not close the file on the institution’s standing in the American financial system.

The New York Federal Reserve suspended BSJI’s access to the U.S. payment system in 2019, restored it in December 2020 after the settlement, then in 2022 found the bank had breached the conditions of its second chance — failing to file three mandatory assessments proving its compliance programme actually worked. The Fed concluded BSJI posed an undue risk and moved to shut it out permanently.

The bank sued. In October 2023, a federal district court refused to block the closure. In January 2025, the case was dismissed. On May 13, 2026 — last month — the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal unanimously, three judges to none. Writing for the court, Judge Denny Chin found that regional Reserve Banks hold what he described as a toolkit of scalpels and a hatchet to manage risk. The court also rejected the bank’s argument that it had been targeted because its owner was Venezuelan, finding no evidence for the claim.

By May 2023, BSJI had 14 account holders. Most of them, court filings reveal, were the owner’s close relatives and offshore entities they control.

This is not a bank in any recognisable commercial sense. It is a family vehicle in Puerto Rico — not federally insured, not under prudential federal supervision — that the FBI raided over Venezuelan oil money and the United States banking system expelled, twice, for compliance failures.

And it submitted a proposal to finance the largest public infrastructure project in Guyana’s history.

The proposal, a preliminary draft dated June 10, 2022 — six months before Guyana signed the construction contract — laid out a Multi-Project Credit Facility: US$252 million, described as up to 35 percent of project cost against an estimated investment of US$800 million. Ten-year term. Interest at 4.50 percent. A 1.50 percent fee. The collateral BSJI wanted was the project’s own output: the electricity and the gas liquids. The funds would sit in trust managed by the bank itself. BSJI also reserved the right to approve whoever won the contract to trade the plant’s natural gas liquids, to take the project’s carbon credits and assign them to third parties, and to require that all insurance covering construction, operating and political risk be acceptable to the bank — at Guyana’s expense.

To summarise: a small Puerto Rico bank owned by Venezuelans proposed to lend Guyana a quarter of a billion dollars, hold the nation’s project revenues in its own trust, control who sold the gas liquids, pocket the carbon credits, and insure itself against risk with Guyanese public funds.

The lender of record for the gas plant is the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which approved a US$527 million loan in late December 2024. The government has never explained BSJI’s role, and Finance Minister Ashni Singh did not return calls on the subject. But CH4’s own press material describes BSJI as its partner bank — the vehicle through which CH4 helps clients secure financing alongside EXIM and the U.S. Development Finance Corporation. The proposal landed on the desks of Ashni Singh and GTE Taskforce head Winston Brassington. The question is not whether BSJI is a footnote. The question is why a bank with this history was anywhere near Guyana’s treasury — and why the government has never said a single public word about it.

Because the bank is only the entry point. To see the full structure, you have to understand who actually built this plant.

The contract was awarded in December 2022 to a consortium styled as Lindsayca-CH4 Guyana. The government and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo sold it relentlessly as American excellence — U.S. engineering, a pillar of the Washington-Georgetown strategic partnership. EXIM gave it a Deal of the Year award. The American framing was the entire political point.

Peel the flag back, and you find Caracas.

Lindsayca, the Houston-based partner, is owned and run by two Venezuelan brothers, Hector and Jesus Fuentes Guimare. The project director at Wales, Ruben Figuera, was, by multiple accounts, a high-ranking official in the Maduro government overseeing PDVSA joint ventures before international authorities froze money in his Andorra accounts on bribery and money-laundering allegations.

CH4 Systems, the other half of the original consortium, is a Puerto Rico company wholly owned by Juan Bellosta. The Bellostas are the family that owns BSJI. Corporate records show CH4 Systems, BSJI and a procurement company called Commonwealth Procurement sharing the same Guaynabo address. Another entity, Venequip Puerto Rico, ties to the same family network.

When the bids came in during September 2022, Lindsayca-CH4 placed the highest of five. PowerChina offered the same integrated facility for US$704 million. China Machinery offered US$696 million. Guyana paid a premium of nearly US$200 million to keep China out — and what it got was a consortium owned by Venezuelans, directed by an alleged former PDVSA operative, and financed, adjacent, by a Venezuelan family bank the FBI had raided over PDVSA money.

The partnership has since fractured in ways the public was deliberately not allowed to see. The consortium took the Government of Guyana to a Dispute Avoidance and Adjudication Board. When that board ruled in January 2025, the government kept the outcome secret, citing confidentiality. Reports indicate Guyana was required to pay around US$106 million, negotiated down to roughly US$82 million, with approximately US$40 million going to CH4 to exit the deal. The Office of the Prime Minister denies any secret payment. But two facts are not in dispute: CH4 and the Bellosta family exited, Lindsayca took full control and rebranded as Lindsayca Guyana Inc., and the government chose to litigate the entire episode in darkness.

A government that trusted its own deal would not need the dark.

Now place all of this on the map as it stands in June 2026, and the embarrassment becomes something heavier and more dangerous.

Venezuela claims the Essequibo — two-thirds of Guyana’s landmass. Maduro held a referendum on annexing it in December 2023 and signed a law in April 2024 purporting to make it Venezuelan territory. The merits of Guyana’s case were argued at the International Court of Justice in The Hague from May 4 to 11 this year. A ruling is expected around August. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez has already declared Venezuela will ignore whatever the ICJ decides.

The gas plant at Wales sits in undisputed Guyana. The geography is not the point. The point is that this government has staked the nation’s energy future — and its national-security argument about independence from imported fuel — on critical infrastructure built and partly bankrolled by the very network the United States spent years dismantling. The PDVSA money that got BSJI raided. The PDVSA joint ventures Figuera is alleged to have run. The Venezuelan ownership running through Lindsayca and CH4. The family bank behind them.

While Caracas attempts to seize Guyana’s oil-bearing territory and the United States defends Guyana against it, Venezuelan oil-network figures poured the foundations of Guyana’s flagship power plant — with a loan from the American export bank. You do not have to allege a conspiracy to find that intolerable. You only have to ask the questions any serious government would ask.

EXIM finances American exports. It does not exist to protect Guyana from the people Guyana hires. That job belonged to this government.

Which brings us to the part that should anger Guyanese most — the part the government cannot attribute to Houston or San Juan or The Hague.

For more than a year, the People’s Progressive Party made Venezuelan entanglement and U.S. sanctions the centrepiece of its case against the opposition. In June 2024, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned businessman Azruddin Mohamed and his father under the Global Magnitsky framework for alleged public corruption and gold smuggling. The Bank of Guyana closed their accounts. In October 2025, a federal grand jury in Florida unsealed an eleven-count indictment.

The PPP did not let a single day of that go to waste. Vice President Jagdeo went on television to warn that the country itself could face sanctions and big trouble with the United States if Mohamed were elected. The U.S. Ambassador called the prospect concerning and problematic. A U.S. Congressman publicly branded Mohamed a pro-Maduro puppet candidate. The message to voters was clear, repetitive, and unmistakable: the opposition is the Venezuelan problem, the opposition is the sanctions risk, a vote for them is a vote to drag Maduro and the Treasury Department down on all our heads.

The standard the PPP applied to Azruddin Mohamed was this: association with U.S. sanctions and a Venezuelan taint disqualifies you from public trust, full stop. By that exact standard, what is a consortium owned by Venezuelan nationals, directed by an alleged former PDVSA operative with frozen Andorra accounts, financed adjacent by a Venezuelan family bank the FBI raided over PDVSA money and the Fed expelled from the U.S. financial system?

If a sanctioned gold dealer represents a national-security emergency, why does a PDVSA-linked network holding the keys to the national power plant qualify as American excellence?

The government invented that standard. It applied it with maximum force against its political opponents. It then abandoned it entirely when the same criteria attached to its own flagship project, its own contractors, and its own financiers.

That is not a policy contradiction. It is a confession.

The 592 Guardian calls on the Ministry of Finance to make public the full nature of BSJI’s role in the Gas-to-Energy project — every communication, every proposal, every meeting. We call on the GTE Taskforce to explain why a consortium that submitted the highest bid was selected, who conducted due diligence on the Venezuelan ownership and PDVSA connections of the principals, and what, if anything, was disclosed to EXIM before the US$527 million loan was signed. We call on parliamentary committees to summon Winston Brassington and examine the procurement record in the public interest.

And we call on every Guyanese who sat through the PPP’s Venezuela lectures during the 2025 election campaign to hold this government to its own proclaimed standard — because a nation that cannot apply its principles evenhandedly has no principles at all.

 

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Gone: The Data Commissioner

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent Accountability Journalism

 EDITORIAL •ACCOUNTABILITY

June 2026

Gone: The Data Commissioner, the Witness, and the Charade of Accountability

 On Monday, the high-profile elections fraud trial proceeding before Acting Chief Magistrate Faith McGusty at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court was adjourned — not because justice had run its course, but because the State’s own witness had apparently run away.

