Held to Ransom:    A Nation That Cannot    Stop Shooting Itself

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THE 592 GUARDIAN — INDEPENDENT EDITORIAL Holding Power Accountable Since the Oil Boom 

MONDAY JUNE 01, 2026, EDITORIAL GUYANA — ENERGY & GOVERNANCE 

SPECIAL EDITORIAL 

BY: Hem Kumar

Held to Ransom:   

A Nation That Cannot Stop Shooting Itself 

A damning letter from a Turkish barge operator is not just a power crisis. It is the final bill arriving for decades of reckless contracting, grand promises, and a government that has never once been held accountable for the wreckage it leaves behind. 

THE EDITORIAL BOARD

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

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01 JUNE 2026 

A letter arrived last Sunday at the Ministry of Public Works. It was polite in tone, measured in language, and devastating in consequence. Signed jointly by Beyza Özdemir, Americas Director of Commercial Operations for Karadeniz Powership Yasin Bey, and Antonio Neto, Managing Director of Urbacon Concessions Investments, it informed the Government of Guyana that it could not be granted the thirty days it had begged for. Instead, it was being given until June 1 — this Monday — to accept a new pricing structure. Or the lights go out in New Amsterdam. 

The government, which stewards one of the most oil-rich nations on earth, was effectively on its knees before a barge operator, pleading for extra time. That image should shock every Guyanese. It does not arrive from nowhere. It is the logical endpoint of a pattern of governance so consistent in its failure,so brazen in its disregard for accountability, that it has become the defining feature of how this country manages its public resources. 

“Alignment and unification of the commercial terms and pricing structure across all country operations remain essential requirements for the continuation of the arrangement.”

— LETTER FROM KARPOWERSHIP/URBACON TO MINISTRY OF PUBLIC WORKS, 25 MAY 2026 — TRANSLATION: ACCEPT OUR PRICE HIKE OR GO DARK. 

I THE LETTER AND WHAT IT REALLY SAYS 

The document, Ref. No. GY-071, is a masterclass in corporate coercion dressed as diplomacy. The two companies acknowledge that the original Powership Time Charter Plus Agreement expired on May 21, 2026. They note, with generous self-congratulation, that they have “continued services beyond the original contract expiry” out of “good faith.” They then decline the government’s written request — made in desperation on May 22 — for a thirty-day extension, granting instead a single week ending June 1. 

But the most telling line is buried mid-letter: the insistence on “alignment and unification of the commercial terms and pricing structure across all country operations.” In plain language, Guyana is being told it must now accept the same inflated, standardized rates Karpowership charges across its entire global fleet — rates which, as this newspaper has documented, have been vigorously contested in Pakistan, Lebanon, and South Africa as exploitative and opaque. 

This is not a negotiation. This is a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum issued to a nation that has no alternative. And the reason Guyana has no alternative is entirely a story of its own government’s making.

II THE FINANCIAL ANATOMY OF THE DEAL

When GPL inked its first contract with Urbacon Concessions Investments W.L.L. — the Qatari-registered shell company that serves as the local face of Turkey’s Karpowership International — on April 13, 2024, it did so under a corporate arrangement designed to obscure accountability. UCC Holdings is incorporated in Qatar. Its strategic partner is a Turkish company. Its managing director signed this week’s ultimatum letter. The chain of liability is long, the chain of proTt is short, and it runs directly to Istanbul. 

US$884M                             

 ESTIMATED TOTAL ADDITIONAL                          COST FROM GTE DELAYS,INCLUDING RENTALS, FUEL &       LEGAL SETTLEMENTS                         

 US$619M                              

 HEAVY FUEL OIL IMPORT BILL FOR THE TWO-YEAR POWERSHIP RENTAL PERIOD ALONE 

 US $97M

 SETTLEMENT PAID TO LINDSAYCA/CH4 AFTER THE

GOVERNMENT LOST ITS OWN 

LEGAL SETTLEMENTS 

ARBITRATION 

US$116M 

KARPOWERSHIP’S WINNING BID 

FOR THE 60MW DEMERARA 

VESSEL — THE HIGHEST AMONG 

ALL BIDDERS

The terms of the 36MW Berbice vessel deal set the stage: GPL agreed to pay 6.62 US cents per kilowatt hour as a monthly charter fee, plus a separate 0.98 US cents per kWh for operation and maintenance. That is before fuel. GPL is responsible for supplying the Heavy Fuel Oil itself. Former minister David Patterson was unambiguous: when all costs are aggregated, the true price of this power exceeded 55 US cents per megawatt, and the two-year bill would top US$200 million for the 36MW ship alone. 

When the government returned to the same company for the second, 60MW

vessel, competing bidders had offered to supply similar capacity for as little as US$37.7 million. Karpowership bid US$116.4 million — more than three times the lowest offer — and won. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo conformed the award and offered the public a negotiated reduction from $0.1117 to $0.095 per kWh as consolation. The arithmetic of that generosity remains unexplained. 

