Political Theater: The Case Against Mohamed’s Region 10 Outsourcing

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Political Theater: The Case Against Mohamed’s Region 10 Outsourcing

An international letter is not a legal remedy — and the record shows Mohamed never sought one

OPINIONS BY: HEM KUMAR– August 2026

Strip away the diplomatic language of Azruddin Mohamed’s letter to British High Commissioner Joseph Fisher, and what remains is an indictment — not of the government he purports to hold to account, but of himself.

The facts are not in dispute, because Mohamed himself supplies them. Region 10 voted in September 2025. WIN’s eighteen councillors were elected. They were sworn in.

Eleven months later, by Mohamed’s own account, the statutory meeting to complete that process has still not been convened. That is not a governance dispute Mohamed is describing — it is a confession.

It is an admission, in writing, that for nearly a year the Leader of the Opposition has possessed a mandate from Region 10 voters and has done nothing with it that a court could recognize as advocacy.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

Ask what Mohamed has actually filed. Not said. Not written to a High Commissioner. Filed. Judicial review of the Regional Executive Officer’s refusal to convene the RDC — available to him since the refusal began. An application for injunctive relief compelling that meeting — available to him. A constitutional challenge to the exclusion of elected councillors from the 2027 budget process — available to him.

“The record shows none of these. The record shows letters.”

This is the pattern this outlet identified two days ago, when WIN’s own campaign coordinator  confirmed the party had already raised Region 10 privately with the Carter Center’s Jason Carter during his August visit — and received nothing, because private appeals to sympathetic foreigners are not remedies, they are consolation.

“What does a mandate mean if the man holding it spends a year writing to London instead of walking to the High Court in Georgetown?”

ESCALATION WITHOUT CORRECTION

Now Mohamed escalates the same failed method rather than correct it. Having tried one international audience and gotten silence, his answer is not the courthouse — it is a longer list of international audiences: the UN, the OAS, the Commonwealth, the CPA, the IPU, the EU. Six institutions, none of which can convene a Regional Democratic Council in Linden. Zero courts, any one of which could.

The Coomacka dismissals deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms, and if more than sixty workers were in fact punished for skipping a PPP rally, that is a matter for independent investigation. But observe what Mohamed does with a genuine grievance the moment he has one: he does not file a labour complaint. He does not seek an injunction against further retaliatory terminations. He appends it to the same international letter, as supporting material for the audience he has already chosen — the one that cannot reinstate a single worker, only issue a statement he can put in his next press release.

But its placement in this letter is instructive: a grievance with genuine substance is being folded into an international appeal rather than pursued through the labour tribunals, the courts, or a formal domestic complaint mechanism that could actually produce reinstatement.

“Even where Mohamed has real ammunition, he reaches for the same outsourced remedy.”

A letter to a High Commissioner generates headlines. It does not reconvene a statutory meeting, does not seat a Regional Chairman, and does not reinstate a single dismissed worker. What it does is allow Mohamed to appear to be fighting for Region 10 without having to explain, in a Guyanese courtroom, why nearly a year of exclusion has produced no legal filing.

THE TELL

This is the tell. A leader who reaches for the foreign microphone before the domestic courtroom, twice, on two different grievances, has not miscalculated strategy. He has revealed what his strategy is: representation performed for an audience that will never be asked to deliver it, because the audience that could — the Guyanese judiciary — was never approached in the first place.

Mohamed asks what a vote means if government can block elected representatives from taking their seats. It is a fair question, and it deserves an answer he has not supplied: what does a mandate mean if the man holding it spends a year writing to London instead of walking to the High Court in Georgetown?

 

Guyana left behind the era of outsourced sovereignty in 1966. A party that structures its entire opposition strategy around the hope that foreign missions will do what domestic courts are built to do is not practicing weak leadership by accident — it is choosing dependency over the harder, slower work of using the Constitution it claims to defend.

It abandons it, one diplomatic appeal at a time, and calls the abandonment leadership.

THIS  IS WHAT REPRESENTATION LOOKS LIKE UNDER “WIN”

— The Board

SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

Guyana Is Building a Surveillance State by Announcement, Not by Law

EDITORIAL◊THE 592 GUARDIAN◊AUGUST,2026

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has now said it twice, four years apart, with the same casual confidence: cameras with facial-recognition software are going up “right across the country.” In November 2022 it was a plan. In February 2025 it was a fact on the ground. In both cases it was announced the way this Government announces most things it does not intend to submit for scrutiny — as an achievement, not as a policy requiring authorization, oversight, or a single line of enabling legislation specific to biometric surveillance.

“Safe Country” or Invasion of Privacy?

 

This is the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented across a dozen files this year: capacity is built and declared before the legal architecture that would make it accountable is built at all. The Data Protection Act No. 18 of 2023 received presidential assent three years ago. By the reporting available to us, it has still not commenced, because the ministerial order needed to bring it into force has not been made, and the Data Protection Office the Act contemplates has not been established.

A law can sit on the books indefinitely in Guyana while the practice it was meant to govern proceeds anyway. That is not an oversight. It is becoming the operating model.

WHAT THE LAW WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

Had the Act commenced, a nationwide facial-recognition network would not automatically be illegal — but it would be answerable. The statute’s own definition of “sensitive personal data” is instructive, and it should worry anyone who has ever attended a political meeting, a religious service, or a protest in this country. The Act names political opinions and membership of a political body as sensitive categories in their own right, alongside religious belief, health, sexual life, and criminal proceedings.

A camera on a public road is not neutral once it can tell the State who was praying, who was marching, and who was standing next to whom.

Facial-recognition templates are not listed by name as a standalone sensitive category in the Act’s summary text available to us — an omission that itself deserves legislative attention — but that silence is not a license. A face, once matched against a database, is personal data the moment it identifies a living individual, and it becomes sensitive personal data the moment that identification reveals political opinion, religious belief, health status, or alleged criminal involvement. Attendance at a PPP rally, a APNU+AFC meeting, a mosque, a church, a mandir, a picket line outside Parliament, or a lawyer’s office are not abstract hypotheticals in Guyana’s political climate.

They are the precise activities a nationwide camera-and-matching system would be positioned to record, store, and cross-reference — without a Data Protection Office to answer to, because none exists.

EIGHT QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ANSWERED

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that Guyana should have no cameras. Public safety is a legitimate government interest, and CCTV recording an event for later review is categorically different from a system that can identify and track a citizen in real time against a watchlist. It is that distinction — event-recording versus identification-and-tracking — that the Government has never publicly acknowledged, let alone regulated.

Before another camera goes up, the public is owed answers to at least the following:

  • Which agency owns and controls each camera network, and under what statutory authority.
  • Whether facial recognition is operational, on trial, or merely proposed — Jagdeo’s own statements have blurred this for four years.
  • What databases or watchlists a face or number plate is matched against.
  • Who is authorized to run a search, and on what legal threshold.
  • How long footage, templates, and match records are retained before deletion.
  • What independent body audits the system and hears complaints of misuse.
  • What remedy exists for a citizen wrongly flagged by a false match.
  • Whether an ordinary Guyanese can obtain the footage and data held about them — and on what timeline before it is overwritten.

Jagdeo has also linked the initiative to “potential use by the banking sector,” a phrase that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it has. If a State-operated facial-recognition capability is being contemplated for private commercial use, that is no longer a public-safety program at all. It is a biometric identity infrastructure being built for reasons that have never been debated in the National Assembly, priced for the public, or subjected to a procurement record anyone outside Cabinet has seen.

THE REMEDY IS NOT OUTRAGE. IT IS A PAPER TRAIL.

Guyana does not litigate under the American Fourth Amendment, and importing that language wholesale into a Guyanese constitutional argument would be a category error. But the underlying principle translates without difficulty: a democratic government does not get to build an architecture of indiscriminate, searchable monitoring of its own population and then decline to say, in enforceable law, who controls it and under what limits. Necessity, proportionality, legality, transparency, and independent oversight are not American inventions. They are the baseline of any constitutional order that takes privacy, expression, and association seriously — all of which appear in Guyana’s own Constitution.