Aneal Giddings, who served as Information Technology Manager at the Guyana Elections Commission during the catastrophically contested March 2020 General and Regional Elections, is currently out of the jurisdiction. The prosecution, unable to produce him, applied to have his evidence-in-chief received via Zoom. Defence attorney Nigel Hughes objected on grounds that a witness of Giddings’ centrality to the case must appear in person for cross-examination — a position this publication considers entirely correct as a matter of both law and elementary fairness.

Magistrate McGusty offered a reasonable compromise: remote evidence-in-chief, with Giddings present in person for cross-examination. The prosecution sought instructions. When the matter was recalled, the State’s preference was to defer his testimony entirely — until he becomes available.

The court was then informed that the next scheduled witness is former Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn, expected on Wednesday, June 24. The trial grinds on. But the question this development raises does not grind on quietly. It detonates.

 The Double Vacancy at the Heart of Guyana’s Digital State

Here is what the public record now compels us to state plainly: Aneal Giddings is not merely a reluctant witness in an elections fraud prosecution. He is, simultaneously, Guyana’s newly appointed Data Protection Commissioner — the sole officer of a statutory body whose mandate is to regulate the collection, storage, processing, and transfer of personal data in a country where an oil boom has accelerated state and corporate data-harvesting at a pace that existing law is utterly ill-equipped to address.

Sources available to The 592 Guardian indicate that Giddings has not temporarily travelled. He has migrated permanently to New York.

If this is accurate, then Guyana currently has no functioning Data Protection Commissioner. The office is not dormant. It is abandoned. And in that vacuum, data harvesting proceeds — commercial, governmental, and extractive — without the statutory oversight the legislature intended when it established the Data Protection Act.

We ask the Ali administration directly: Is the Data Protection Commission operational? Is Aneal Giddings being paid from the public purse while residing permanently in New York? Has the government received formal notice of his departure or his intention to vacate the office? And if he has vacated it in fact if not yet in law, when does the administration intend to tell the Guyanese people?

 A Witness in an Elections Fraud Trial Cannot Simply Be Unavailable

Giddings is not a peripheral figure in this prosecution. As GECOM’s IT Manager during the 2020 elections, he occupied one of the most consequential technical positions in what became the most disputed electoral count in Guyana’s post-independence history. The charges before the court — nineteen counts of conspiracy, implicating Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, former Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield, former Deputy Chief Elections Officer Roxanne Myers, former PNCR Chairperson Volda Lawrence, and others — rest substantially on what happened to the data during that count. Giddings sits at the technical centre of that question.

The defence is right to insist on in-person cross-examination. The State was right to acknowledge it cannot proceed otherwise. But what neither acknowledgement addresses is the deeper structural embarrassment now before this court and this country: the prosecution’s key technical witness has emigrated, and the government that is prosecuting the case appointed that same witness to a statutory regulatory post that now sits empty.

How does one square that appointment with due diligence? Did no one in the relevant ministry ask whether a witness in a live criminal prosecution — one touching directly on his conduct at GECOM — was an appropriate candidate for a statutory office requiring continuous and in-country presence? Or was the appointment itself a form of patronage extended to a figure whose continued cooperation with the prosecution required some form of inducement?

We do not assert the latter as fact. We assert it as a question the public is entitled to have answered, openly, by the administration that made the appointment.

 The Data Protection Vacuum Is Not a Technicality

Guyana’s Data Protection Act was enacted to govern a landscape that is rapidly becoming one of the most consequential regulatory terrains in the country’s modern history. State agencies collect biometric data. Oil companies and their contractors collect proprietary geological data that doubles as territorial intelligence. Telecommunications providers harvest communications metadata. Commercial banks and fintechs process transaction data that, in aggregate, constitutes an intimate record of economic life.

The Data Protection Commissioner is not a ceremonial post. It is the statutory checkpoint between Guyanese citizens and the entities — state and private — that seek to exploit their personal data for commercial or political advantage. In a petrostate economy characterised by procurement opacity, regulatory capture, and institutional thinness, that checkpoint matters.

If the Commissioner’s chair is empty because the appointee has migrated to New York while nominally holding office, then data harvesting is proceeding in a legislative context that provides for oversight but in practice provides none. The companies drilling into Guyana’s data ecosystem — like the companies drilling into its seabed — are operating in a surveillance-friendly vacuum.

The legislature did not pass the Data Protection Act so that it could be administered by a phantom.

 What the Administration Must Do

The 592 Guardian calls on the Ali administration to immediately clarify the status of Aneal Giddings’ appointment as Data Protection Commissioner, including whether he has formally resigned, whether he continues to draw salary or allowances, and whether any acting appointment has been made in his absence.

We call on the Director of Public Prosecutions to publicly address the implications of the prosecution’s key witness having emigrated, and to explain what assurances — if any — the State has secured regarding his return and availability to testify.

We call on the National Assembly’s relevant committee to summon the Minister responsible for the Data Protection Act to account for the operational status of the Commission. The people of Guyana are entitled to know whether the Act they funded through their parliamentary representatives is being administered or merely filed.

And we call on civil society — particularly the legal profession, technology sector advocates, and human rights organisations — to monitor this vacancy actively. The absence of a functioning Data Commissioner is not an administrative oversight. It is a governance failure with direct consequences for every Guyanese whose personal data is being collected, processed, and traded while the office meant to protect them sits dark.

 The elections fraud prosecution is, at its core, a test of whether Guyana’s institutions will hold those who violated the democratic will of the people accountable. If its witnesses can emigrate and its statutory officers can vanish without consequence, that test is already failing. Guyana cannot prosecute electoral fraud on Mondays and tolerate institutional abandonment on Tuesdays. The law applies, or it does not.

 — The Editors, The 592 Guardian

A Strategy, Finally — Two Decades and Hundreds of Billions Too Late

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL  |  June, 2026

A Strategy, Finally — Two Decades and Hundreds of Billions Too Late

Minister Zulfikar Mustapha calls the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority’s first published strategy a historic milestone. The more urgent history is the one nobody explained at the soft launch: how an apex agency entrusted with tens of billions of dollars a year operated for two decades without a governing document — and why the man now welcoming this strategy as NDIA chairman is the same official an earlier audit found had personally breached procurement law.

At Thursday’s soft launch, Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha presented the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority’s first-ever published strategy as a watershed moment — the document through which Guyana would finally chart a path toward resilient, productive, and prosperous water management. NDIA Chairman Lionel Wordsworth called it an important roadmap for phased implementation.

Both men spoke as though the absence of such a document until 2026 were a footnote rather than the headline. It is the headline.

 NDIA was established under the Drainage and Irrigation Act as the country’s apex authority for drainage, irrigation, and flood control more than two decades ago. For all but the final weeks of that history, it has operated, by its own minister’s admission, without a strategy.

The money that moved through that strategic vacuum was not modest. The 2023 national budget allocated $19.7 billion for drainage and irrigation works; NDIA’s capital allocation alone for pump stations, structures, and retention payments was budgeted at $6.3 billion that year, yet actual spending reached $15.3 billion — more than double the approved figure, with no published strategy to explain the overrun. In 2024, $72.3 billion of a $97.6 billion agriculture budget was directed to drainage and irrigation. In 2025, Senior Minister Dr. Ashni Singh announced a further $73.2 billion injection to complete pump stations and advance canal works.

Multiply those figures across the years NDIA has existed, and the sums entrusted to an agency operating without a published strategy run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Against what plan were those budgets built? Against what targets were they measured?

Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions the Auditor General’s own office was effectively forced to ask.                     A performance audit of NDIA’s asset management, covering January 2021 to June 2024 and tabled only weeks ago, found widespread weaknesses: poor documentation, unfilled key positions, inadequate maintenance systems, and a lack of accountability for billions of dollars in public property.

The audit was triggered by NDIA’s own escalating maintenance expenditure, which rose from $1.07 billion in 2021 to $2.46 billion in 2023, and by persistent public complaints about flooding despite that spending. The total bill to maintain more than 500 pieces of NDIA equipment over the period came to $6.67 billion. Twenty-two recommendations followed. Notably absent from that list: write a strategy — because, apparently, no one in the chain of oversight thought to ask why one did not already exist.

Even that audit has been publicly challenged as insufficient. A critique published in response to the Auditor General’s findings argued that the report measured compliance, not performance: it could not tell taxpayers how many kilometers of canals were maintained, how many structures were rehabilitated, how many acres were protected from flooding, or what NDIA actually achieved with the billions it spent.

If neither the agency nor the body auditing it can answer that question, what exactly is the new strategy being launched to fix — and how would the public ever know if it worked?

The most damning fact in this story is not a figure. It is a name. Lionel Wordsworth, the NDIA chairman who stood at Thursday’s launch describing the strategy as an important roadmap, is the same Lionel Wordsworth who served as NDIA’s chief executive in 2012, when an internal audit of fuel consumption and equipment maintenance found that fraudulent acts had been committed in breach of the Procurement Act 2003 and recommended his immediate dismissal. That audit found undated, unstamped contractor quotations indicating deliberate concealment, and a senior engineer who certified payments to his own uncle without declaring the conflict. President Donald Ramotar sat on the findings for months without acting.                                                                                                                          When the coalition government took office in 2015, Wordsworth was placed on 308 days of accumulated leave and never returned to the post. In 2020 he resurfaced as a ministerial advisor to Minister Mustapha. He is now NDIA’s chairman — the man entrusted with welcoming a strategy meant to close the very governance gaps an earlier audit found him personally responsible for opening.