DOCUMENTED 

The Two-Year Damage Sheet: A document presented to the National Assembly on April 22, 2025, revealed the combined daily rental cost of both ships at GY$48,847,450 — a staggering GY$35.6 billion over two years, or approximately US$165.8 million in charter fees alone. GPL’s fuel bill, separately, stands at GY$47 billion per annum, with 93% of that being imported Heavy Fuel Oil. Prime Minister Mark Phillips revealed in 2026 a 74.8% average increase in fuel import costs since the start of the year — costs the Guyanese taxpayer absorbs entirely. 

III THE ROOT CAUSE: GAS-TO-ENERGY AND THE BRIDGE THAT NEVER ENDED 

None of this would have been necessary had the Gas-to-Energy (GTE) project delivered on its central promise: cheaper, cleaner baseload power from Guyana’s own offshore gas reserves by the end of 2024. That promise was made repeatedly, loudly, and with the full authority of the state. It was not kept. 

When first conceived, the GTE project carried a price tag of US$478 million. By 2026, that figure had bloated past US$2 billion — with some analysts warning the final total, inclusive of grid upgrades, legal settlements, and delay costs, could approach US$3 billion. The ExxonMobil-built offshore pipeline was completed on schedule in 2024. It now lies idle, filled with nitrogen to prevent corrosion, waiting on a power plant that has not arrived. 

2018 — PROMISE MADE

GTE project announced at an estimated cost of US$478 million. Cheaper electricity “for all Guyanese” pledged as the cornerstone of the oil wealth dividend. 

EARLY 2024 — FIRST MISS 

Completion pushed from end-2024 to Q4 2025. GTE Task Force head Winston Brassington cites work delays, late equipment deliveries, and foundation issues at the Wales site. 

APRIL 2024 — THE BARGE ARRIVES 

GPL signs emergency contract with Urbacon/Karpowership for 36MW power ship at New Amsterdam. The “temporary” bridge solution begins. US$1M mobilization fee paid upfront. 

LATE 2024 — SECOND BARGE, HIGHER PRICE 

Government awards second Karpowership contract for 60MW — at US$116M, the highest bid submitted, beating competitors by as much as US$78 million. 

2025 — LEGAL DEFEAT 

Government loses arbitration against contractor CH4-Lindsayca and is forced to pay a US$97M settlement. Legal fees add approximately US$2M more. CH4 subsequently dissolves from the consortium; Lindsayca continues alone. 

MAY 2026 — THE ULTIMATUM 

Contract expires May 21. Government begs for 30-day extension May 22. Karpowership refuses. The nation is given until June 1 to accept new pricing terms — in secret, with no public disclosure, until a leaked document exposed the crisis.

IV THE COMPANY’S GLOBAL TRAIL OF CONTROVERSY 

The Guyana government, in its rush to the power ship solution, either did not perform due diligence on Karpowership’s global record — or it did and proceeded regardless. Either conclusion is troubling. 

In Pakistan, a Karadeniz subsidiary was accused of paying politically connected middlemen over US$5 million to clinch a five -year contract worth US$565 million. Pakistan’s Supreme Court rescinded the deal in 2012, triggering a seven-year legal battle and a continuing corruption investigation. In Lebanon, the company stands accused of paying commissions to a company linked to politically connected businessmen; the country’s financial public prosecutor impounded both operating ships as surety for a potential US$25 million fine. In Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and Sudan, the company has been accused by US Senate investigators of deliberately causing blackouts to gain financial leverage during contract renegotiations — a playbook that Guyana’s current predicament should render hauntingly familiar. 

Investigators from South Africa’s amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism described the Karpowership business model with clinical precision: the company had “shifted decisively from being a provider of short-term power supply for urgent temporary shortfalls, to effectively making itself the costly solution to permanent ’emergencies.'” The company’s own founder once acknowledged, in a communication reviewed by US diplomatic sources, that the power ship “is intended as a short- to mid-term solution to help a country’s leadership mitigate potential social or political unrest.” The pitch is not about energy security. It is about political survival — and the price of that survival compounds annually. 

“The company shifted decisively from being a provider of short term power to making itself the costly solution to permanent ’emergencies.'” 

— AMABHUNGANE CENTRE FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM, ON KARPOWERSHIP’S GLOBAL BUSINESS MODEL 

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME. THIS IS THE PATTERN.

The tragedy of the power ship crisis is not that it is surprising. It is that it is entirely predictable — the latest chapter in a decades-long pattern of megaproject mismanagement that has drained the Guyanese treasury across successive administrations, with the same architects, the same excuses, and the same absence of consequence. 

The Skeldon Sugar Factory, built by Chinese contractor CNTIC at a cost of approximately US$187–200 million — a sum that at the time exceeded the entire national budget — was commissioned in 2009 and never functioned as designed. It did not modernize GuySuCo; it accelerated its collapse. The contagion of its failure spread to every other sugar factory in the country. Guyana is still repaying the loans. The factory’s roof has since caved in. The debt, per the Caribbean Development Bank loan terms, runs until 2033. 

The Amaila Falls Hydro Project — another “transformative” energy solution — consumed over US$100 million before being abandoned. It left behind no power, no infrastructure, and a template for how grand announcements and opaque contracting can consume public funds without producing public benefit. 