For any citizen who believes they have been recorded, matched, or flagged, the practical route runs through preservation before it runs through protest. Surveillance systems overwrite footage on short cycles. A letter to the Commissioner of Police, the responsible ministry, and any identified contractor — demanding preservation of footage, search logs, match records, and the underlying vendor contract, before requesting access to one’s own data — is not a symbolic gesture.

It is the only way to convert a system designed to be unaccountable into one that can, eventually, be made to answer in court, through judicial review, or through whatever mechanism the Data Protection Act supplies once it is finally switched on.

Until it is switched on — until there is a named agency, a published policy, an independent regulator, and a retention schedule a citizen can actually read — “Safe Country” is not a security policy.

It is a euphemism for a surveillance capability introduced by press statement, operated without a supervising law, and answerable to no one but the Vice President who announced it.

— The Board

The Outcome He Never Explained

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592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

ACCOUNTABILITY & CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS

The Outcome He Never Explained

President Ali did not have to reach into the judiciary himself. The outcome he wanted arrived anyway — engineered by the one man positioned to insulate it from scrutiny. Ten months later, no one has asked him why he has never said a word about it.

A PROCESS BUILT TO BE INSULATED

Guyana’s constitutional architecture for appointing a Chancellor and Chief Justice exists precisely to keep the selection out of the hands of whoever occupies the presidency at the time. It requires agreement between the President and the Opposition Leader. The design assumes friction. Friction is the point — it is what stands between an executive’s preference and the two most senior judicial offices in the country.

That friction did not hold. And the record now shows, in some detail, why.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

Former Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton has stated, on the record, that CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson placed multiple calls to him personally pressing him to accept President Ali’s preferred nominees for the two posts. Norton’s discomfort deepened, by his own account, when Anderson raised the possibility that then-Acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings might agree to early retirement — at a time when Norton was backing Cummings for Chancellor and Justice Roxane George for Chief Justice, against Ali’s preference for George as Chancellor and Justice Navindra Singh as Chief Justice.

Cummings then took early retirement, under circumstances that have raised suspicion she was pushed rather than that she chose to go. With the deadlock unresolved through the constitutionally mandated route, Ali proceeded to appoint his two preferred candidates in an acting capacity — a mechanism that requires no Opposition Leader agreement at all. No substantive appointment has been made since. A new Opposition Leader has now held that office for more than six months. Ali has not reopened the conversation.

Set the sequence beside the design it defeated: a process meant to require negotiation produced no negotiation. It produced the President’s first-choice outcome, by way of a sitting judicial officer applying pressure to the one man empowered to block it — followed immediately by a fallback appointment mechanism that needed no agreement from anyone.

The process was supposed to make Ali’s preference irrelevant. Instead his preference is the only thing that survived it.

NOT AN ISOLATED STYLE OF GOVERNING

Anderson’s willingness to personally press a political outcome and then reach for the acting-appointment route when resistance held is not happening in a vacuum. It sits inside a wider pattern now documented independently, in an unrelated dispute, by Anderson’s own judicial colleagues.

A leaked internal email chain among CCJ judges — reported first by the Trinidad Express and corroborated across multiple sources — shows Justice Jamadar alleging that Anderson attempted to influence colleagues’ opinions “in an authoritative manner” in specific cases, including a Guyanese extradition matter. It shows Justice Eboe-Osuji alleging Anderson tried to override collegial decision-making conventions, and quoting a remark Anderson is said to have made to fellow judges in 2025 — that he did not see himself as running a democracy. It shows Justice Bulkan warning, in writing, that the entire design of a multi-judge appellate panel exists specifically to prevent one judge from imposing an outcome the majority does not share.

None of that dispute concerns Guyana’s Chancellor deadlock. What it establishes is character of conduct: this is a court president whose own colleagues, independently and without reference to Guyana, describe him as someone who moves outcomes unilaterally and resists being told he cannot. Norton’s account of the Cummings intervention is not the only data point for that pattern. It is one instance of a pattern other judges have already put on the record.

WHERE ALI’S EXPOSURE ACTUALLY LIES

This piece does not allege that Ali directed Anderson to make those calls. There is no evidence of that in the record, and asserting it would overreach what Norton, or anyone else, has actually said.

But direction is not the only form of culpability available to a Head of State, and it is not the one that matters most here. Ali is the sole beneficiary of an intervention that, on the public record, violated the spirit and likely the letter of a constitutional process — an intervention carried out by a judicial officer who was not supposed to have a side. For ten months, Ali has said nothing about it. He has not distanced himself from it. He has not ordered any review of how his preferred nominees came to occupy their posts without the agreement the Constitution requires. He has not reopened talks with the current Opposition Leader. He has simply kept the outcome.

A President who benefits from a constitutional violation and never once repudiates it is not a passive bystander to that violation.

Silence sustained for ten months, in the face of a public, on-the-record account implicating the judiciary’s own president, is itself a choice — and it is the choice this piece holds Ali accountable for.

THE QUESTION NO ONE HAS PUT TO HIM

Guyana’s media has, to date, covered the CCJ leak as an internal judicial scandal and the Chancellor deadlock as a stalled bureaucratic process. No outlet has yet connected the two, or asked the head of state the question that connection raises: why has President Ali never been asked to explain why the outcome of a process explicitly designed to require the Opposition’s agreement is, instead, exactly the outcome he wanted — engineered by a judicial officer now independently accused, by his own colleagues, of doing exactly this kind of thing as a matter of course?

Heads of state are not exempt from that question because of the office they hold. They are, if anything, the reason the question exists.

— The Board

A Baby Died Waiting on a WhatsApp Group

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592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A Baby Died Waiting on a WhatsApp Group

EDITORIAL · HEALTH MINISTRY ACCOUNTABILITY

OPINION BY: Staff Writer – August 2026

Guyana calls itself one of the fastest-growing economies on earth and promises a “world-class” emergency care system. It has spent five months and a $161.1 billion health budget without buying a single air ambulance. A three-day-old infant in Mabaruma paid the difference between the promise and the balance sheet.

On 10th August, Stacy Correia, a healthcare worker at Matthews Ridge (Pakera) Hospital, gave birth at Mabaruma Regional Hospital following a high-risk pregnancy and a two-hospital referral chain. Her son developed severe respiratory distress within hours. Nursing staff found him cyanotic, with a Random Blood Sugar reading of 23 — a level that in any resourced facility triggers immediate transfer, not a queue. He was placed on CPAP. By Tuesday, doctors had determined he needed Georgetown-level neonatal intensive care. No bed was available until Wednesday, when space opened at West Demerara Regional Hospital. He never reached it.

He died Thursday afternoon at Mabaruma, three days old, while the country’s medical evacuation system — in practice, a WhatsApp group monitored by the Ministry of Health and populated by private commercial pilots — failed to produce a plane.

Aircrafts readily available for political outreaches

This board does not traffic in anecdote as indictment. We traffic in the distance between what a government has promised on the record and what it has delivered on the ground. On this measure, the Correia infant’s death is not a tragic outlier. It is the predictable output of a system this administration has described in public, budgeted for in writing, and left unbuilt.

THE PROMISE, IN THE GOVERNMENT’S OWN WORDS

In March 2026, addressing the commissioning of a hospital pavilion, President Irfaan Ali unveiled the National Ambulance Authority — a centralized command intended to bring “world-class emergency care nationwide,” built on “land, air, and river ambulances,” pre-deployed units, GPS-tracked response, and a stated target of a 15-minute golden window for the first emergency call. Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony, presenting the parallel Guyana Emergency Medical Authority (GEMA) initiative to the National Assembly during Estimates, said the explicit ambition was to “replicate an emergency service as they have in North America.” Funding, he told Parliament, had already been allocated.

“We are also building out an emergency-care system that ensures every second counts.” — President Irfaan Ali, March 2026, five months before a three-day-old child ran out of seconds in Mabaruma.

Five months separate that podium and this obituary. In that interval, the National Ambulance Authority produced no air ambulance capable of reaching Region One. The Ministry of Health’s actual evacuation protocol, as reported and as this board has independently confirmed against the public record, remains a WhatsApp group: doctors post a request, private commercial operators — who fly the Mabaruma route on ordinary business daily, and who were confirmed present in the area the week before this death for a government outreach event — decide whether to divert. None did. No emergency charter was arranged. The Guyana Defence Force, which had itself publicised a Bartica-to-Georgetown medevac on 1st January as proof of “the Force’s readiness to support national emergency response efforts,” did not deploy.