This media outfit asks, formally and on the record, the questions Thursday’s soft launch was not built to answer.                                                       
How did NDIA prepare its annual budget estimates for two decades without a governing strategy to justify them against?
Under what framework were the $216 million in advances linked to pump station projects — flagged as unrecovered in the Auditor General’s 2024 report — approved and disbursed?
What internal control today distinguishes sole-sourced contracts and procurement decisions from the undocumented, undated, relative-awarded contracts an earlier audit found at the same agency under the same chairman
And why, fourteen years after an audit recommended his dismissal for fraud, does Lionel Wordsworth remain inside the institution he was found to have failed — now at its helm?

 None of this is new to NDIA’s file. As far back as 2013, opposition parliamentarians flagged the Auditor General’s recommendation that NDIA operate its own independent accounting body rather than have its funds run through the central ministry — a structural safeguard against precisely the undocumented, unaccountable spending the 2025 performance audit found all over again. That recommendation went unimplemented through a coalition government and is apparently still unimplemented under this one.

The pattern is not partisan. It is institutional, and it has now spanned three administrations without correction.

A strategy document, however well produced, does not retroactively account for two decades of spending without one.

The 592 Guardian calls on the Public Accounts Committee and the National Assembly to require NDIA to publish, alongside this strategy, a full reconciliation of capital and maintenance expenditure against measurable deliverables for every year since the authority’s establishment — and to explain, publicly and specifically, the continued tenure of a chairman an audit once found to have personally breached the Procurement Act.                                  Until those answers are on the record, Thursday’s soft launch was not a milestone. It was an admission, twenty years late, dressed up as one.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Remainder Seat

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL ♦  June, 2026

The Remainder Seat

Amanza Walton-Desir secured Guyana’s last parliamentary seat by force of arithmetic, not breadth of support. Her nominations to the Guyana Elections Commission behave as though the opposite were true.

On September 1, 2025, the Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) secured a single seat in Guyana’s 65-member National Assembly with 4,585 votes — 1.05 percent of the national count, the final seat allocated. It claimed only because no other minor party retained sufficient remainder votes to capture it.

That arithmetic is the entirety of FGM’s parliamentary mandate. It is not a foundation from which to dictate the composition of a constitutional commission.

Yet that is the posture Amanza Walton-Desir has adopted in her response to Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s consultation on Opposition-nominated appointments to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM). She nominated Nigel London for the seat — a figure already designated under FGM’s internal rotation arrangement to inherit her own place in the 13th Parliament.

The nomination is not a contribution to a national consultation. It is succession planning routed through a constitutional appointment.

Walton-Desir’s own description of London — that he “will ask difficult questions” and engage “critically with the work of the Commission” — is the full extent of the case made for him. No electoral-law background, no administrative record, no demonstrated familiarity with the Representation of the People Act (ROPA) has been offered to the public to justify placing him at the center of Guyana’s electoral machinery.

Walton-Desir then proposed retaining one of the three outgoing Opposition-nominated commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin, or Desmond Trotman — for a two-year transitional period, while converting the other two into paid advisers to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. The justification offered was “institutional knowledge.” That argument does not survive contact with GECOM’s governing framework.

The Commission operates under ROPA and its accompanying regulations — codified, public, and accessible to any attorney competent in electoral law. There is no proprietary expertise sealed inside three individuals that cannot be transferred through ordinary statutory and constitutional literacy

.

What the proposal does guarantee is a new and unnecessary expenditure: paid advisory roles for commissioners whose 2025 tenure was defined by a documented pattern of walkouts from GECOM statutory meetings in the run-up to the September elections — disruptions serious enough to draw public criticism from the Attorney General and to repeatedly force the Commission to invoke its constitutional quorum-reduction provisions.

A record of repeated withdrawal from the table is an unusual qualification to monetize as institutional memory.

 Having built her case for retention on uncertain ground, Walton-Desir then moved to disqualify Mohamed’s own short-listed nominees — Senior Counsel Roysdale Forde, attorney-at-law Siand Dhurjon, and Damien Da Silva — on the basis that their ongoing representation of Mohamed in litigation creates “avoidable perceptions of a conflict of interest.” The objection does not hold. Representing a client in an unrelated legal matter does not, on its own, disqualify an attorney from serving on a constitutional commission; applied consistently, the standard would empty Guyana’s election-law bar of eligible candidates. Forde’s record as Shadow Attorney General during the 12th Parliament and his sustained litigation on voter verification and biometric safeguards make him among the more credentialed names ever floated for the post — credentials Walton-Desir, herself an attorney, did not dispute. She raised perception, not competence, while subjecting her own nominee to no comparable scrutiny.

The cumulative effect of Walton-Desir’s submission — retain a familiar commissioner, install an untested successor, and block the Opposition Leader’s legally credentialed nominees — is not reform.

 It preserves a known arrangement under reform’s vocabulary, the kind of continuity that has long allowed GECOM’s commissioner seats to function as fixed points in the country’s entrenched political duopoly rather than as instruments of an electoral authority answerable to the country as a whole.

Walton-Desir’s own framing — that “the question before us is not only who should sit at the table, but whether we are prepared to improve the table itself” — is correct as a proposition and undercut by her own conduct. Nothing in her submission improves the table. It rearranges the chairs while keeping familiar hands on them.

 

FGM holds its single seat in the National Assembly by the narrowest possible margin, and Walton-Desir would be better served treating that fact as a constraint rather than a credential.

A party that arrived in Parliament on a remainder seat does not thereby acquire standing to dictate the architecture of Guyana’s electoral authority through nomination and obstruction.

 If FGM intends to grow beyond 1.05 percent of the national vote, it will not do so by clinging to proximity with the order it claims to be reforming. It will do so by demonstrating, in full public view, the judgment that 4,585 voters were asked to trust on faith — and by recognizing that a mandate this narrow obligates restraint, not maximalism.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Guyana’s Uranium Gamble

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦RESOURCE ACCOUNTABILITY♦ JUNE 2026

Guyana’s Uranium Gamble: Strategic Resource, Weak Safeguards

The announcement that Canadian junior explorer U92 Energy Corp. has acquired a decade’s worth of technical data for the Kurupung uranium project should not be treated as routine mining news. It is, in fact, a development that exposes a glaring policy vacuum, raises serious regulatory questions, and signals that Guyana may be drifting into a strategically sensitive sector without the institutional readiness to manage it.

Uranium is not gold, nor is it bauxite. It is a strategic mineral tied directly to nuclear energy and global security frameworks.

 Countries that permit uranium exploration and production do so under strict legislative regimes, layered oversight, and international safeguards aligned with institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Guyana, by contrast, appears to be approaching uranium under the same legal and administrative architecture used for conventional minerals. This approach is, at best, outdated, and at worst, dangerously insufficient.

At the center of this issue is U92’s acquisition of a comprehensive historical dataset underpinning a 20.6 million-pound uranium resource estimate. The dataset—comprising geological mapping, drill records, assay results, geophysical surveys, and metallurgical analyses—represents the intellectual and technical foundation of the project. Control of this data is not incidental; it determines how the resource is valued, developed, and ultimately monetized.

Yet this critical asset was secured through a CA$500,000 transaction settled entirely in shares.

 

This raises immediate red flags. Share-based transactions of this nature often obscure true valuation and bypass the financial transparency that accompanies cash deals. They can signal limited liquidity on the part of the acquiring company, while simultaneously transferring significant value through speculative equity instruments. In practical terms, a decade of strategic geological intelligence has now changed hands without a clear indication of its real market worth.

More troubling, however, is the layered corporate structure through which control of this uranium project has been assembled. U92, a Canadian entity, acquired a Singaporean company—LIA Industries—which in turn controls a Guyanese subsidiary holding the prospecting licenses. Now, through a separate agreement, U92 consolidates ownership of the project’s technical data.

This multi-jurisdictional arrangement complicates oversight and raises legitimate questions about beneficial ownership, regulatory scrutiny, and accountability.

 It is precisely the type of structure that demands heightened due diligence from state agencies, particularly when the underlying asset involves a mineral of strategic importance.

There is no public indication that such scrutiny has been applied.

Equally concerning is the apparent absence of a national uranium policy. Guyana has not articulated how it intends to regulate uranium exploration, manage its environmental risks, or comply with international nuclear material safeguards. There is no evidence of a dedicated legal framework governing the handling, storage, transport, or export of radioactive materials. Nor is there clarity on whether existing institutions possess the technical capacity to oversee such a sector.

Instead, what is unfolding suggests that Guyana is allowing a foreign junior explorer—whose primary asset is speculative capital—to establish early control over both the physical resource and the data that defines it.

The timeline adds further pressure. The prospecting licenses issued for the Kurupung property expire in April 2027, with possible extensions to 2029. This creates an inherent incentive to accelerate drilling and resource validation, potentially outpacing environmental oversight and regulatory preparedness. Already, a 5,000-metre diamond drilling program is being mobilized, with infrastructure development underway.