The Cheddi Jagan International Airport expansion, the Sheriff Street Mandela Avenue road project, the Surendra Specialty Hospital: each a variation on the same story. Foreign contractors, cost overruns, deadline extensions, legal disputes, and a public that is informed only after the damage has been done. 

DOCUMENTED

The Pattern, Documented: “Afer losing some US$200 million in the Skeldon Sugar Factory, over US$100 million in the Amaila Falls Hydro Project, around US$100 million in the Surendra Specialty Hospital and a litany of impetuous sojourns, it seems that Guyana is witnessing an antithesis of The Midas Touch” — Kaieteur News analysis, October 2025. When GTE is added to this ledger, the cumulative cost of the PPP/C government’s failed megaprojects exceeds half a billion US dollars, excluding the ongoing power ship rental and fuel bills. 

VI THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT 

There is a structural reason these failures repeat. It is not incompetence alone, though there is incompetence. It is the near-total absence of public accountability in the contracting process. The details of the power ship agreements were not proactively disclosed. The scale of the GTE cost overruns was not proactively disclosed. The government’s legal defeat against Lindsayca and the resulting US$97 million settlement was not proactively disclosed. The approaching contract expiry — and the company’s pricing demands — was not proactively disclosed. Guyana, an oil-rich nation with billions in natural resource revenues, learned that its electricity supply was days from collapse through a leaked letter. 

Minister Deodat Indar, to whom the ultimatum was addressed, did not respond to media requests for comment on Saturday. The government, which controls the messaging infrastructure of a state flush with petroleum revenues, chose silence. The citizens who pay the fuel bills, who absorb the charter fees, who will absorb whatever new pricing Karpowership demands — they were the last to know, and may still not know the full terms of what is being agreed in their name. 

■ THE COMPOUNDING CRISIS 

Guyana sits on a gas pipeline built and paid for, lying idle under nitrogen, while it imports Heavy Fuel Oil at GY$47 billion a year, rents foreign-owned ships at US$165 million over two years, pays out US$97 million in lost arbitration, employs a US$50,000-a-month consultancy with reported ties to officials, and now faces an undisclosed price increase from a company with a documented global history of leveraging dependency for financial gain. 

Every dollar of this was preventable. None of it has been accounted for. No official has resigned. No contractor has been blacklisted. No independent public inquiry has been ordered. 

VII WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW 

The immediate crisis must be managed — Guyana cannot negotiate from cold and dark. But managing the immediate crisis cannot become the permanent excuse for burying the larger accountability reckoning. This newspaper calls for the following, without equivocation: 

Full public disclosure of the new pricing terms being negotiated with Karpowership, before they are signed. The Guyanese public is the paying party. It has the right to know the cost before commitment, not after. 

An independent parliamentary inquiry into how a nation with the fastest growing oil economy in the Western Hemisphere arrived at a point where a foreign barge company could threaten its power supply with one week’s notice. This inquiry must have subpoena authority, public hearings, and a mandate to examine the GTE procurement, the Karpowership award process, and the Urbacon/UCC corporate structure. 

Accountability for the GTE delays. Winston Brassington has overseen a project that ballooned from US$478 million to over US$2 billion, missed its delivery date by more than two years, required an emergency foreign rental that will cost nearly US$900 million in total, and lost a US$97 million arbitration. These are not abstractions. They are Guyanese dollars that will not build schools, hospitals, or roads. 

A moratorium on emergency no-bid contracts of the type that delivered Karpowership its Guyanese monopoly. The procurement record shows that better, cheaper alternatives existed at every stage. They were not chosen.

A nation that cannot account for the past is condemned to repeat it. Guyana has repeated it in sugar, in hydro, in roads, in airports, in hospitals, and now — most expensively — in energy. The letter dated May 25, Ref. No. GY-071, is not merely a power company pressing for better rates. It is the invoice for years of decisions made without transparency, without competition, and without consequence. Until those conditions change, the next invoice is already being written. 

The lights may stay on after June 1. The reckoning, however, is overdue. 

— ◆ — 

THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL BOARD | 31 MAY 2026 

ALL FIGURES SOURCED FROM NATIONAL ASSEMBLY DOCUMENTS, GPL PRESS RELEASES, KAIETEUR NEWS, STABROEK NEWS, AND AMABHUNGANE CENTRE FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM.

Deported Into Limbo: The United States and Mexico Are Abandoning People to Suffer and Die

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Deported Into Limbo:

The United States and Mexico Are Abandoning People to Suffer and Die

A Human Rights Watch report has laid bare a moral catastrophe. Now someone must be held accountable.

Let us be precise about what is happening at the intersection of American immigration enforcement and Mexican indifference: elderly men and women — many of them sick, many of them long settled in the United States — are being flown to a country they do not know, stripped of their documents, and left on the street to die. This is not hyperbole. This is policy.