THE MONEY WAS NEVER THE CONSTRAINT

Budget 2026 is $1.558 trillion, a 307 percent increase over 2021, financed in part by a $495 billion (US$2.37 billion) transfer from the Natural Resource Fund — oil money, drawn against a fund that held roughly US$3.96 billion at the end of May. Health alone received $161.1 billion, part of a $503.8 billion allocation to education, health and housing that the Finance Minister described in the Assembly as ‘foundations of a more prosperous, secure society,’ not expenses.

The Guyana Defence Force’s own budget has grown by more than 800 percent in proportional terms since 2021, reaching roughly US$250 million in 2025 — spent substantially on maritime patrol assets to guard offshore oil infrastructure. The Air Corps that budget built has three helicopters and no dedicated medevac airframe. Guyana’s air power ranks 148th of the countries measured worldwide.

None of this is a poverty story. It is an allocation story.

Health Ministry allocation, Budget 2026

 $161.1B
Oil transfer funding Budget 2026 (32% of total)

 US$2.37B
GDF defence budget growth since 2021

 +800%
Dedicated government air ambulances

 0
GDF Air Corps active helicopters

 3
Days from symptom onset to death, Correia infant

 3

SIX BEDS, ONE WARNING

The government’s own referral hospital confirmed the same failure in the same week, on the coast, in full view. On 11th August, the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation — the country’s Level V national referral centre, the last stop for the most critical cases in the country — issued a public release warning motorists to drive more carefully. Buried inside it was an admission that should have been the headline: the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit was running on six beds. Four of them, at the moment of filming, held patients with severe brain injuries. GPHC did not lead with that number. It led with a lecture to pedestrians. That ordering is not incidental. It is the story.

A national referral hospital with a six-bed ICU is not a hospital under temporary strain. It is a hospital operating at the edge of its capacity as a matter of routine, one bad accident weekend away from having nowhere to put the next critical patient — hinterland or coastal. This is the same institution the Correia infant was ultimately being routed toward when a NICU bed was finally located at West Demerara on Wednesday. The capacity gap that killed him in Mabaruma does not end at Georgetown’s city limits.

A SECOND AUGUST DEATH TOLL, DISPUTED BUT UNRESOLVED

The Correia infant’s death is not the only maternal-and-newborn-care failure under public scrutiny this month. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly named four women — including Emily Singh, 24, and Rictecia Semple, 24 —  who lost their babies at the $6.6 billion Bath Regional Hospital in Region Five between June and August 2026, arguing that state-of-the-art infrastructure must be matched by the resources, expertise and systems needed to save lives. Bath Regional Hospital has publicly rejected the characterisation, citing 314 successful deliveries since its 2025 opening and cautioning against turning grief into unsupported allegations. This board treats the claim as a serious, contested allegation, not a verified finding — but an allegation of four infants deaths at a flagship $6.6 billion facility, unresolved a year after its ribbon-cutting, is itself a matter the National Assembly should not be permitted to leave uninvestigated.

THE NATIONAL NUMBERS BEHIND THE INDIVIDUAL DEATHS

Individual tragedies invite individual explanations — a power outage, a missing bed, a WhatsApp group that failed to produce a plane. But Guyana’s national health indicators show these are not isolated breakdowns. Guyana’s neonatal mortality rate stands at roughly 16 deaths per 1,000 live births; its infant mortality rate at roughly 22 to 24 per 1,000; its maternal mortality ratio at roughly 75 to 112 per 100,000 live births, depending on the year measured — translating to an estimated 13 to 18 maternal hospital deaths nationwide annually. All three figures sit above the regional Americas averages.

PAHO’s most recent published measure of Guyana’s treatable premature mortality — deaths that should not occur if health systems function properly, from causes that timely, effective care can address — stood at approximately 287.7 per 100,000 population. Applied to Guyana’s current population, that rate implies roughly 2,870 deaths every year from causes medicine already knows how to prevent. This board offers that figure as its own extrapolation from PAHO’s published rate, not as a number PAHO itself has certified for 2026 — but even treated as an estimate, it reframes the Correia infant’s death and the Bath Regional Hospital allegations from anomalies into arithmetic. A system that cannot reliably staff a medevac request, keep a NICU powered, more than six ICU beds at its flagship hospital is not failing occasionally. It is failing at scale, and the scale has a number.

A country that positions itself for foreign patients while its own maternity wards run short of beds and its flagship ICU runs on six is not building a health system. It is building a brochure.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This board has tracked this administration’s signature failure mode across multiple ministries this year: the Neurological Rehabilitation Centre, announced in Budget 2026 against a PAHO/Lancet study ranking Guyana among the Americas’ worst for neurological disease burden, remains an unstaffed line item with no disclosed bed capacity or referral pathway. Ministry of Health contract nurses have gone as long as eight months unpaid because payroll renewal is still processed on paper, a collapse the Minister answered by redirecting nurses to a deputy permanent secretary’s office rather than fixing the system. The National Ambulance Authority and GEMA now join that list: announced with North American ambition, budgeted in writing, and absent at the one moment a family in Region One needed it to exist.

The common thread is not incompetence at the point of care. Mabaruma’s nurses did their jobs — they escalated on schedule, placed the infant on CPAP, and kept him alive through repeated power outages that, compounding the crisis, disrupted his oxygen delivery equipment.

The failure sits above them, in an administration that budgets for capacity it has not built and announces systems it has not staffed, then relies on the goodwill of private pilots to cover the gap.

WHAT THIS BOARD DEMANDS

  1. A public, dated implementation timeline for the National Ambulance Authority and GEMA’s air and river ambulance components, including procurement status for any dedicated aircraft, to be tabled in the National Assembly within 30 days.
  2. Full disclosure of the Ministry of Health’s current hinterland medevac protocol, including the terms under which the ministry relies on private commercial operators, and what obligation — if any — those operators carry to respond to a logged emergency.
  3. An independent inquiry into the Correia infant’s death, examining the referral delay, the ICU/NICU bed shortage, the power outages at Mabaruma Regional Hospital, and the medevac failure as a single chain of causation — not four separate excuses.
  4. A published accounting of why Guyana Defence Force air assets were not deployed when commercial evacuation failed, given the Force’s own public claim to “readiness” following its January Bartica medevac.
  5. Regional Health Authority disclosure of backup power and oxygen-delivery redundancy status at every hinterland hospital equipped with a NICU or ICU.

The family, Kaieteur News reports, does not expect anything to come of this. This board’s purpose is to make that expectation wrong.

— THE BOARD

 

Sealed Bids for a Sunken Truth

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Sealed Bids for a Sunken Truth

OPINION BY: STAFF WRITER– August 2026

What the Government’s Silence on the MV Barima Salvage Bidders Reveals About Its Real Commitment to Transparency

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation and the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) chose, of their own volition, to run an open tendering process for the salvage of the MV Barima. Nobody forced that choice on them. Open tendering is not merely a procedural label — it is a public promise. It tells citizens: watch us, because we have nothing to hide. Guyana’s Procurement Act attaches a plain expectation to that promise — that once bids close, the identity of bidders and the sums they quoted become public record, subject to review by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB).

The submission window for the salvage contract closed on August 14, 2026. As of this writing, the public has been told nothing. Not how many companies responded. Not their names. Not what they bid. APNU Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul has rightly demanded MARAD and the Ministry explain the delay, and has directed his question specifically at whether NPTAB — the body constitutionally tasked with making such information public — has been permitted to do its job.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This newsroom does not treat this in isolation, because the government has not earned the benefit of the doubt on this file. Readers of this platform  will recall the sequence already documented: in late July, MARAD privately invited a Dutch salvage firm, KMS, to submit a proposal — days before any public Request for Proposals existed. That invitation went to a company whose principal has a documented history of fraud-related litigation abroad, a fact this news-room  reported at length. Only after public exposure of that arrangement did government pivot to an open Expression of Interest process.

A leaked internal document, reported by Kaieteur News, showed the invited firm had already quoted a price — an US$8 million figure — before the public process the government now points to as proof of its transparency had even opened.