The pace of activity stands in stark contrast to the silence on policy.

This is not an argument against resource development. It is an argument for coherence, transparency, and strategic awareness

 Countries such as Canada and Australia permit uranium mining, but only within robust regulatory systems that integrate environmental protection, national security considerations, and international compliance obligations. Others, including Kazakhstan and Namibia, maintain strong state involvement in uranium projects to ensure national interests are preserved.

Guyana, on the other hand, appears to be entering this sector without a declared framework, while permitting complex offshore ownership structures and opaque transactions to define its trajectory.

This raises unavoidable questions.

What due diligence was conducted on U92 Energy Corp. and its affiliated entities? Did the Government of Guyana assess the implications of transferring control of a decade’s worth of uranium exploration data through a share-based transaction? Is there a national policy governing uranium exploration and potential production? Are Guyana’s laws aligned with international nuclear safeguards and export control regimes? And critically, who is ultimately accountable for ensuring that this sector develops in a manner consistent with national security and environmental protection?

These are not abstract concerns. They go to the heart of sovereignty, governance, and long-term national interest.

Guyana cannot afford to treat uranium as just another line item in its extractive portfolio. The decisions being made now—quietly, and with limited public scrutiny—will shape not only the future of this resource, but also the country’s credibility in managing strategically sensitive industries.

If there is a policy, it must be stated. If there are safeguards, they must be demonstrated. And if there is oversight, it must be visible

Anything less would suggest that Guyana is not managing its uranium potential—but surrendering it.

 

STOLEN FROM THE INTERIOR:

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        THE 592 GUARDIAN     

INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

STOLEN FROM THE INTERIOR:

How the State Has Looted, Ignored, and Buried the Amerindian Purpose Fund for Twenty-Five Years

The 2024 Auditor General’s Report does not merely flag irregularities in the Amerindian Purpose Fund. It confirms — once again, with the numbing patience of a system that no longer expects to be heard — that a fund established for Guyana’s most marginalized communities has been allowed to dissolve into a legal void, a financial black hole, and a graveyard of undelivered promises. This editorial names the failure, traces its architecture, and holds its custodians to account.

The 592 Guardian   | Investigative Desk | June 2026

Let us begin with what the law says — or rather, what it no longer says. The Amerindian Purpose Fund was created under Section 28 of the Amerindian Act Chapter 29:01. In 2006, that Act was repealed. The successor legislation, the Amerindian Act 2006, made no provision for the Fund’s continued operation. From that moment, the Amerindian Purpose Fund ceased to have a legal foundation.

That was nineteen years ago.

In nineteen years, no administration — not the APNU+AFC coalition, not the PPP/C government that succeeded it — has seen fit to pass the enabling legislation that would give this Fund a lawful basis. Money has continued to move through it. Cheques have been written in its name. Communities have been told projects are funded. And the legal infrastructure to govern any of it has simply never existed.

A fund created to serve Indigenous communities has operated without law, without accounts, and without consequence — for nearly two decades. That is not negligence. That is policy.

The 2024 Auditor General’s Report, paragraphs 208 through 210, confirms what previous reports have confirmed in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and before that. Financial Statements for the Amerindian Purpose Fund were not presented for audit. The finding, the AG notes with understated precision, echoes “similar observations noted in previous years.” This is the language of an institution that has stopped expecting accountability and begun merely recording its absence.

The 592 Guardian will not accept that framing. We place the evidence before the public as a prosecutor places it before a jury — methodically, without embellishment, and with the full weight of what it means.

II.THE FOURTEEN COUNTS — EVIDENCE OF INSTITUTIONAL BETRAYAL

The following findings are drawn directly from the 2024 AG Report and corroborated by the AG’s prior annual reports. Each constitutes a discrete, documented failure. Together they form a pattern so consistent, so repeated, and so unaddressed that no honest observer can attribute it to circumstance.

|COUNT 1: OPERATING WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 209; Amerindian Act 2006

Finding: The Fund’s enabling legislation was repealed in 2006. No replacement provision was enacted.

Duration: 19 years of unlawful operation

Every transaction processed through the APF since 2006 has occurred in a legal vacuum. No minister, no permanent secretary, no budget officer authorized to disburse public funds through this vehicle had — or has — a valid statutory basis to do so. The question that neither the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs nor the Attorney General’s Chambers has been asked to answer publicly is this: what is the legal status of every dollar disbursed through this fund since the repeal? The 592 Guardian asks it now.

|COUNT 2: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. ZERO FINANCIAL STATEMENTS.

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 210; AG 2014 Report

Finding: No audited financial statements have been produced since the Fund opened in 2000.

Pattern: Flagged repeatedly — including as a “similar observation” from prior years in 2024

The Amerindian Purpose Fund was opened in 2000. It has never — not once in twenty-five years — produced an audited financial statement. Section 29 of the Act explicitly requires the Ministry to prepare annual financial statements subject to audit by the Auditor General. This requirement has been consistently violated across multiple administrations. The Ministry’s response to the 2024 finding? Staff shortages. The same response given last year. The year before that.

|COUNT 3: BANK ACCOUNT LAST RECONCILED: 2009

Source: AG 2020 Report, as reported by Stabroek News

Finding: The Fund’s bank account has not been balanced against its books in over 15 years.

Implication: No one in government can say with certainty how much money is in this Fund or where it went.

Bank reconciliation is not an advanced financial practice. It is the most basic act of fiscal stewardship — matching what the ledger says against what the bank statement shows. The APF’s account has not been reconciled in over fifteen years. This means that the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs has been authorizing expenditures from an account whose balance it has never verified. The Ministry does not know what it holds. It does not know what it has spent. And it has told the nation’s auditors, in effect, that this is acceptable.

|COUNT 4: GYD $647.6M OUT THE DOOR. NO RECEIPTS.

Source: 2024 AG Report

Amount: GYD $647.6M (approx. US$3.1M)

Finding: 109 cheque orders from 2023 and 2024 remain uncleared — money paid in advance, proof of delivery never returned.

One hundred and nine cheque orders. Nearly three million US dollars. Disbursed in advance. Not one receipt confirmed what the money purchased. Under standard financial regulations, cheque orders must be cleared within thirty days. These have not been cleared. In some cases they have been outstanding for well over a year. The rules exist precisely to prevent public money from disappearing without trace. Those rules have been systematically ignored.

|COUNT 5: GYD $352.6M STILL UNCLEARED AS OF SEPTEMBER 2025

Source: 2024 AG Report

Amount: GYD $352.6M (approx. US$1.7M)

Finding: 74 cheque orders from 2023 remained uncleared as of September 2025 — nearly two years overdue.

These are not recent disbursements. These are 2023 cheque orders that had still not been accounted for as of September 2025. The rules gave 30 days. Two years passed. The Ministry issued no public explanation. No official was disciplined. No money was recovered. The Audit Office issued a recommendation. The Ministry said it would follow up.

|COUNT 6: GYD $101.5M IN STALE CHEQUES — 19 VILLAGES LEFT WITHOUT CAPITAL FUNDS

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 208

Amount: GYD $101.5M (approx. US$487,000)

Finding: 25 cheques for capital projects across 19 Village Councils written, recorded as spent, and allowed to expire undisbursed.

This is the finding that should have triggered a parliamentary emergency. Twenty-five cheques. Nineteen communities. Nearly half a million US dollars designated for capital projects — roads, drainage, water, community infrastructure — written, recorded in the public accounts as expenditure, and then allowed to go stale in a government drawer. The money was never delivered. The projects were never built. The communities were never told.

Half a million dollars for nineteen Indigenous communities — written, recorded as spent, and left to expire. Not one village was named. Not one official was held accountable.

And this is where the failure compounds into something uglier still: the AG Report does not name the nineteen communities. Nineteen Indigenous villages are owed capital project money that went stale. They are owed the basic dignity of being identified as victims of this failure. The 592 Guardian demands their names be published. If the Ministry will not publish them, we will use every available mechanism to obtain and print them.

|COUNT 7: THE MINING MONEY THAT NEVER CAME

Source: Stabroek News, February 2022; Public record

Finding: GGMC — the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission — is required to contribute to the Fund from mining activity. In 2020 and 2021, it paid nothing.

While Guyana’s mining sector generated tens of billions in revenue and the country celebrated oil-era GDP growth, the statutory contributions owed to a fund for Indigenous communities from that very extractive activity were simply not made. No penalty was levied. No corrective transfer was ordered. The GGMC, a state entity, violated its statutory obligation to the APF without consequence. The government that presides over both entities said nothing.

|COUNT 8: THE LOGBOOK NOBODY KEPT

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: The Cheque Order Register — the basic ledger tracking every advance — was not maintained. Auditors could not measure the full scale of the problem.