A new Human Rights Watch investigation, “Casting Us Aside to Die,” documents in exhaustive, damning detail how the Trump administration has deported more than 4,300 Cuban nationals to Mexico between January 2025 and March 2026 — part of a broader transfer of over 18,000 third-country nationals. These are not abstract numbers. These are grandparents. These are people with dialysis appointments and insulin prescriptions. These are human beings who spent decades building lives in America, paying taxes, raising children, burying parents — people who believed, however naively, that a life lived in good faith offered some measure of protection.

It offers none. Not anymore.

This Is Not Deportation. It Is Abandonment.

There is a word for what governments do when they remove someone from a country to which they have no legal connection, in which they have no family, no language, no resources, and no rights. That word is dumping. The Trump administration has constructed, with bureaucratic precision, a system for dumping human beings.

Cuba frequently refuses to accept its own citizens back. So rather than confront that diplomatic problem, Washington has found a workaround: ship people to Mexico instead, declare the deportation complete, and move on. Mexico, for its shameful part, has accepted these transfers without demanding a single meaningful protection in return. The result is a population of people in permanent legal limbo — no status in Mexico, no path back to the United States, no way forward to Cuba — stateless in everything but name, marooned in cities like Tapachula and Villahermosa that are already buckling under the weight of violence and poverty.

These are not sanctuary cities. They are dumping grounds.

The “Public Safety” Justification Is a Lie

The administration and its defenders will reach, as they always reach, for the public safety argument. They will invoke criminals and threats and the sovereign right to protect the homeland.

The data obliterates this case before it can be made.

Only 16 percent of those deported had convictions for violent offenses. More than a quarter — over 25 percent — had no criminal record whatsoever. They were deported not because they were dangerous, but because they were deportable — a legal category that, under this administration, has been stretched to justify nearly anything. When you strip away the rhetoric, what remains is a policy that targets the old, the sick, and the vulnerable with the same indiscriminate sweep it applies to anyone else. There is no meaningful individual review. There is no proportionality. There is only the machinery of removal, grinding forward.

One deported Cuban, elderly and stranded, put it with devastating plainness: “There’s no help. We can’t work because we don’t have papers. They don’t give us anything… How are we supposed to eat, to pay rent?”

There is no answer to that question. That is the point. The policy is not designed to answer it.

Mexico Must Stop Playing Innocent

Washington bears primary responsibility for this catastrophe — but it does not bear it alone. The Mexican government has been a willing accomplice, quietly accepting transfer after transfer while providing deportees with nothing: no shelter, no medical access, no documentation, no legal pathway, no plan. Mexican officials have allowed their southern border cities to become warehouses for people discarded by a more powerful neighbor, and they have done so without protest, without negotiation, and without shame.

This is a bilateral failure — and the Mexican government’s studied passivity makes it a participant, not merely a bystander. Accepting these transfers while offering no durable protection is not neutrality. It is complicity dressed up as diplomacy.

Mexico must demand — and the United States must provide — transparent legal agreements before any third-country transfer occurs. Anything less is a handshake over a mass abandonment.

What Must Happen Now

The remedies are not complicated. They require only political will, which is precisely what is absent.

The United States must immediately reinstate individualized review for every deportation case involving third-country transfer. Every person facing removal to a country they have no connection to must have access to a protection screening, legal counsel, and a genuine opportunity to contest their removal. Anything less is a violation of domestic due process guarantees and international legal obligations the United States has formally accepted and is now casually discarding.

Mexico must provide immediate humanitarian relief to those already stranded — emergency shelter, medical care, identity documentation, and a real pathway to legal regularization. Receiving these individuals and then leaving them to sleep in parks outside hospitals is not migration management. It is cruelty with paperwork.

And the international community — human rights bodies, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, allied governments — must refuse to look away. When two governments conspire through action and inaction to strand thousands of elderly, medically vulnerable people in indefinite limbo, the silence of the international community is not neutrality. It is permission.

History Will Not Be Kind

There is a particular kind of moral cowardice in policies designed to make suffering invisible — to move people far enough away that their desperation never becomes a domestic political problem. That is what this is. These Cubans are not being sent home. They are being sent away: away from American news cameras, away from American courts, away from American conscience.

They are being cast aside to die. Some of them already have.

The United States government is doing this in the name of American citizens. The Mexican government is enabling it in the name of diplomatic accommodation. And unless pressure — sustained, furious, and organized — is brought to bear on both capitals, it will continue.

This is not a migration policy failure. It is a human rights emergency, authored by governments that know exactly what they are doing and have decided, with full deliberation, to do it anyway. Call it what it is. Demand they stop.

 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Drones Above, Darkness Below

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Drones Above, 

Darkness Below

 

  A government that can choreograph spectacle should be able to deliver services. Guyana’s real crisis is not a shortage of celebration, but a shortage of competence.

Guyana is being invited to celebrate lights in the sky while too many of its citizens continue to struggle with the absence of reliable lights on the ground. That is the paradox of this moment: a government eager to stage spectacle, yet far less convincing when it comes to delivering the basic services that make daily life bearable.

There is nothing wrong with a national celebration. A country should mark its milestones with pride. But celebration becomes offensive when it is used to distract from dysfunction, when choreographed beauty is deployed to mask administrative failure, and when the people are expected to applaud while they are still trapped in the consequences of neglect.