Now, at the very next procedural juncture where transparency was actually costless — disclosing who responded and what they offered, a step that discloses no trade secret and delays no salvage timeline — the government has again chosen silence. Three junctures. Three opportunities to demonstrate the process was real. Three times government chose the version that keeps the public guessing.

What conceivable reason could government possibly have for the constant cloak-and-dagger machinations surrounding a national tragedy?

THE WRECK IS THE EVIDENCE

This is not an abstract procurement quarrel. The MV Barima is not simply a vessel to be raised; it is the single largest piece of physical evidence in a disaster that has claimed 73 confirmed lives, left roughly 30 people still unaccounted for, and now sits under formal examination by an international Commission of Inquiry.          Whoever wins this contract will control the chain of custody over that evidence during the most sensitive phase of its recovery. A public unable to see who is competing for that role, and on what terms, cannot judge whether the eventual winner was chosen on merit or convenience.

We note, too, that the August 14 deadline was for Expressions of Interest, not a final sealed tender. MARAD’s own advertisement reserves the right to shortlist firms and negotiate a fuller Request for Proposals with selected companies only — a further, narrower, less visible stage still to come. That structure makes today’s disclosure more urgent, not less: if the identities of respondents to even the open, publicly advertised stage are being withheld, what confidence can the public have that the shortlisting stage that follows will be any more visible?

AN HONEST ACCOUNTING OF MAHIPAUL’S POSITION

In fairness to the record, Mr. Mahipaul’s own position has moved. In early August he argued against the open-tender approach altogether, urging government to invoke emergency procurement powers to save time. He has since accepted that the tender process is what government chose, and now insists government honour that choice’s transparency obligations.

That is not inconsistency. It is exactly what a functioning opposition does — adapt its pressure to the terrain government itself has selected, rather than abandon the accountability question because the underlying dispute over process speed was not resolved its way.

 

GRIEF DESERVES BETTER THAN GUESSWORK

Seventy-three families have buried their dead. Roughly thirty more are still waiting for word on the missing. For them, every week this file spends shrouded in unexplained secrecy is a week stolen from grieving in the open, with full knowledge of what happened to the vessel and why. Secrecy surrounding a national tragedy of this scale should not be met with quiet acceptance. It should provoke real public outrage and sustained pressure until government supplies an answer that survives scrutiny — because right now, none has been offered at all.

This publication renews its standing call, first made in the days after the Koole/KMS revelations, for full public disclosure of every communication, invitation, and proposal touching this salvage contract. Today we add to it.

FORMAL DEMANDS

  1. MARAD and the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation immediately publish the number of Expressions of Interest received by the August 14, 2026 deadline, the name of every submitting company, and the value of every bid submitted.
  2. NPTAB confirm publicly whether it has received the bid file for evaluation, and state on what statutory basis, if any, disclosure has been withheld beyond the customary evaluation period.
  3. Government disclose whether KMS — the firm privately invited to submit a proposal on July 28 — is among the respondents to the subsequent open EOI process, so the public can judge whether the earlier private invitation ever gave that firm an advantage.
  4. The Commission of Inquiry be granted express, binding authority to review and approve the eventual salvage contractor selection, given the wreck’s status as evidence central to its mandate.
  5. Government commit, in advance of the next procedural stage — the narrower Request for Proposals to shortlisted firms — to publish shortlisting criteria and outcomes as they occur, rather than leave that stage to be reconstructed after the fact through leaks and freedom-of-information requests.

Guyanese are not asking for anything unusual. They are asking government to do what it already announced it would do — run an open, transparent tender — and to prove that word meant something. Nothing more, and nothing less.

— The Board

THE CASE RALPH RAMKARRAN DIDN’T MAKE

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 THE CASE RALPH RAMKARRAN DIDN’T MAKE

A defense of CCJ President Winston Anderson built entirely on his own account, tested against nothing else in the record

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD August 2026

Ralph Ramkarran’s “Rumble in the CCJ” is, on its own terms, the most serious defense yet mounted of Justice Winston Anderson. It is not the reflexive institutional-loyalty piece that has otherwise characterized the CCJ’s response to the crisis engulfing it. Ramkarran, a former Senior Counsel and one of the region’s most respected legal commentators, does something almost nobody else defending Anderson has bothered to do: he engages the allegations one by one, on the merits, and reaches a considered legal conclusion — that the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission (RJLSC) has no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct the “transparent and independent review” it announced on August 10.

That point is correct, and it matters regardless of where anyone lands on Anderson himself. Article V of the Agreement Creating the Caribbean Court of Justice sets out the RJLSC’s powers precisely: appointing and disciplining judges other than the President, recommending the President’s own appointment or removal to the Heads of Government, and determining terms of service.

Nothing in that list authorizes the RJLSC to investigate its own chairman’s conduct as President of the Court. Ramkarran has identified a structural defect in the institution’s own promised remedy — a defect this publication has already been tracking as part of a wider pattern of accountability theater in Guyana: announcements of review, inquiry, or consequence that dissolve on contact with the relevant legal text.

Credit given. The trouble is what the analysis is built on, and what it leaves out.

A DEFENSE BUILT ON THE DEFENDANT’S OWN TESTIMONY

Ramkarran’s case for Anderson rests, almost without exception, on Anderson’s own extensive statement issued Friday, August 14 — the CCJ President’s first public response to the leaked email chain first reported by the Trinidad Express under the headline “Deep Divide at the CCJ.” On the dress code dispute, Ramkarran accepts Anderson’s account that a judge’s insistence on wearing national dress in Chambers precipitated the panel change in D’Almada v TT/Jamaica/Caricom, and that this was the sole reason for it.

On the broader allegations of pressuring judges and influencing rulings, Ramkarran reports that Anderson “said judicial views were not suppressed and no Judge was directed to reach a particular conclusion” — and treats that denial as effectively dispositive.

This is not unreasonable as a starting point. A person accused is entitled to have his account heard in full, and Anderson’s statement deserved exactly the careful reading Ramkarran gave it. But a defense that stops at the accused’s own telling is not yet an analysis — it is a transcription.

And measured against what is actually in the leaked record, Ramkarran’s piece is conspicuously silent on three bodies of evidence that do not come from Anderson, and that a serious reckoning with this crisis cannot skip.

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, I: JAMADAR

Justice Peter Jamadar’s email is not mentioned anywhere in “Rumble in the CCJ.” That is a significant omission, because Jamadar’s account is not about a dress code at all. Jamadar described the working environment at the Court as “increasingly becoming toxic” and named two specific matters — the Enriquez/Ramlogan trilogy and, more consequentially, the Mohamed extradition case — as instances in which he experienced what he called an attempt “to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed … in an authoritative manner.” He said the experience was “far beyond anything he had ever experienced in all his years as a judge on appellate courts,” and that other judges had expressed the same.

The Mohamed matter, not the dress code, is where a sitting judge has said on the record that he personally experienced pressure toward a particular result.

— the substance of Dionne Jackson Miller’s argument, “Time for Tea”

The Mohamed matter is not a peripheral detail. On July 29, 2026, a CCJ panel of Justices Rajnauth-Lee, Jamadar, and Bulkan unanimously dismissed the extradition appeal brought by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father Nazar Mohamed, clearing the way for US extradition proceedings to resume before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman. Guyana’s own Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, argued the government side. The ruling was delivered by Justice Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Anderson” — and Anderson was absent from its delivery, for reasons Ramkarran’s source material does not explain. Azruddin Mohamed has since publicly demanded an independent examination of the allegations specifically as they touch his own case.

A defense of Anderson that never mentions Jamadar, never mentions the Mohamed extradition matter, and never grapples with a sitting judge’s on-record claim of experiencing pressure on a live case is not a complete defense. It is a defense of the version of events that happens to be easiest to defend.

 

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, II: EBOE-OSUJI, BULKAN, AND THE PATTERN

Ramkarran’s piece treats the removal of Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the D’Almada panel as an isolated, adequately explained incident. It was not received that way by Eboe-Osuji himself. In his own email, Eboe-Osuji said he had “never seen before the level of dictatorship in the administration of a judiciary” that he had witnessed at the CCJ in recent months, and recounted that Anderson told judges early in his presidency that he did not see himself as “running a democracy” and would run the Court “in any way he sees fit.” Eboe-Osuji further cited a prior matter, Barrow v Caricom, as an earlier instance in which he says Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions.”