The Cheque Order Register is not a complex financial instrument. It is a logbook. It records every advance made against the Fund so that auditors — and the public — can follow the money. It was not kept. This means the scale of the uncleared cheques problem documented in this report is a floor, not a ceiling. The true extent of what has been disbursed and not accounted for cannot be determined because the Ministry did not maintain the records that would make determination possible. This is not a filing error. It is the destruction — through inaction — of the evidentiary basis for accountability.

|COUNT 9: THE MINISTRY DOES NOT KNOW WHAT IT OWNS

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: Asset inventories not updated — a breach of the Stores Regulations. Flagged in previous years.

The Ministry of Amerindian Affairs cannot produce an accurate inventory of the assets it holds. This is a violation of the Stores Regulations. It means that equipment, vehicles, and materials procured through this Fund — paid for with public money designated for Indigenous communities — cannot be verified as existing, functioning, or located. The Ministry is a steward that cannot account for what it holds in trust.

|COUNT 10: FIVE RECOMMENDATIONS. ONE IMPLEMENTED.

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: Of the 2023 audit’s 5 recommendations, only 1 was fully implemented. The remaining 4 were partially addressed at best.

Pattern: Identical scorecard to prior years.

The Audit Office does not make recommendations casually. Each recommendation represents a documented failure of governance with a prescribed corrective action. Of five recommendations issued after the 2023 audit, four remain unimplemented entering 2025. This is not a ministry struggling to comply. This is a ministry that has calculated — correctly, so far — that non-compliance carries no cost.

|COUNT 11: FLAGGED SINCE 2014. TWO GOVERNMENTS. SAME FINDING.

Source: AG Reports 2014–2024; Public record

Finding: These failures predate the current administration. The PPP/C and APNU+AFC both presided over this fund without correcting its structural deficiencies.

This editorial does not spare the previous administration. The APNU+AFC coalition governed from 2015 to 2020 and produced the same audit findings, the same non-responses, and the same institutional inertia. The APF’s condition is not a partisan problem. It is a problem of the Guyanese state’s relationship with its Indigenous citizens — a relationship in which accountability has never been demanded and has therefore never been delivered. Both governing parties bear responsibility. The current administration bears current responsibility.

|COUNT 12: “WRONG TIME TO DISCUSS” — THE MINISTER’S WORDS ON RECORD

Source: Stabroek News, December 2021

Finding: When APF failures made the news in 2021, the subject minister told the press it was the ‘wrong time to discuss’ the matter.

In December 2021, the Amerindian Purpose Fund’s failures became newsworthy. Communities were asking questions. Journalists were filing queries. The minister responsible for the Fund’s oversight told the press — on record — that it was the “wrong time to discuss” the matter. Four audit reports later, the finding reads identically. The 592 Guardian asks: when is the right time? After five more reports? Ten? When has the last cheque gone stale and the last community has stopped asking?

III.THE EVIDENCE — BY THE NUMBERS
FINDING
AMOUNT
 
 
STATUS

 
Uncleared cheque orders (2023–24)

 GYD $647.6M / US$3.1M

 109 orders — no receipts returned
Stale cheques — Village Councils

 GYD $101.5M / US$487K

 25 cheques expired; 19 communities unserved
Long-outstanding orders (to Sept 2025)

 GYD $352.6M / US$1.7M

 74 orders from 2023 — nearly 2 years overdue
GGMC statutory contributions unpaid

 Unknown

 Zero paid in 2020 and 2021
Financial statements produced (since 2000)

 None

 25 consecutive years — zero audited accounts
Bank reconciliations (since 2009)

 None

 16+ years — no balance verification
Prior recommendations implemented (2023)

 1 of 5

 4 outstanding — same pattern as prior years
IV.THE ACCUSED — NAMING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Accountability journalism requires more than the passive voice. It is not enough to say that “the Fund failed” or that “statements were not produced.” Institutions do not fail in the abstract. People make decisions — or fail to make them — and those decisions have consequences. The 592 Guardian names the institutional actors who bear direct responsibility for the condition of the Amerindian Purpose Fund.

|THE MINISTRY OF AMERINDIAN AFFAIRS

As the line ministry responsible for the APF, the Ministry bears primary institutional culpability. Its permanent secretary and budget officers have presided over twenty-five years without financial statements, fifteen years without bank reconciliation, and a cheque register that was simply never maintained. Its formal responses to audit findings — “staff shortages,” “will follow up,” “ongoing” — constitute a studied contempt for the oversight function of the Audit Office. The Ministry does not lack the resources to comply. Guyana is the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere. What it lacks is the will.

|THE MINISTER OF AMERINDIAN AFFAIRS

Political accountability sits above administrative accountability. The minister who told the press in 2021 that the APF’s failures were the “wrong time to discuss” is on record. That deflection was not a one-time lapse of judgement. It was the public expression of a governing philosophy: that the Amerindian communities served by this fund are not a constituency whose grievances require urgent attention. The minister responsible for the APF — then and now — must answer publicly for the condition of this institution.

|THE OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

The legal vacuum at the heart of the APF is not a mystery. It is a known deficiency that has existed since 2006. The Office of the Attorney General advises the state on legal compliance. It has had nineteen years to advise that the Fund requires enabling legislation. Either that advice was given and ignored — in which case, the public deserves to know — or it was never given, which is a dereliction of institutional duty.

|THE GUYANA GEOLOGY AND MINES COMMISSION

The GGMC has a statutory obligation to contribute to the Amerindian Purpose Fund from mining revenues. In 2020 and 2021, it contributed nothing. In years when Guyana’s extractive sector was generating record revenues — revenues derived in significant part from activity on and near Indigenous lands — the state entity tasked with channeling a portion of those revenues back to affected communities simply did not do so. No penalty was imposed. No public explanation was offered. This is not a compliance failure. It is a choice.

V.THE VERDICT — WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

The 592 Guardian does not issue verdicts in the judicial sense. We issue them in the democratic sense: we place the evidence before the public and call upon those with the power to act to exercise it. The following is not a wish list. It is a minimum standard of governance in a country that calls itself a constitutional democracy.

1.Immediate enabling legislation

The National Assembly must pass legislation giving the Amerindian Purpose Fund a lawful operational basis. Every month this is delayed is another month of unlawful disbursement. Cabinet must bring the bill. The opposition must support it. There is no legitimate grounds to oppose it.

2.Publish the nineteen villages

The Ministry of Amerindian Affairs must immediately publish the names of the nineteen communities owed capital project money that went stale. These communities have a right to know. The 592 Guardian will pursue this through access to information mechanisms if the Ministry declines.

3.Full forensic audit of all APF transactions since 2006

The Audit Office, in cooperation with independent forensic accountants, must trace every transaction through the APF since the legal basis for the Fund was repealed. The public is entitled to know the full extent of what has been disbursed, to whom, and whether it reached its intended recipients.

4.Recover the GGMC arrears

The government must calculate and recover the statutory contributions owed to the APF by the GGMC for the years in which it paid nothing. These are not discretionary payments. They are legal obligations.

5.Name and discipline the officers responsible

The permanent secretaries, budget officers, and administrative officials who presided over the destruction of the Cheque Order Register, the failure to maintain asset inventories, and the non-production of financial statements must be identified and subjected to appropriate disciplinary proceedings under the Public Service Rules.

6.Parliamentary oversight hearing

The Standing Committee on Public Accounts must convene a dedicated hearing on the APF, at which the Minister, the Permanent Secretary, and the Auditor General must all appear. The hearings must be public and broadcast.

VI.CLOSING ARGUMENT

Guyana is producing over 900,000 barrels of oil per day. The Natural Resource Fund holds billions. The government speaks, at every international forum, of transformation, of prosperity, of a new Guyana. Meanwhile, nineteen Indigenous communities wait for capital project money that was recorded as spent years ago. A fund created in their name has no legal standing, no audited accounts, and a bank balance that no one has verified since 2009.

This is not a resource problem. Guyana is awash in resources. This is a prioritization problem — a revelation of who, in the hierarchy of the state’s concern, is considered worth accounting for.

The Amerindian communities of Guyana’s interior did not consent to being governed by institutions that cannot account for the money held in their name. They did not agree that their capital projects could be written into the budget and then allowed to expire in a Georgetown drawer. They did not accept that the legal framework governing their fund could dissolve without replacement and that no one in twenty years of governance would notice — or care enough to act.

No law. No oversight. No answers. Our communities deserve better. — Concerned Guyanese

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until the nineteen villages are named, the forensic audit is conducted, and the ministers and officials responsible are held to public account. We note, for the record, that the Amerindian Act 2006 — the very legislation that repealed this Fund’s legal basis — was passed under a government that celebrated itself as a champion of Indigenous rights. The hypocrisy of that record belongs in the history of this country.

The Interior is not a footnote. Its people are not a rounding error. And their money is not the state’s to lose.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Investigative Desk ♦ All findings sourced from the 2024 Auditor General’s Report and corroborated prior AG reports.

©2026 The 592 Guardian. All rights reserved. Reproduction for non-commercial public interest purposes permitted with attribution.