The drone display may have dazzled the eye, but it did not dry a flooded street, unclog a drain, or ease the hardship of families whose yards and communities remain waterlogged after every serious rainfall. It did not restore confidence in drainage maintenance or repair the long-standing neglect that has turned flooding into a recurring feature of life for too many Guyanese.

And then there is GPL — or rather, the lack of dependable light from GPL. Here lies the cruel irony. The state can summon drones to paint patterns in the night sky, but it cannot consistently ensure that homes, businesses, and neighborhoods are properly served by the public utility people depend on every day. One is engineered for applause. The other is supposed to be basic governance. 

Yet in Guyana, the spectacle shines more brightly than the service.

That is why the contrast matters. It reveals a government more comfortable with symbolism than with substance, more interested in presentation than performance. Drone lights are temporary, theatrical, and forgettable. Reliable electricity, functional drainage, and passable roads are not luxuries. They are the foundation of a civilized society. When those fail, no amount of pageantry can persuade people that they are living under competent leadership.

A serious administration would understand that the true measure of progress is not how well it can stage a celebration, but how consistently it can improve the lives of ordinary citizens. It would know that the real test of power is not the ability to put on a show, but the discipline to maintain drains, clear canals, repair roads, strengthen utilities, and protect communities from preventable hardship.

Instead, Guyanese are too often told to look up while they are forced to look down. Up at the drones. Down at the floodwater. Up at the spectacle. Down at the stagnation. Up at the promise of a modern nation. Down at the reality of services that remain unreliable and communities that remain neglected.

This is not a matter of optics alone. It is a matter of priorities. 

A government that can choreograph lights in the sky should be able to guarantee lights in the homes of its people. A state that can fund spectacle should be able to fund service. A leadership that celebrates national progress must first prove that it can deliver the basics without turning every rainy season into a crisis.

Until that happens, the paradox will remain impossible to ignore. The drones will glow overhead. GPL will continue to symbolize the frustration below. And ordinary Guyanese will be left to wonder why their country can illuminate the night for a celebration but not consistently light the lives of the people who make that nation real.

Guyana does not need more theatrical light shows; it needs dependable light, dependable drainage, and dependable leadership.

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

A LIFE IN SERVICE TO THE NATION.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN   |SPECIAL FEATURE 

 

THE 592 GUARDIAN

SPECIAL FEATURE •  GUYANA INDEPENDENCE EDITION •  JUNE 2026

A LIFE IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

Honoring the Diplomatic Brilliance, Corporate Mastery, and Lifelong Patriotism of

Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally

Ph.D.  •  MBA  •  BBA  •  FAIA (UK)  •  DTM

Scholar • Financial Executive • Ambassador • Global Citizen

To be honored at the Guyana Independence Ball –New York City • Saturday, June 27,2026

There are men and women who serve their nation from a sense of obligation. And then there are those who serve from a sense of destiny—who look at every degree earned, every corporation turned around, every classroom inspired, and see not personal achievement, but tools to be laid at the feet of a people and a republic. Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally belongs emphatically and irrevocably to the latter company.

As the Guyanese diaspora gathers in New York for the prestigious annual Independence Ball on Saturday, June 27th , the spotlight falls on this remarkable son of the soil—a scholar, corporate titan, international diplomat, academic pioneer, and global thought leader whose career spans six decades, five continents, and 84 countries. To honor Dr. Ally is to honor the very spirit of what Guyana can produce when ambition meets integrity and personal success is fused with national purpose.

The 592 Guardian presents this comprehensive tribute not merely as a record of titles held or positions occupied, but as a chronicle of a life lived in full—in boardrooms and embassies, in lecture halls and presidential libraries, in the oil-rich corridors of the Middle East and the quiet streets of Georgetown where it all began.

INTRODUCTION

From the Red Earth of Providence

The Village That Forged a Statesman

Favorite Quote

“Service to Humanity is the Best Work of Life.”

Before the ambassadorial credentials, the Wall Street boardrooms, the Gulf-state negotiations, and the Guinness World Records—there was Providence. Providence Sugar Estate, East Bank Demerara: red earth roads and the warm, dense smell of cane under a Guyanese sun; logie row houses where an entire community lived shoulder to shoulder and raised its children as one. It is here, in this particular soil, that the story of Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally truly begins.

He was born the first child of Soharab Ally—shop owner and pharmacist at Providence Estate Hospital—and his mother, Bebi Rahana. The Ally family grocery shop, set within the logies, was more than a place of commerce; it was a gathering point, a pulse of the community’s daily life. From his earliest years, Dr. Ally observed what it meant to be of service to a people: his father dispensing medicine and provisions alike, his mother holding the warmth of home steady. The values of that shop—reliability, generosity, dignity in every transaction—would travel with him to every office and every continent that followed. In time, the family moved to a modern residence at 7 Public Road, Providence, East Bank Demerara, but the logie foundations were already set, permanent and deep.