Justice Arif Bulkan’s email adds an institutional argument Ramkarran does not engage at all. Bulkan wrote that the content of a judge’s opinion is “very clearly a matter within our sole discretion,” and explained why appellate panels are deliberately staffed with more than one judge: if a president could simply overrule the majority, he asked, what would be the point of a panel at all? Bulkan connected this directly to why a majority of Caribbean states — including Trinidad and Tobago, whose Prime Minister has “clearly articulated their distrust” of the Court — have not acceded to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction: the fear that a single judge could impose an outcome is precisely what keeps them out.

This is the distinction Ramkarran’s piece never draws, and it is the one that matters most. Judges disagreeing with each other is not a crisis — it is the ordinary business of an appellate court, which is exactly why panels are staffed in odd numbers, to produce a tiebreaker rather than demand unanimity. What Jamadar, Eboe-Osuji, and Bulkan describe is not disagreement among equals.

It is an allegation that the presiding judge tried to substitute his own view for the panel’s, on matters where the Agreement creating the CCJ gives him no such authority.

Ramkarran’s “robust discussion, if not attaining the level of intimidation” framing treats this as a matter of tone. The judges who wrote these emails are not describing tone.

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, III: GUYANA, REFRAMED BY ANDERSON’S OWN ADMISSION

Ramkarran defends Anderson’s private intervention in Guyana’s stalled Chancellor and Chief Justice appointments by noting that two of Anderson’s predecessors as CCJ President also publicly raised concerns about the delay. That is true as far as it goes, and it is a point worth verifying against the Byron and Saunders record rather than dismissing. But it is also, notably, no longer where Anderson himself has chosen to rest his own defense.

In his August 14 statement, Anderson conceded the intervention was a mistake in its method, if not its underlying constitutional concern: “Looking back, I recognise that another course would have been much better. It may have been better to have confined myself to public commentary on the constitutional importance of substantive judicial appointments, as did my predecessors.”

That is Anderson distinguishing his own conduct from his predecessors’ — they raised the issue publicly; he raised it privately, in multiple calls to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton, in which he reportedly floated the possibility that then-Acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings might agree to early retirement. Cummings did subsequently take early retirement amid suspicion she had been pushed out, after which President Ali installed his own preferred acting appointees — appointments that remain unconfirmed ten months later. Ramkarran’s predecessor comparison elides precisely the distinction Anderson himself now draws.

THE RECUSAL QUESTION RAMKARRAN’S OWN ARGUMENT CREATES

Here is the deepest problem with “Rumble in the CCJ” as a piece of reasoning: Ramkarran correctly establishes that the RJLSC has no jurisdiction to review Anderson’s conduct — and then stops, as though the absence of jurisdiction were itself the end of the matter. It is not. It raises the next, more obvious question, which Ramkarran never asks: given that the RJLSC’s chairman is Anderson himself, who exactly did the RJLSC imagine would be conducting this “transparent and independent review” of him?

Martin Daly, a former RJLSC member and Senior Counsel, has already answered that question publicly, and bluntly: “The president of the court is chairman of the RJLSC, but he must, of course, recuse himself from participating in an investigation of administrative decisions made by him. It is unfortunate that the practice of appointing a deputy chairman of the commission was not sustained.”

Broadcaster and attorney Dionne Jackson Miller made a version of the same structural point on her program “Time for Tea,” arguing that treating this as an internal matter for the Court to resolve behind closed doors — rather than a matter of legitimate public concern once published — is itself what most endangers the institution. Her point was blunt: the public cannot simply be shut out of the room and asked to trust that those inside will handle it responsibly.

Jackson Miller’s broader argument is worth setting directly against Ramkarran’s, because the two are, in effect, answering different questions about the same facts. Ramkarran’s central concern is that the leak itself — the “unauthorized disclosure of internal deliberations” — has damaged the Court and ought to be a subject of scrutiny in its own right, potentially alongside or even instead of the underlying allegations.

Jackson Miller’s response, delivered before Ramkarran’s piece but answering the same reflex, warned specifically against the instinct within the legal community to “close ranks” and “circle the wagons” around the institution rather than confront what the emails actually describe. She argued that treating the leak as the primary scandal is precisely the wrong response to a crisis of this scale — and that once judges’ own emails describe a president who told colleagues he did not see himself “running a democracy,” the public’s business in the matter is no longer optional. Notably, the CCJ’s own statement to the Trinidad Express — which answered none of fifteen direct questions — did not dispute that the emails were authentic. Nobody at the Court, including Anderson, has denied writing what is attributed to them.

Ramkarran does end his piece by turning the tables on the leakers, suggesting that if the RJLSC is to “review” anything, it should also review whether the Court’s confidential business was improperly disclosed. That is a fair question to raise. But raising it as a kind of counterweight to the substance of what was disclosed — rather than as a separate matter to be pursued in parallel — is the same instinct Jackson Miller warned against: a pull toward litigating the leak instead of the leaked.

WHAT ACTUALLY NEEDS ANSWERING

None of this means Ramkarran’s piece was written in bad faith, or that Anderson’s account should be dismissed rather than tested. It means the account has not yet been tested — not by Ramkarran, and not, meaningfully, by the RJLSC, whose chairman is the man it would be reviewing.

Three questions remain open regardless of how sympathetically Anderson’s own statement is read:

⇒What, specifically, did Justice Jamadar experience in relation to the Mohamed extradition ruling, and does it hold up under independent examination?

⇒What does Barrow v Caricom show about whether the D’Almada panel change was really a first-time, isolated response to attire, as Anderson maintains, rather than one instance of a pattern several judges independently describe?

⇒And who, structurally, is positioned to conduct a genuinely independent review, if not the body chaired by the man under review?

Ramkarran gave the region a serious legal argument about the limits of the RJLSC’s authority. He did not give it an accounting of what five judges, writing independently of one another, say they experienced. Both are needed. Only one has been supplied.

Sources: Ralph Ramkarran, “Rumble in the CCJ”; Trinidad Express, “Deep Divide at the CCJ” (Mark Bassant); Jamaica Gleaner, Aug. 15, 2026; Kaieteur News, Aug. 14–15, 2026; Demerara Waves, Aug. 10 & 12, 2026; NewsAmericasNow, Aug. 14, 2026; Dionne Jackson Miller, “Time for Tea,” episode on the CCJ crisis.

A $5 Billion Question the Government Won’t Ask

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

OIL & GAS GOVERNANCE  ·  STABROEK BLOCK

A $5 Billion Question the Government Won’t Ask

Exxon says the cost bank is clear. Guyana’s own audit trail suggests the company was already over its contractual limit before that announcement — and the state has not said a word about it.

On July 31, ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods told shareholders on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that the Stabroek Block consortium had recovered its full US$55 billion in investment and operating costs — nearly two years ahead of schedule. Chief Financial Officer Neil Hansen confirmed the figure. Guyana’s government said nothing for ten days. When it finally spoke, through Head of the Local Content Secretariat Michael Munroe, standing in for Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat, the message was that the country’s 50 percent profit-oil share had “already taken effect.”

That statement is technically defensible and functionally misleading, and the distinction matters more than the silence that preceded it.

WHAT THE CONTRACT ACTUALLY SAYS

The 2016 Stabroek Production Sharing Agreement does not grant Guyana 50 percent of oil produced. It grants 50 percent of profit oil — whatever remains after royalty and cost recovery are deducted from gross production. Article 11.2 caps that cost-recovery deduction at 75 percent of production in any given month. Whatever survives that monthly cap is split: 2 percent royalty to Guyana off the top, then the remaining profit oil divided 50/50 between the state and the Stabroek consortium.

Run the arithmetic on a single month of production and Guyana’s realized share of gross revenue has never been 50 percent, and it has rarely been the 14.5 percent commonly cited in public commentary. It has been closer to 12.5 percent — 2 percent royalty plus half of the 25 percent left over once the contractor takes its full 75 percent allowance. That is the figure Kaieteur News itself has used in describing the fund’s own quarterly disclosures.