A Bill for Themselves

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL

A Bill for Themselves

How Guyana’s Political Class Is Cashing Out on Oil Wealth — and What Parliament Must Do About It

Veteran trade unionist Lincoln Lewis did not mince words. In a letter to the editor published this week, Lewis observed what many Guyanese already feel but rarely see stated so plainly: politics in this country increasingly resembles a lifetime investment plan. While workers battle rising costs, stagnant wages, and crumbling public services, Parliament is being asked to restore — and expand — a buffet of unlimited perks for former presidents. Lewis was right to raise the alarm. This editorial takes his intervention as its starting point and goes further.

The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not a pension measure. It is not a matter of dignified retirement. It is, stripped of its institutional language, a wealth transfer — from the Guyanese public to a small class of individuals who have already benefited enormously from the offices they held. In a country seven years into one of the largest oil booms in the Western Hemisphere, this bill reveals, with unusual clarity, exactly who this government believes the state is for.

Oil “wealth is plentiful when politicians are spending it on themselves.”

I. What the Bill Actually Proposes

Lewis is careful to note — and this editorial agrees — that reasonable retirement benefits for former heads of state are legitimate. The issue is not pension. The issue is the specific catalogue of entitlements this bill would codify at public expense, indefinitely and without accountability.

Proposed Entitlements Under the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill
Unlimited household utility payments (electricity, water, telecommunications)
Full complement of household staff — funded by the state
State-provided vehicles and fuel allocation
Comprehensive medical care — no ceiling, no review mechanism
Security detail and residential security infrastructure
Office allowances and administrative support — indefinitely
Travel allowances for official and semi-official engagements

Each item, taken individually, might be argued on its merits. Taken together, they constitute a publicly funded lifestyle guarantee for a tiny political class — unlimited in duration, uncapped in cost, and insulated from any form of public oversight. There is no sunset clause. There is no means test. There is no accountability mechanism. There is only the entitlement itself, permanently inscribed in law.

This is not institutional dignity. This is institutional self-dealing.

II.Seven Years of Oil — and This Is the Priority

Guyana struck first oil in commercial quantities in December 2019. In the years since, the country has become one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Offshore oil revenues have transformed the government’s fiscal position. The Natural Resource Fund has received billions. GDP has surged. The projections are extraordinary.

And yet. Seven years into the oil era, too many Guyanese still cannot afford the basic necessities of a dignified life. The power cuts continue. The roads in hinterland regions remain impassable. Public hospitals operate under chronic resource constraints. Teachers and nurses earn wages that have not kept pace with the inflation that oil-linked construction booms have seeded into the cost of living. The Demerara Harbour Bridge replacement — a project of fundamental national infrastructure — has lurched through procurement delays and cost escalations that have never been satisfactorily explained.

The question this bill forces upon the public is not whether former presidents deserve comfort. The question is: when the government decides how to spend, who is always first in line? The answer, across seven years and dozens of procurement decisions, has been consistent. It is not the nurse. It is not the cane worker. It is not the Region 7 community waiting for a functional bridge. It is the political class — and those connected to it.

“The pattern is not the exception. The pattern is the policy.”

III. This Bill Does Not Stand Alone

This editorial has documented, across a sustained body of investigative work, a recurring architecture of governance in Guyana under the Ali administration. Individual cases may be dismissed as isolated errors or administrative oversight. Taken together, they constitute a pattern — and patterns do not lie.

The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract awarded power supply arrangements without competitive tender, insulating a preferred counterparty from scrutiny. The Karpowership agreement — negotiated in opacity, with contract terms that remain only partially public — committed the Guyanese treasury to a long-term liability whose full cost the public still cannot verify. The NDIA audit failures revealed systematic weaknesses in how infrastructure funds are tracked and reported, failures that benefit those who prefer accountability not to be exercised. The G-Mining and Reunion Gold transactions involved indirect asset transfers that raised serious questions about whether the state’s resource interests were adequately protected. The Puruni bridge routing — with its curious alignment toward certain private landholdings — suggested that even physical infrastructure decisions are not immune to private interest.

Now the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill. Add to this the Guyana Development Bank Bill — which this outlet has separately examined — with its exclusion of Bank of Guyana oversight, its absence of an independent audit mandate, and its governance structure that creates institutionalized space for patronage. Each individual bill, each individual contract, can be argued in isolation. But the aggregate tells a story that no single item can conceal: a political class systematically using state instruments to secure wealth for itself and its network, dressed in the language of governance, development, and institutional necessity.

 

The Pattern Ledger: A Partial Record
GPL–InterEnergy: Sole-source power contract — no competitive tender
Karpowership/Karadeniz: Opaque contract terms, unverified liability exposure
NDIA audit failures: Systemic tracking failures enabling procurement opacity
G-Mining/Reunion Gold: Indirect asset transfer — taxation gap unaddressed
Puruni bridge routing: Infrastructure alignment serving private land interests
Guyana Development Bank Bill: BOG oversight excluded; patronage architecture embedded
Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill: Unlimited public-funded entitlements for the political class

IV.Naming the Architecture

What we are describing has a name. It is elite capture — the process by which a small political and economic class colonizes the institutions of the state and redirects their outputs toward private benefit. Elite capture does not announce itself. It does not draft legislation titled ‘A Bill to Enrich the Political Class.’ It drafts legislation that sounds reasonable, that invokes dignity and precedent, that appeals to the language of governance norms. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill sounds institutional. It is not. It is the latest mechanism in a long project.

The comparison with other resource-rich democracies is instructive. Botswana, often cited as a model of resource governance on the African continent, has structured its Pula Fund with explicit parliamentary oversight, published audits, and expenditure rules that link state spending to development indicators. Norway’s Government Pension Fund — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — operates under a statutory ethical framework that explicitly prohibits the kind of opacity that characterizes Guyana’s procurement environment. Indonesia, following the resource nationalism reforms of the 2000s, built anti-corruption institutional capacity as a deliberate counterweight to the patronage networks that had dominated the Suharto era.

None of these comparisons are perfect. But they share a common element: a deliberate decision that resource wealth belongs to the public, and that institutional design must enforce that principle against the natural gravity of elite capture. Guyana has made no such decision. Instead, it has made the opposite one — repeatedly, systematically, and now with a bill that asks the public to fund, in perpetuity, the comfort of the people who made those choices.

“In a country still battling poverty, such entitlement is not dignity. It is greed dressed up as governance.”

V.What Parliament Must Do

The 592 Guardian calls on Parliament to take the following actions, without delay and without equivocation:

 

1.Reject the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill in its current form. No unlimited entitlements. No open-ended public liability. No perks package that cannot be audited and capped.

2.If retirement provisions for former heads of state are to be considered, bring a revised bill that specifies fixed ceilings on every category of expenditure, a review mechanism tied to national development benchmarks, and full transparency of cost to the public.

3.Commission an independent audit of all sole-source procurements awarded since January 2020, with findings tabled in Parliament and published in full within ninety days.

4.Amend the Guyana Development Bank Bill to restore Bank of Guyana oversight authority and mandate an independent external audit function before the institution is operationalised.

5.Establish a parliamentary select committee with cross-party composition and a public reporting mandate to review all contracts — energy, infrastructure, extractives — where competitive tender was waived.

6.Publish, in full and without redaction, the complete contractual terms of the Karpowership agreement and all GPL third-party power supply arrangements, so that the Guyanese public can assess what liabilities have been incurred in their name.

VI.The Bill Is the Message

Lincoln Lewis ended his letter with a moral observation, not a legal one. He was right to do so. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not primarily a budgetary matter, though it has budgetary implications. It is not primarily a constitutional matter, though constitutional questions surround it. It is, at its core, a statement about what this government believes the state exists to do — and who it believes the state exists to serve.

When oil revenues flow and the question is how to spend them, the answer this bill provides is: on us. On the people who already had power. On the class that already benefited from holding office. On the network that is already comfortable, and that would like to be comfortable forever, at public expense, without limit, without audit, without shame.

The Guyanese people deserve better than this. They deserve a state that invests oil wealth in nurses and roads and schools and bridges — in the infrastructure of a dignified life for ordinary citizens, not the infrastructure of permanent comfort for an extraordinary few. They deserve Parliament to look at this bill and call it what it is.

Lincoln Lewis called it greed dressed up as governance. He was right. This editorial stands with him — and demands that Parliament stand with the people.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Accountability Journalism for Guyana

The Speaker’s Lecture Is the Problem

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism | Independent | Guyanese

EDITORIAL — PARLIAMENTARY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Speaker’s Lecture Is the Problem

Manzoor Nadir’s semantic defense of a dormant Assembly does not clarify the record—it confirms why the record needs defending–The 592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026

Parliament has not been “closed.” The Speaker is technically correct. Clerks are at their desks. Questions circulate in administrative limbo. The institution breathes, in the way that a building breathes when its lights are on and its doors are locked.

But a parliament that does not sit is not a parliament at work. It is a parliament in abeyance—and when the Speaker of a democratic assembly takes to state media to deliver a lecture on why that distinction should comfort the public, something has gone seriously wrong.

The 592 Guardian is not interested in scoring semantic victories. We are interested in the democratic vitality of the National Assembly. And on that question—the only question that matters—Speaker Nadir has no credible answer.