Dr. Ally childhood home

Providence Estate taught him something no university curriculum can fully convey that greatness is rooted in community. Neighbors shared what little they had without keeping score. Elders settled disputes and dispensed wisdom in the cool shade of mango, tamarind, genip, soursop, golden apple, cherry, guava, jamoon, gooseberry, and sugar apple trees—a natural parliament of the village, convened under branches rather than beneath official seals. There was a collective, unspoken covenant that every child mattered, that no one’s potential belonged to them alone. It was a conviction that would later animate every textbook Dr. Ally donated, every scholarship he championed, every development grant he fought to secure.

His formal education unfolded at Wilson’s Preparatory and Central High Schools—institutions that shaped not merely his mind but his character. Wilson’s instilled the foundational trinity of discipline, rigorous education, and intellectual curiosity. Central High expanded the horizon: it was there he encountered the power of ideas as instruments of change, the dignity embedded in honest labor, and the concept of duty to something larger than the self. These were not abstractions taught from a textbook; they were lessons absorbed from teachers who demanded excellence because they believed their students were capable of it—and who understood that belief, in itself, is a form of investment.

Those years live in the body as much as the memory: the sound of rain hammering zinc rooftops; the thwack of a cricket ball on a road wicket as evening gathered; the smoke and laughter of cookouts in the back-dams where community was not a concept but a daily practice. They live in the voices of the teachers who refused to let a single student believe that geography or circumstance determined destiny. It was an education conducted simultaneously inside the classroom and outside it—in the estate roads, the village yards, the shared kitchens, and the long conversations under those fruit trees.

From those foundations, Dr. Ally carried his formation to the University of Guyana, where he completed the Diploma in Management Program—the bridge between the village that raised him and the world he would go on to shape. Every institution he would later attend—Adelphi University, Walden University, the Association of International Accountants in the United Kingdom—was built upon a base of values poured in Providence, reinforced in the classrooms of Wilson’s and Central High, and tested in the practical life of Georgetown’s commercial and civic arena.

It is that journey—from the red earth and the logie row houses to the halls of power and the pages of international history—that gives Dr. Ally’s life its particular resonance and authority. He did not arrive at his convictions through theory. He arrived at them through Providence. And the conviction he carries, the one that has guided every decision across six decades of service, remains the same one forged in that estate community:

 

Guyana’s true wealth is its people, and service is the debt we owe to the place that raised us.

PART I: THE CRUCIBLE OF NATION-BUILDING — Guyana, 1964–1979

To understand the diplomat who would one day secure historic multi-million-dollar agreements in the Middle East, one must return to the streets and institutions of Georgetown in the years immediately following Guyana’s independence. Between 1964 and 1979, the young Dr. Ally was not a spectator to history—he was a participant in the foundational machinery of the new republic.

 

He served as Administrative Assistant to the legendary R.B. Gajraj—Lord Mayor of Georgetown, Speaker of Parliament, and CEO of H.B. Gajraj—learning the levers of civic power at the elbow of one of the nation’s towering figures. This was his first postgraduate school: not a university campus, but the living, breathing engine of Guyanese governance.

During this formative fifteen-year period, Dr. Ally’s footprint expanded across the full architecture of Guyanese commercial and civic life:

  • Company Secretary and Accountant for Booker Lithographic & Boxmakers Ltd. (later Guyana Lithographic Co. Ltd.), and Secretary/Director/Accountant of the Guyana Lithographic Co-operative Credit Union—building the cooperative economic architecture of the new nation from within.
  • Selected as a Member of the elite Guyana Financial Advisory Team tasked with negotiating and executing the national acquisition of Booker Holdings—a watershed moment in Guyana’s economic sovereignty and self-determination.
  • Director of the National Lotteries; Director of Guyana Cooperative Insurance Services; Deputy Chairman of the Board of Governors for Kuru Kuru Cooperative College; and General Manager of the powerhouse Gafoors Group of Companies.
  • Civic architect and connector: President of the Central Demerara Lions Club; Vice President of the Georgetown Jaycees; President of the Georgetown Toastmasters Club; and, for seven years, President of the Twinning Association of Georgetown—personally leading annual diplomatic delegations to Ottawa, Canada, and hosting reciprocal delegations from Ottawa and Lusaka, Zambia, in a forerunner of the municipal diplomacy he would later practice on the world stage.

These were not ceremonial roles. They were the proving grounds of a leader who understood that national service demanded technical mastery, financial discipline, and the courage to act at pivotal moments in a young nation’s story.

PART II: THE FINANCIAL ALCHEMIST — Wall Street and the Corporate World

When Dr. Ally departed for the United States, he carried with him not the hunger of an immigrant seeking personal fortune, but the ambition of a man who understood that the most dangerous thing a developing nation can lack is a corps of world-class financial minds. He was determined to become one.

His academic pursuit was systematic and relentless. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration and an MBA from Adelphi University, followed by a Ph.D. in Administration and Management from Walden University (in association with Indiana University)—a doctoral dissertation of 373 pages focused on restructuring CARICOM for the 21st century through regional economic integration. To that he added the Fellow of the Association of International Accountants (FAIA) designation from the United Kingdom, a grueling 16-examination benchmark equivalent to a CPA or CMA, demonstrating that his credentials were not the product of convenience but of rigorous, competitive pursuit.