Recovering the historical $55 billion cost bank does not change that formula. It does not convert the arrangement into a flat 50/50 split of everything produced from August onward. It means the specific pool of past expenditure that was consuming space inside the 75 percent monthly ceiling has been paid down. The ceiling itself does not disappear. It refills — with current operating costs, and with whatever the consortium spends developing the two additional projects it is already eyeing, an eighth and ninth phase, on top of the seven already approved.

The opposition’s own position, delivered through APNU, is that no further project should be sanctioned without a ring-fencing provision, precisely because new project costs will re-enter the same 75 percent bucket and suppress Guyana’s take exactly as the original seven did.

Munroe’s statement that the 50 percent share “has already taken effect” is true only in the narrowest sense: for the moment, and only for the moment, the historical bank is empty. Whether that translates into a sustained higher share depends on a variable the government did not mention and has not committed to disclosing: how much of the freed-up 75 percent capacity gets absorbed again by new sanctioned development.

THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD HAVE LED THE STORY

Buried beneath the recovery announcement is a finding that did not originate with this publication, but deserved far more scrutiny than it received. The Oil and Gas Governance Network, an overseas technical monitoring group, compared ExxonMobil’s disclosed cost-recovery totals against the Bank of Guyana’s own published figures for total Stabroek Block revenue between 2020 and 2025.

The Bank of Guyana reported gross block revenue of US$61.3 billion over that period. Under Article 11.2’s 75 percent ceiling, the maximum the consortium was contractually entitled to recover was approximately US$46.0 billion. ExxonMobil’s own disclosures show it recovered US$51.0 billion — roughly US$5 billion beyond what the contract permits, equivalent to 83.2 percent of gross revenue rather than the 75 percent ceiling written into the agreement.

If that figure holds up, it means the premise of the entire “Guyana has now arrived at its 50 percent share” narrative is built on a cost bank that may itself have been overstated relative to the PSA’s own terms. A government that had been rigorously enforcing the 75 percent ceiling all along would have caught a US$5 billion overage well before Exxon announced full recovery on its own earnings call.

Nothing in the public record indicates that happened.

WHAT THE DEPOSITS ACTUALLY SHOW, SO FAR

Independent of OGGN’s overage finding, the receipts flowing into the Natural Resource Fund this year do not yet show the step-change some commentators have projected. Bank of Guyana disclosures show the Natural Resource Fund received approximately US$761 million in the first quarter of 2026 and a further US$1.235 billion in the second quarter — a combined US$2.0 billion for the first half of the year. That tracks close to Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh’s own full-year budget projection of roughly US$2.78 billion, not a trajectory toward the US$8–10 billion in annual revenue some public estimates have floated as the ceiling of what full cost-bank clearance could eventually deliver.

That does not mean those higher projections are wrong. It means they have not shown up in the money yet, and government’s ten-day silence — followed by a single unscripted remark from a deputy at an energy conference — has left no official account of why, or what changes going forward.

THE ACTUAL FAILURE OF GOVERNANCE

The comparison worth drawing is not that ExxonMobil conducts itself professionally while the Guyanese state does not. Exxon’s obligation is to its shareholders, and by that measure, Woods’ description of the recovery as exceeding the company’s own expectations is unremarkable — that is what a well-run extraction company does.

The state’s obligation is different in kind. Under a production-sharing agreement, the government is not merely a passive recipient of a royalty check. It is the counterparty responsible for verifying that cost recovery stays inside the ceiling the contract sets, because every dollar the consortium recovers beyond that ceiling is a dollar that does not become profit oil subject to the 50/50 split. On OGGN’s numbers, that verification function did not hold for the five years leading up to this announcement.

The Ministry of Natural Resources has not disputed the US$5 billion figure. It has not confirmed it either. It has said nothing about it at all — the same silence that met the recovery announcement itself, now extended to the audit finding that should have prompted the announcement in the first place.

Two weeks elapsed between Exxon’s disclosure and any government acknowledgment. In that window, citizens learned the state of their principal natural resource asset from a shareholder call in Texas before they learned it from Georgetown.

That sequencing is the actual scandal — not that a private company defends its shareholders’ interests capably, but that the public authority charged with checking that company’s arithmetic against a specific, numerical, contractual ceiling appears not to have been checking it, and still has not said whether it now will.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from the Ministry of Natural Resources on the OGGN cost-recovery overage finding. This article will be updated with any response received.

GtE: Half-price, Half -cooked, Half -raw

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592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

GtE: Half-price, Half –cooked, Half –raw

OPINION BY: GHK LALL- August 2026 

This is shaping up to be crab on the half shell.  Half-price electricity, that is.  I’m beginning to think of this promised half-price electricity as half-baked, half-packed, and half-assed (if that’s allowed).  If it isn’t, then half-price electricity must qualify to be half-pregnant.  Forget about whether that’s possible or not.  This is what Guyanese get for believing in the authorities.  Half-price electricity will come to pass.  Eventually. 

The concern is that Guyanese may not like how it came about; the half-convincing manner in which it is put in the books, and the light bill that results.  The question is when….

Take it out from the new half profit share (while that lasts) and subsidize the Wales Gas-to-Energy distribution program.  Who could be so crass as to complain?  Half price is 50 percent off, so where’s the trouble?  My trouble is when the half price for light is going to be?  First, it was December 2024, then 2025, then some time in 2026.  Now, it’s midyear 2027, before rolling to a slow full stop in December 2027. 

Is that really the finish line for the calendar busting Wales GtE?  I have got to see that to believe.  Maybe even touch a livewire to see if the shock is real.  Don’t hold me to that one 

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  Now, tell me, why should I allow any damn fool to try a third time?  Not happening, folks.  Not in this lifetime.  I will now make a bold prediction.  Half-price electricity is not going to go live in 2027.  Sorry, but that’s how the cards read.  I play the hand the PPP Govt has given me.  Not on the Wales GtE alone, but on many other matters of national importance.

Recall Pres Ali first inaugural address from six Augusts ago.  Guyanese are still waiting for his promised PPP holy trinity of transparency, accountability, and unity.  There have been signs of the latter.  People crossing the floor.  People coming out of the churches and expounding on ‘excellence in leadership.’  On the same unity, there was the One Guyana scheme in slow motion and technicolor in Linden.  Things got out of hand. 

Apparently, I am in sync with Vice President Jagdeo who would have none of it and left a vacuum in his wake.  If that is the promised unity six years later, then some screw went slack, some connecting rod got warped.  As for transparency and accountability, don’t get me started.  Let’s say that having spoken so brightly, Pres Ali picked up his bat, collected his ball, yanked out the stumps and sent everybody scattering.  Proof of the PPP Govt dedication to sworn commitments.  Thus, what fate something as cheap, low, and negligible as half-price light?

Recall, Pres Ali’s second victorious address.  Ah, why go over the litany of failed promises.  Like the first one, bombastic rhetoric overpowered by ugly reality.  In two phrases, promise Guyanese the world, then give them a basket to bathe ducks.  It seems that the president thrives in these situations.  Apparently, he delights in talking large, then diminishing to a lump, disappearing through side doors. 

Poor General Phillips, it was never so tough in the barracks.  His gift is dirty jobs.  MV Barima descending, carrying many mysteries with it.  Get the prime minister urgently.  There’s none better for the job.  Take charge, Prime Minister.  Wales Gas-to-Energy encountered turbulence, time-consuming detour mandatory, it’s time for General Phillips to saddle up and spearhead rescue ops.

No documents to lay in parliament (GtE).  No half price electricity for another year and a half (GtE), Mr. Mark is the man.  When will half price be?  A year from now is too close.  Eighteen months look iffy.  Two years may see the project finally completed.  Then the bureaucracy has to get cranking.  Another six months.  Guess what, fellow citizens:  It’s awfully close to the next elections. 

If there’s one thing that matters to the PPP, it’s elections.  There goes half-price, and all these half-assed assessments flying about.  May this day gleam continuously with light.  Naturally.