A Parliament that does not meet is not a Parliament at work. It is a Parliament on pause—no matter what the Speaker chooses to call it.

I.THE ANATOMY OF AN EVASION

Nadir’s defense rests on a single structural move: disaggregate “Parliament” from “sittings of the National Assembly,” then argue that the former continues while the latter merely pauses. This is a distinction that functions only in the abstract.

In every Westminster democracy worth naming—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica—parliamentary accountability is measured not by administrative throughput but by the frequency, substance, and adversarial character of sittings. A Parliament that does not convene cannot question ministers in real time. It cannot compel testimony. It cannot debate the supplementary budgets that quietly expand executive spending authority. It cannot challenge the procurement decisions that are, in this administration’s case, systematically bypassing competitive tender.

The Speaker knows this. He is not uninformed; he is evasive. And evasion at this level of institutional responsibility is not a minor rhetorical failing—it is a democratic dereliction.

 

When the National Assembly went nearly four months without a sitting, the executive did not pause. Cabinet continued meeting. Contracts continued being awarded. The GPL-InterEnergy arrangement continued. The Karpowership renegotiations continued. The NDIA continued operating without audit resolution. None of it waited for Parliament. Only Parliament waited—for itself.

II.WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

The Speaker cited over 400 questions submitted and processed as evidence of parliamentary vitality. We will take him at his word on the count. But numbers require context.

Over 150 of those questions were rejected outright. The Speaker does not dwell on this. He does not explain the grounds for rejection, the pattern of subject matter filtered out, or whether the rejections correlate with the most sensitive areas of executive conduct. He simply presents the figure as part of a bureaucratic accounting exercise designed to look like accountability.

It does not look like accountability. It looks like a gatekeeping system that processes scrutiny before it reaches the floor—and in doing so, insulates the executive from precisely the kind of dynamic, public, adversarial questioning that Westminster procedure was designed to enable.

Questions submitted to a clerk are not the same as questions put directly to a minister under parliamentary rules. The latter carries consequence. The former carries the illusion of process.

Procedural paperwork is not democratic oversight. It is the simulation of oversight—and the simulation has become the alibi.

III. THE INVERSION THAT INDICTS

The most revealing element of Nadir’s remarks was not his statistics. It was his accusation.

The Speaker accused members of the opposition and public commentators of “misleading” the public about Parliament’s status. Let us sit with this for a moment.

The National Assembly had not convened for the better part of a year at points within this term. The public record—sitting schedules, Hansard, parliamentary calendars—documents this. And yet the Speaker chose to characterize those who noted this reality as the misleaders.

This is not a defense. It is a prosecution of the witnesses. It is a rhetorical tactic deployed when the substantive record cannot be defended: discredit the observers rather than answer the observation. The Ali administration has used this tactic repeatedly—on procurement critics, on labor rights advocates, on journalists who report what the government auditors themselves have found. The Speaker, in deploying it, aligns himself with the evasion culture he is constitutionally obligated to check.

The Speaker of the National Assembly is not a member of the Cabinet. He is not a spokesperson for the government’s record. His institutional function is to guarantee the integrity of parliamentary process—including its frequency, its openness, and its independence from executive preference. When he instead uses press access to rebut parliamentary critics on behalf of a government narrative, he has crossed a line that compromises his office.

IV.STATE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

This editorial would be incomplete without addressing how the Speaker’s remarks reached the public: through taxpayer-funded state media platforms, broadcast without challenge, rebuttal, or editorial counterweight.

Guyana’s state broadcasting apparatus—NCN and its affiliates—operates on a remit of public service. That remit includes fair, balanced, and editorially independent coverage of governance. What it does not include—or should not include—is the uncritical amplification of institutional self-justification from the office of one of the country’s senior constitutional officers.

When state resources are used to broadcast a one-sided defense of parliamentary inactivity, the public is not being informed. It is being managed. The distinction matters enormously in a democracy that still struggles with the legacy of state media as propaganda infrastructure.

This is not an abstract concern. When the same platforms that broadcast the Speaker’s defense of procedural normalcy do not equally broadcast the opposition’s counter-arguments, or the civil society analyses, or the comparative democratic benchmarks that expose the inadequacy of his position, the public discourse is being curated—not served.

The Speaker’s lecture confirms the very impunity it denies. Institutions that cannot be questioned do not defend themselves with evidence—they defend themselves with authority.

V.WHAT A FUNCTIONING PARLIAMENT LOOKS LIKE

We will not be accused of offering only critique without standard. Here is what functioning parliamentary democracy looks like in comparable Westminster systems.

In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons sits for approximately 150 days per year under normal conditions. Prime Minister’s Questions occurs every Wednesday when Parliament is in session. Select committees meet continuously, publishing inquiries on government spending, policy failures, and institutional conduct. Ministers appear before these committees and are questioned under oath. The record is public, searchable, and binding on the government’s credibility.

In Trinidad and Tobago, Parliament’s Standing Orders require that the Assembly meet at least once every two months. In Jamaica, budget oversight committees sit independently of the parliamentary calendar to ensure continuity of fiscal scrutiny. In Barbados, the parliamentary question system is supplemented by Ministerial Statements that require immediate debate.

None of these systems are perfect. All of them sit more regularly than Guyana’s National Assembly has in the period under review. All of them provide mechanisms for real-time executive accountability that do not depend on clerks processing questions in administrative corridors.

Guyana is not a small territory with limited institutional capacity. It is an oil-producing state with a GDP that has more than doubled in five years, a procurement budget that runs to billions of dollars annually, and an executive branch that has demonstrated—repeatedly, across this publication’s investigative record—a preference for opacity over transparency. That state needs more parliamentary oversight, not less. It needs more sittings, not administrative equivalents of sittings. It needs a Speaker who guards the institution’s independence rather than manages the institution’s public relations.

VI.THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

The 592 Guardian puts the following on the record—directed at the Speaker of the National Assembly, at the government benches, and at the constitutional oversight bodies that have remained silent:

1.  The National Assembly must publish a firm sitting schedule for the remainder of the parliamentary year, with a minimum frequency of once per month, publicly available and legally enforceable by opposition motion.
2.  The Speaker must provide a full accounting—broken down by subject matter—of the 150-plus questions rejected during the period in question. The public is entitled to know what categories of executive conduct were filtered before reaching the floor.
3.  State media must provide equal broadcast time and editorial weight to parliamentary critics, opposition spokespersons, and civil society analysts as it provides to institutional self-justifications from constitutional officers.
4.  The Parliamentary Management Committee must convene an independent review of question processing procedures, with terms of reference that include examining whether rejection patterns correlate with politically sensitive subject areas.
5.  The Speaker must publicly clarify whether any sitting was deferred, delayed, or cancelled at the request of the executive branch, and on what authority such a request was made or accommodated.
6.  The Guyana Elections Commission and the Ombudsman’s Office must independently assess whether the prolonged gaps between sittings in the pre-election period constituted a structural suppression of parliamentary accountability for electoral advantage.
THE VERDICT

Manzoor Nadir has served the National Assembly for many years. His institutional knowledge is not in question. His judgment in this episode is.

A Speaker who uses state media to rebut critics, cites administrative statistics as substitutes for democratic vitality, and accuses observers of misleading a public that can read a sitting calendar has made a choice. He has chosen institutional defensiveness over institutional integrity.

That choice has consequences—not merely for his office, but for the credibility of the Assembly he presides over. Every time a Speaker defends procedural adequacy rather than demanding procedural excellence, the bar for parliamentary accountability drops. Every time state media amplifies that defense without challenge, the public learns that the institution serves itself before it serves them.

Guyana is at an inflection point. Oil revenues are transforming the fiscal and political landscape at a pace that outstrips the institutional capacity to oversee them. The National Assembly is either a check on that transformation, or it is not. It cannot be both a functioning parliament and a parliament that meets at administrative convenience.

The Speaker has had his say. The record will have the final word.

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent accountability journalism for Guyana.

Correspondence and submissions: editor@592guardian.com

INTERENERGY SOLE-SOURCE CONTRACT

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—THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GUYANA  June 2026

US$15.6 Million, Eight Months, and the Lights Are Still On a Rented Ship

The GPL-InterEnergy contract was sole-sourced, apparently in breach of the Procurement Act, displaced a cheaper, competitive winner, and has consumed eight months of public money. The only things shown to the public so far are a PowerPoint and an office ribbon-cutting. The figure for what has actually been paid remains a state secret.

Guyana’s government likes to speak in superlatives. The largest budget in history. The fastest-growing economy on earth. The most ambitious energy transition the Caribbean has ever seen. What it does not speak about and has not spoken about despite four direct parliamentary requests from the opposition, is how much public money has been disbursed to a Dominican Republic power company for a job that, eight months in, the country cannot yet feel.

On October 8, 2025, the Guyana Power and Light Incorporated signed a US$15.6 million contract with InterEnergy Group for what was officially described as Supervisory, Engineering and Project Management Consultancy Services.

At US$650,000 per month across two years, the contract would make InterEnergy the most expensive supervisor in GPL’s history — paid not to build anything, not to own anything, not to operate anything, but to watch other companies build and operate things that Guyanese taxpayers are funding separately.