For 27 years, Dr. Ally operated at the apex of American corporate finance—not as a middle manager, but as Controller and Chief Financial Officer of major publicly listed technology and manufacturing companies on NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX, including Acrodyne Industries, Veeco-UPA Technology, and Porta Systems Corp. The results he delivered were not incremental. He engineered rapid financial reporting turnarounds, reducing closing cycles to as few as three to five business days, and delivered over $31 million in cumulative annual cost savings across his major corporate tenures—a figure that stands as one of the most concrete demonstrations of executive capability in the Guyanese diaspora’s professional history.

His American career also included a notable year (1994–1995) as a Federal Agent with the Internal Revenue Service in New York, where he applied his command of Title 26 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code to enforce corporate tax compliance at the highest levels—a role that speaks to a moral seriousness about financial governance that would define his diplomatic tenure a generation later.

PART III: THE DIPLOMAT — Kuwait, the Middle East, and the US$950 Million Legacy

When Dr. Ally was appointed Guyana’s Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) in 2016, it was a recognition that Guyana’s investment story needed to be told with both passion and precision. When he was subsequently appointed Guyana’s Second Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the State of Kuwait—presenting his credentials to the Amir in March 2017—he carried with him not the typical diplomat’s portfolio of protocol and pleasantries, but the balance sheet of a CFO and the conviction of a patriot.

His signature framework— “Show, Tell, & Know Guyana”—transformed the Guyanese Embassy in Kuwait City from a passive outpost into a high-octane investment promotion hub. The results were historic.

The US$50.7 Million Debt Write-Off

Through sustained, skillful negotiation, Dr. Ally secured a landmark bilateral agreement in which the State of Kuwait formally forgave US$50.7 million of Guyanese debt—a single stroke of financial diplomacy that removed a significant burden from the national treasury and repositioned Guyana as a trusted, respected partner in the Gulf region.

The US$900 Million Islamic Development Bank Portfolio

Serving concurrently as Guyana’s First Alternate Governor to the Islamic Development Bank (Is DB) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Dr. Ally operated with rare dual authority—representing Guyana in both bilateral and multilateral arenas simultaneously. It was in this capacity that he orchestrated a US$900 million portfolio of grants and loans from the Is DB for critical Guyanese infrastructure and national development—an injection of capital unmatched in the history of Guyana’s multilateral financing relationships. These were not promises or letters of intent. They were secured commitments, the product of a man who understood both the technical language of development finance and the personal relationships required to translate proposals into signed agreements.

The Guinness World Record and the Art of Cultural Diplomacy

In January 2020, Dr. Ally demonstrated that diplomacy need not be confined to conference rooms. He led the Guyana Embassy to a Guinness World Record for the “Most Stickers on a Car” (41,543 stickers) at Kuwait Motor Town—an initiative that captured international headlines while fusing environmental recycling advocacy with cultural diplomacy in a way that cemented Guyana’s image as a creative, vibrant, and forward-looking partner. It was the act of a man who understood that soft power and hard finance are not opposites but complements.

When his tour of duty concluded in August 2020, the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry bid him farewell with deep and genuine respect. The measure of an ambassador is not the office he occupies, but the institutional bridges he builds and the goodwill he leaves behind. By that measure, Dr. Ally’s tenure was exceptional.

 

PART IV: THE PROFESSOR AND THE PUBLISHED MIND — 25 Years in the Academy

Throughout his corporate and diplomatic career, Dr. Ally never abandoned the classroom. For 25 years, he taught graduate and undergraduate courses spanning International Accounting, Strategic Management, and Global Sustainability at eight universities across New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and internationally including DeSales University, George Washington University (where he served as a doctoral dissertation examiner), and Qatar University.

His authority as a leadership thinker was globally validated when he was selected as one of only 30 global leaders interviewed for Dr. Michael Marquardt’s seminal work, Leading with Questions—alongside leaders from Switzerland, Korea, and Singapore. He is also a  published author in his own right; his Amazon title, My Tenure as Guyana’s Ambassador in Kuwait and Lessons in Diplomacy offers an authoritative insider account of how small-nation diplomacy can be conducted with vision and executed with discipline.

He has also long been ahead of the curve in educational technology—mastering narrated course delivery on Blackboard and Blackboard Learn platforms years before the pandemic made online learning a global necessity. He achieved the prestigious Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) designation as far back as 1975, a half-century of mastery in communication and leadership that few can rival.

PART V: THE PHILANTHROPIST — Giving Back to Guyana’s Future

Dr. Ally’s patriotism has never been merely rhetorical. Through his personal vision and personal financing, he donated 1,458 specialized U.S. textbooks—valued at over G$19 million—to establish the “Dr. Shamir Ally Reading Corner” at the University of Guyana. This was not a tax strategy or a publicity exercise. It was the act of a man who understood that a nation’s future is built in its libraries, and who was willing to fund that future from his own resources.