The Missing US$1.6 Billion: Exxon’s Local Content Claims Don’t Match the Ministry of Finance’s Own Book

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY & INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Missing US$1.6 Billion: Exxon’s Local Content Claims Don’t Match the Ministry of Finance’s Own Books

ExxonMobil told an industry audience this month it has spent US$3.6 billion in local companies since 2019, pointing ahead to the 2027 Guyana Energy Conference. Finance Minister Ashni Singh’s own Budget figures put cumulative local content spending at just over US$2 billion since December 2021 — and even that number is only half itemized. Neither account has been reconciled, and neither institution has been asked to explain the gap.

By the Editorial Board — August,2026

ExxonMobil Guyana Limited (EMGL) President Alistair Routledge told an industry audience on August 14 that “collectively the industry has spent over US$3.6B in local companies” of the roughly US$55 billion the company and its partners have poured into developing the Stabroek Block since first oil.

He offered the figure as evidence of “tremendous progress,” framed against an ambition he said remains “higher than that,” and pointed to discussions at the upcoming 2027 Guyana Energy Conference as the venue to build on it.

The number was not interrogated at the venue where it was delivered, and it does not appear anywhere in the Government of Guyana’s own accounting of the same activity. Seven months earlier, in his 2026 Budget presentation to the National Assembly, Senior Minister with Responsibility for Finance Dr. Ashni Singh gave the National Assembly a materially different figure: “over US$2 billion” in goods and services procured from Guyanese companies and nationals since the enactment of the Local Content Act in December 2021 — not since 2019, and not “over US$3.6 billion.”

Both figures purport to measure the same underlying activity: what of the offshore oil boom’s capital and operating spend has actually landed with Guyanese firms. Both were delivered as settled, citable facts, by officials with every institutional resource needed to produce a precise number.

Neither matches the other, and no public record shows either side has been asked to reconcile the difference.

A GAP THAT WIDENS UNDER SCRUTINY

The discrepancy is not simply that the two figures disagree by roughly US$1.6 billion. It is that the disparity survives, and in one dimension worsens, once the underlying periods and Minister Singh’s own category breakdown are examined.

Exxon’s US$3.6B figure covers industry-wide spending — EMGL together with its co-venturers Hess and CNOOC — across a longer window beginning in 2019. Government’s US$2B figure covers a narrower window beginning only at the Local Content Act’s passage in December 2021, and appears to describe EMGL-linked and broader registered-firm procurement rather than the full three-company partnership. A shorter period should, on its face, produce a smaller number. It does — but the gap between the two remains far larger than the roughly two-year difference in start dates would explain on its own, particularly given that the bulk of Stabroek’s capital expenditure and vendor registration activity has occurred since 2021, not before it.

The gap widens further on inspection of the Ministry of Finance’s own supporting detail. In the same Budget presentation, Dr. Singh itemized four categories comprising the government’s local content figure: US$175 million in construction, US$250 million in engineering and machining, US$387 million in manpower and crewing, and US$101 million in accommodation. Those four categories sum to approximately US$913 million — less than half of the “over US$2 billion” headline Dr. Singh cited in the same address. The Ministry has not published what fills the remaining balance.

“More than half of the government’s own headline local-content figure is unaccounted for in its own supporting detail.”

Source

 Figure cited

 Period covered

 Basis / venue
ExxonMobil Guyana (Alistair Routledge)

 US$3.6B

 Since 2019

 Public remarks, industry conference, Aug. 2026
Min. of Finance (Dr. Ashni Singh)

 “Over US$2B”

 Since Dec. 2021 (LCA enactment)

 2026 Budget presentation, Jan. 26, 2026
Singh itemized categories (sum)

 ~US$913M

 Same period as above

 Construction + engineering/machining + manpower/crewing + accommodation only

TWO EXPLANATIONS, NEITHER TESTED

There are, in essence, two non-exclusive explanations for why Exxon’s public claim and the Ministry of Finance’s own figures diverge by roughly US$1.6 billion, and this newsroom has found no evidence that either has been formally examined by Parliament, the Auditor General, or the Local Content Secretariat.

The first is that the Ministry of Finance’s accounting is incomplete — that Dr. Singh’s “over US$2 billion” figure understates true local content spending because it does not fully capture procurement by Hess and CNOOC, undercounts categories outside the four itemized in the Budget presentation, or simply reflects a narrower measurement methodology than the one Exxon uses internally. On this reading, the missing US$1.6 billion is real spending that the state’s own books have failed to record — a significant statistical and oversight failure in its own right, given that the Local Content Secretariat exists specifically to track this activity.

The second is that Exxon’s US$3.6 billion figure is inflated relative to what the Local Content Act actually defines as qualifying local content. The Act’s First Schedule reserves 40 specific categories of goods and services for Guyanese-majority firms — office rental, catering, accommodation, insurance, immigration services, non-hazardous waste management, and others — with defined thresholds ranging from 25 percent to 100 percent Guyanese participation. Industry-wide “local spend” figures of the kind Routledge cited routinely include categories the Act does not reach at all: payments to joint ventures where Guyanese ownership is nominal rather than economically substantive, procurement routed through first-tier contractors whose own local content reporting has been separately flagged by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo as unreliable, and category totals that were never independently verified against the Local Content Register.

Both possibilities point toward the same institutional failure: more than four years after the Local Content Act’s passage, and roughly eleven years after first discovery, there is no single, audited, publicly reconciled figure for how much of Guyana’s oil wealth has actually reached Guyanese hands. The two largest institutional actors with the standing to produce one — the operator and the Ministry of Finance — have each published their own number, and neither has been required to defend it against the other.

THE ENFORCEMENT BACKDROP

The disparity does not exist in a vacuum. It sits atop a documented pattern, described on the record by Vice President Jagdeo himself at an April 2023 Local Content Summit, in which foreign firms structure joint ventures to satisfy the Act’s 51 percent Guyanese-ownership threshold on paper while extracting the underlying economic value through loan and lease arrangements that sit senior to any dividend the Guyanese majority shareholder might otherwise receive.

Mr. Jagdeo further acknowledged that first-tier contractors have been outsourcing carved-out categories of work specifically because “their reporting relationship is not strong enough” to prevent it — a direct admission that the categories meant to guarantee Guyanese participation are not reliably enforced even where they nominally apply.

The statutory penalty for non-compliance underscores how little institutional weight sits behind the figures either side is citing. The Local Content Secretariat has confirmed that the fine for a non-compliant company is GUY$5 million — approximately US$28,809 — against contracts that Guyanese joint-venture partners have described as routinely running into the hundreds of millions of US dollars. A penalty measured in the tens of thousands of dollars is not a deterrent against a contracting structure built around hundreds of millions; it is a cost of doing business, and it supplies no incentive for either an operator or a first-tier contractor to ensure the figures it reports are accurate rather than merely favorable.

WHAT THIS NEWSROOM IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is putting the following questions to ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources / Local Content Secretariat. We will publish responses in full.

  1. To ExxonMobil Guyana Limited: Please provide the methodology and category-level breakdown underlying the US$3.6 billion figure cited by President Alistair Routledge, including the share attributable to EMGL, Hess, and CNOOC individually, and the share of that figure that qualifies as “local content” under the First Schedule of the Local Content Act as opposed to broader in-country spending.
  2. To the Ministry of Finance: Please reconcile the “over US$2 billion” figure cited in the 2026 Budget presentation with ExxonMobil’s US$3.6 billion figure. Specifically, does the Ministry’s figure include procurement by Hess and CNOOC, or EMGL alone? What categories, beyond the four itemized (construction, engineering/machining, manpower/crewing, accommodation), account for the remaining balance of over US$1.1 billion within the Ministry’s own total?
  3. To the Ministry of Finance and the Local Content Secretariat: Has any government body — the Auditor General, the Public Accounts Committee, or the Secretariat itself — independently verified either Exxon’s US$3.6 billion figure or the Ministry’s US$2 billion figure against the Local Content Register or audited financial statements of registered firms? If not, why not, given that both figures have now been cited publicly as authoritative?
  4. To the Local Content Secretariat: Of the companies whose procurement is counted within either the Exxon or Ministry of Finance totals, how many have been reviewed for the joint-venture “fronting” structures described publicly by Vice President Jagdeo in April 2023 — in which a 51 percent Guyanese shareholding is not accompanied by proportionate economic benefit due to loan or lease arrangements with the foreign partner? How many such reviews have resulted in decertification, fines, or referral for prosecution since the Secretariat’s establishment in 2022?
  5. To the Ministry of Natural Resources: Given that the Secretariat’s own November 2025 review of the Local Content Act was launched specifically to address “gaps identified since the law’s inception,” does the Ministry consider the current First Schedule — and the accounting practices used to measure compliance with it — adequate to produce a verifiable, reconciled figure for local content spending? If not, what is the timeline for a framework that would?