Eight months on, the grid is still running on Karpowership’s rented Turkish powerships, still subject to cascading load-shedding, and still months away from the Gas-to-Energy plant whose readiness InterEnergy was ostensibly hired to ensure. What InterEnergy has delivered to the public record is a roadmap — presented to President Ali and select private sector figures in early June 2026 — and a Georgetown office inauguration. Neither is what the Procurement Act’s public interest provisions were designed to purchase.

The contract was sole-sourced. The winning bidder was never told it had won. The government has not disclosed how much has been paid. This is not a procurement irregularity — it is a procurement system in active collapse.

HOW A COMPETITIVE TENDER BECAME A NO-BID CONTRACT

The story begins, as so many of this administration’s embarrassments do, with an item buried in official routine. In December 2024, GPL issued an invitation for proposals for project supervisory services related to the Gas-to-Energy initiative. Bids were opened in January 2025. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board evaluated the submissions and recommended the lowest-qualifying bidder: Method4 Engineering Inc., a Canadian firm.

Method4 was never told. GPL, having received NPTAB’s recommendation in January, said nothing to the winning company. The contract was not awarded, the file was not closed, and Method4 learned it had won only when Stabroek News reported the matter months later. This silence was not negligence — it was preparation. On June 2, 2025, GPL wrote to NPTAB requesting the annulment of the Method4 award. Three weeks later, on July 17, sole-source procurement of InterEnergy went before Cabinet under the Office of the Prime Minister, which gave its no-objection.

Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran — one of the few technocrats in Guyana willing to call procurement violations by their statutory names — was unambiguous: GPL’s failure to notify Method4 of its award was a violation of Section 39 of the Procurement Act. More fundamentally, Goolsarran noted that sole-source procurement cannot legally be used when the services are demonstrably available from other suppliers, as evidenced by the very fact that GPL had already received competitive proposals

. There is no legal corridor between the rejection of Method4 and the engagement of InterEnergy. The government created one anyway.

When Minister Indar was subsequently pressed in Parliament by APNU’s Sherod Duncan, he argued the move was fully justified under the Act due to a critical and urgent need to stabilize the GPL grid. This was the government’s chosen justification for a procurement decision that had been months in preparation, predicated on a Memorandum of Understanding signed with InterEnergy in January 2024 — before the tender was even issued.

GPL issued the tender in December 2024. InterEnergy had an MoU with GPL since January 2024. The competitive process was, in retrospect, a procedural formality that the outcome had already been decided.

THE ARITHMETIC OF THE DEAL

President Ali, in defending the contract prior to signing, argued that comparable services could have cost as much as US$40 million. This framing — that US$15.6 million is a bargain relative to a hypothetical ceiling the government itself invented — is not a procurement justification. It is rhetorical misdirection.

What the government did not say is that Method4’s lowest bid, which NPTAB evaluated and recommended, came in at a figure millions cheaper than InterEnergy’s US$15.6 million. The public has not been given the precise figures for either bid. No tender board minutes have been published. No evaluation criteria have been released. No justification for why InterEnergy’s qualifications outweighed Method4’s has been formally provided. What Vice President Jagdeo called the most cost-effective choice is, by definition, not the cheapest option the competitive process produced.

At US$650,000 per month, InterEnergy is being paid to supervise work that Power China and Indian firm Kalpataru are executing under separate contracts totaling over US$400 million.

The supervisor costs more per month than many of the infrastructure subcomponents being supervised. The taxpayer funds the infrastructure, funds the supervision, funds the power ships keeping the lights on in the interim, and receives no itemized accounting for any of it.

CONTRACT VALUE

 US$15.6 million (US$650,000/month over 24 months)
PROCURED BY

 Single-source / sole-source — Cabinet no-objection July 17, 2025
CONTRACT SIGNED

 October 8, 2025
CONTRACTOR

 InterEnergy Group, Dominican Republic
MoU DATE

 January 16, 2024 — predates any tender process
DISPLACED BID

 Method4 Engineering — NPTAB’s recommended lowest bidder, January 2025
METHOD4 NOTIFIED?

 No. Method4 learned of its own selection via media, months later.
ANNULMENT LETTER

 GPL to NPTAB dated June 2, 2025 — requesting annulment of Method4 award
STATUTORY VIOLATION

 Section 39 Procurement Act (failure to notify), and single-source without legal grounds per former Auditor General Goolsarran
MONTHS ELAPSED

 ~8 months (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026)
PUBLIC DELIVERABLES

 One roadmap presentation + Georgetown office inauguration (June 2026)
AMOUNT PAID TO DATE

 Undisclosed. Opposition has asked four times. No answer.

THE WALL OF SILENCE

APNU has now asked four times, through parliamentary channels, for the full procurement records of the InterEnergy contract: tender board minutes, evaluation criteria, and the justification for sole-source selection. The government has not provided them. Minister Indar has offered parliamentary answers that defend the outcome without disclosing the process. GPL, NPTAB, and the Office of the Prime Minister have collectively maintained what Goolsarran described as a blackout on information.

When Stabroek News put the procurement legality question directly to InterEnergy Chairman Rolando González Bunster in October 2025, his response was instructive. He recounted that President Ali had visited InterEnergy’s operations in the Dominican Republic, was impressed by what he saw, and that a partnership followed.

Asked specifically whether he was concerned that the contract appeared to violate Guyana’s procurement law, González Bunster said it was none of his business. He later approached the reporter who had asked and suggested the line of questioning indicated a desire to exclude InterEnergy from future Guyanese business.

This is the posture of a company that has been given every reason to believe the rules do not apply to it: a head of state personally enchanted by its facilities, a Cabinet that produced no-objection without competitive evaluation, and a government that treats parliamentary scrutiny as an inconvenience rather than a constitutional requirement.

When the Chairman of a foreign contractor calls procurement law enforcement ‘none of my business,’ the question is not about his conduct — it is about the government that has made him so comfortable in that view.

EIGHT MONTHS: WHAT HAS BEEN DELIVERED

The contract was signed October 8, 2025. By the time InterEnergy presented its roadmap to President Ali in early June 2026 and inaugurated its Georgetown office, eight months of the two-year contract had elapsed — representing, at the contracted rate, approximately US$5.2 million in payments assuming disbursement on schedule. The government has confirmed none of this. No payment schedule has been published. No milestone report has been tabled in Parliament. No progress audit has been commissioned or released.

What InterEnergy has publicly cited as evidence of its work includes supervision of over 350 kilometers of transmission lines, 16 new or expanded substations, and the deployment of 20,000 smart meters — all projects that were already underway or contracted before InterEnergy’s engagement, built by other companies, financed by public capital, and which would have proceeded regardless of whether a Dominican Republic management consultancy was watching. The claim of supervision over work that was already in motion is not a deliverable. It is a description of proximity.

The grid, meanwhile, remains dependent on Karpowership’s Turkish power ships. Load-shedding continues. The Gas-to-Energy plant, whose supervisory readiness InterEnergy was hired to ensure, is still not operational. APNU this week filed a parliamentary question about the status of power ship contract renewals and whether Guyana’s grid would survive the transition if either vessel ceased operations before Wales comes online. The government broke its silence only after the question was filed. The power ship dependency that InterEnergy was engaged to help end has not ended.

WHAT MUST BE ANSWERED

This editorial makes no allegation of corruption in the criminal sense. It makes a simpler and more verifiable demand: that a government which spends public money on sole-sourced contracts, displaces competitive bidders without notification, and refuses to disclose payment records to elected representatives is not governing in the public interest. It is governing against it.

The following are not opposition talking points. They are the minimum requirements of statutory accountability under the Procurement Act, the Financial Administration and Audit Act, and the basic obligations of a Parliament whose members were elected to exercise oversight:

  1. GPL and the Ministry of Public Utilities must immediately publish the full NPTAB evaluation records for the December 2024 tender, including Method4’s bid amount, InterEnergy’s proposal, and the evaluation scores for each.
  2. Cabinet must release the sole-source justification document submitted on July 17, 2025, including the legal opinion — if one was obtained — on whether InterEnergy’s engagement satisfied the Procurement Act’s criteria for single-source award.
  3. GPL must table a full payment schedule and disbursement record showing every sum paid to InterEnergy from contract inception through the current date, certified by the Auditor General.
  4. InterEnergy must submit to Parliament a formal progress report against agreed contractual milestones, separating its own deliverables from infrastructure work performed by other contractors under separate agreements.
  5. The Audit Committee of Parliament must initiate a formal inquiry into the procurement process, with terms wide enough to examine the relationship between the January 2024 MoU, the December 2024 tender, the June 2025 annulment request, and the July 2025 Cabinet no-objection.

This is a public utility that Guyanese depend on for their homes, their businesses, and their futures. Its US$15.6 million consultancy contract is not an abstraction. It is money drawn from an oil-era fiscal ledger that was supposed to close the gap between what this country has been promised and what it actually receives. Until the government opens its books, that gap — like the lights in too many Guyanese homes — remains dark.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.