The 592 Guardian sought comment from ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources in advance of publication. This article will be updated with any response received.

— The Board

Selective Concern: A Year of Silence on Region 10 — From WIN, and Now From the Carter Center

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Selective Concern: A Year of Silence on Region 10 — From WIN, and Now From the Carter Center

By Editor, The 592 Guardian

The Carter Center’s statement last  week reads, on its face, like the institution doing exactly what it has done in Guyana since 1992: watching, warning, and reminding officials of unfinished business. It expressed “considerable concern” over the impasse at the Guyana Elections Commission. It called for implementation of its own 2025 election report. It welcomed the Attorney General’s acknowledgment that the Constitutional Reform Act needs amending. All of it defensible. None of it wrong.

What the statement does not contain is the more urgent story.

A COUNCIL THAT HAS NEVER GOVERNED

Region 10 held its regional elections on September 1, 2025, alongside the national vote. We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) won the region outright — nine of eighteen seats, a plurality no other single party matched. The eighteen councillors were sworn in. Under the law, that council was then required to elect a Regional Chairman and Vice Chairman.

It has never happened.

The October 10, 2025 vote for Chairman produced a 9-9 tie between WIN’s Mark Goring and APNU’s Dominique Blair. The law is not silent on what happens next: the Regional Executive Officer is required to allow further rounds of voting until the tie is broken. Region 10’s REO did not do this. Nearly a year later, he still has not.

The consequences are not abstract. With no Chairman, no Vice Chairman, and no functioning council, the Regional Executive Officer proceeded to submit the 2026 regional budget without input or approval from the elected councillors — a budget covering a region of roughly 40,000 people, prepared and passed around the very representatives the people of Linden elected to prepare and pass it. WIN’s councillors have said plainly that no consultation occurred. Protests were held. Placards read “Swear in Goring.” “Respect my vote, respect my choice, REO.” None of it moved the administration.

This is not a procedural quarrel between parties who cannot agree on a date. It is a Regional Executive Officer — an appointed administrator — overriding the arithmetic of an election and the plain requirement of law, indefinitely, while the machinery of governance proceeds without the people residents chose.

Dr. Ryan Richards, WIN’s Member of Parliament, has documented this accurately and repeatedly: administrative overreach, elected representatives bypassed, a council paralyzed while budgets move forward regardless. He is not wrong. He has never been wrong. But as this newsroom  argued in response to his most recent statement, accuracy without action is impotence. Repetition, at some point, stops being advocacy and becomes complicity — not on Dr. Richards’ part alone, but on the part of every actor with standing to act and the means to do so.

RESIGNATION DRESSED UP AS LEADERSHIP

Before the Carter Center’s silence is examined, WIN’s own silence must be. For nearly a year, the party that won Region 10 has watched a Regional Executive Officer refuse to hold a lawfully required second round of voting, has watched its own councillors excluded from a regional budget process, and has responded almost entirely with statements — issued in the hope, it seems, that someone else would eventually step in and fix it. Freedom House. The Carter Center. Anyone but WIN itself.

That is not leadership. It is resignation dressed up as leadership.

When voters in Region 10 placed their mark against WIN’s name, that mark carried an unspoken contract: that the party would step up, in every conceivable way available to it, to lead. Constitutional remedies exist precisely for moments like this — judicial review, injunctive relief, a constitutional challenge to an REO acting outside his lawful authority. None of them require anyone’s permission. None of them require the Carter Center’s blessing. And yet, one year on, none of them have been utilized.

The comparison that makes this hardest to excuse is WIN’s own record elsewhere. On the issue of Indian immigrants caught up in trafficking allegations, WIN’s advocacy was immediate, sustained, and pointed — the kind of pressure campaign that moves an issue into the national conversation and keeps it there. That capacity clearly exists within the party. It was simply never applied to the eighteen thousand-plus voters of Region 10 who delivered WIN its only outright regional win in the country.

That contrast raises an uncomfortable but fair question: if this is how WIN responds when it holds a single region, what would its posture have been had it acceded to national leadership? A party’s conduct in the territory it actually controls is the most honest preview available of how it would govern more broadly. One year, no legal remedy sought, no litigation filed, no explanation offered — that is not a record that inspires confidence, and it demands a clear, direct explanation from WIN as to what conceivable reason has kept the courts off the table this long.

TOLD DIRECTLY, AND SILENT ANYWAY

Which brings us to the Carter Center.

The Center’s delegation, led by Board Chairperson Jason Carter — grandson of the institution’s founder — was in Guyana this week as a follow-up to its final report on the 2025 elections, meeting with a wide range of stakeholders to assess implementation of its own recommendations. According to Charles Sugrim, WIN’s campaign coordinator, WIN raised the Region 10 impasse directly with Jason Carter during that visit. Not with a junior staffer. Not through a written submission routed to a desk officer. With the Chairman of the Board himself.

The statement that followed addressed GECOM. It did not mention Region 10 at all.

“The omission is not an oversight. It is a choice.”

This is worth sitting with. The Carter Center is not a passive observer of Guyanese democracy; it has, by its own account, conducted more than a dozen missions here since 1992 and considers itself instrumental in the country’s democratic development.            Its statements carry institutional weight precisely because the organization has spent three decades building a reputation for saying difficult things plainly. When such an institution is told, in a direct meeting during a working visit, that an elected council has gone almost a year without its lawfully elected leadership — and responds days later with a statement that finds room to discuss constitutional reform, campaign finance, and the composition of a commission, but not that — the omission is not an oversight. It is a choice.

We are not speculating about whether the issue reached the delegation. It did. The question this newsroom  is now putting to Mr. Carter directly is simple: why did a concern raised with you personally not merit a single sentence in the statement your Center issued last week? Guyanese officials, and the tens of thousands of people governed without their chosen representatives in Region 10, deserve an answer that is not “outside the scope of this particular release.”

An institution that has stood for decades on the premise that its voice matters cannot then choose, selectively, when that voice will be used.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CONCLUSION

None of this diminishes the legitimacy of the Carter Center’s GECOM concerns, which are real and which this news media  has covered extensively. But it does confirm something this publication has argued before: external validation was never going to be the mechanism that resolves Region 10. If a body with the Carter Center’s history and standing will not spend its institutional weight on a documented, year-long breach of electoral law it was told about directly, then the wait for outside pressure to fix this is over. It was arguably never going to work.—and WIN’s own year of waiting for it to work is the more damning story here.

It is worth noting, plainly, that no other media house in Guyana has addressed this intransigence — not WIN’s silence, not the Carter Center’s selective statement. That silence, too, is a choice, and this publication does not intend to make it.

That leaves the courts — the only lever still available to WIN that does not depend on someone else’s press release.

Judicial review of the REO’s refusal to conduct further rounds of voting. Injunctive relief compelling the council to convene. A constitutional challenge, if the administrative record supports one. These are not extreme measures. They are the ordinary instruments democracies provide for precisely this situation — when an administrator substitutes his own indefinite delay for the outcome an election produced, and every institutional actor with the standing to intervene, from Freedom House to the Carter Center, declines to.

In two weeks, Guyana will mark one year since the elections that were supposed to settle who governs Region 10. The people of Linden have waited that long already. Statements — from Dr. Richards, from this media room , from the Carter Center or anyone else — will not seat a Chairman. Only enforcement will. WIN said, after its January protests, that it would not stop until the election was concluded. Nearly seven months later, it must now finish what it started — not on a picket line, but in a courtroom.

Democracy in Guyana is not sustained by the frequency of statements condemning its erosion. It is sustained by what happens after those statements are ignored.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from the Carter Center on the omission of Region 10 from its August statement. This piece will be updated with any response.

— The Board