During the 2007 Cricket World Cup Super-8 matches in Guyana, he personally conceptualized, executed, and financed 90% of a comprehensive Visitor Spending Survey—generating hard empirical data (average visitor spending of $439 on shopping and $379 on transport, among other metrics) that provided the Guyanese state with the analytical framework needed to optimize its sports tourism infrastructure for generations. This was private investment in public knowledge, the kind of contribution that rarely makes headlines but permanently shapes policy.

PART VI: THE GLOBAL CITIZEN — 84 Countries and the Continuing Education of the World

Dr. Ally operates on a philosophy that has guided his life for decades: “Travel is global continuing education on people, culture, food, music, and history.” He has backed this belief with his feet and his years, visiting 84 countries across five continents, 45 of the 50 U.S. states, and 11 U.S. Presidential Libraries and Museums—an extraordinary curriculum in executive leadership drawn not from syllabi but from direct observation of how nations are governed and how leaders are remembered.

His travels have been marked by memorable milestones: in September 2001, he completed a true circumnavigation of the globe—Newark to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, and back to Los Angeles—that included a historic stay at the iconic, ultra-luxury Burj Al Arab in Dubai. Most recently, from January 25 to February 10, 2025, he embarked on a seven-nation journey through Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Qatar, and Brunei—with Brunei marking his official 84th distinct country.

Among all the nations he has visited, it is Singapore that he holds as the gold standard of national governance—a city-state that has shown the world what is possible when leadership combines education, health, and financial security into a coherent national vision. That admiration is revealing it is the admiration of a man who has seen the possibilities, who believes Guyana can achieve them, and who has spent his life trying to help make them real.

PART VII: THE MEDIA VOICE — “Diplomatic Speak” and the Weekly Counsel of a Statesman

Retirement, for Dr. Ally, is not a condition he recognizes. Today, he serves as President, CEO, and CFO of International Consulting Services (ICS) in Long Island, New York, bringing the full weight of his financial and diplomatic expertise to bear on the challenges of global enterprise.

He also continues to share his wisdom with the Guyanese public and diaspora through his weekly “Diplomatic Speak” column for Village Voice News, with more than 200 published columns to date covering leadership, governance, macroeconomic metrics, and international affairs. This is not the work of a man coasting on his legacy—it is the work of a public intellectual who believes that every week brings a new obligation to inform, challenge, and inspire.

★ A FITTING TRIBUTE ★

When Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally steps onto the stage at the Guyana Independence Ball on the evening of June 6th, he will do so carrying more than personal achievement. He will carry the weight and the honor of every Guyanese student who ever opened one of his donated textbooks, every civil servant whose infrastructure was funded by a deal he negotiated in the Gulf, every diaspora member who drew courage from his example, and every young person who has come to understand, through watching his life, that it is possible to belong to the world and still belong, above all, to Guyana.

The accolade he will be  receiving  on June 27th is not a retrospective. It is a recognition, in real time, of a life still actively being lived in service. Dr. Ally continues to write, to consult, to advise, and to advocate. The story is not finished. The nation is still being built.

The 592 Guardian salutes Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally, Ph.D., MBA, FAIA, DTM—diplomat of distinction, financial architect, academic pioneer, philanthropist, and selfless servant of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. His life is proof that one person, armed with expertise, integrity, and an unbreakable love for their homeland, can change the trajectory of a nation.

THE 592 GUARDIAN • WHERE GUYANA’S STORY IS TOLD

Special Feature • Guyana Independence Edition • June 2026

The Invisible Transfer: 

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EDITORIAL — SPECIAL REPORT 

RESOURCE SOVEREIGNTY & GOVERNANCE REVIEW 

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES · TAX POLICY · NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY 

The Invisible Transfer: 

How Guyana’s Governance Gaps Give Away Strategic Resources 

When a uranium deposit changes hands in Singapore, Guyana collects nothing. This is not an accident— it is a system working exactly as poorly designed systems do. 

MAY 2026 · SPECIAL EDITORIAL · TAX & RESOURCE GOVERNANCE

The acquisition of Guyana’s only uranium project by Canadian firm U92 Energy Corp.—executed through the purchase of Singapore-registered LIA Industries Pte. Ltd.—did not merely expose a gap in one law. It illuminated the outline of a governance architecture that was never built. What the country faces is not a single loophole to be patched; it is a structural condition in which the legal, regulatory, and fiscal scaffolding around its extractive sector lags dangerously behind the sophistication of those who exploit it. 

The mechanism here is neither novel nor obscure. It is a well documented instrument in the global extractive industry: the indirect transfer of resource assets through offshore holding companies. Instead of selling the Guyanese asset directly—which would trigger domestic tax obligations—a company sells the foreign entity that owns the asset. The asset never formally moves. Only the beneficial owners change. And so, from Guyana’s current legal vantage point, nothing taxable occurred on its soil at all. 

The Kurupung uranium project—spanning over 90 square kilometers with an estimated 20.6 million pounds of uranium in the ground—changed hands without the State capturing a single dollar in transfer taxes, capital gains tax, or windfall levies. In a world increasingly turning toward nuclear energy as a low carbon baseload solution, uranium is not merely a mineral. It is a strategic asset. And Guyana appears to have had no seat at the table when its ownership was reassigned.

“The DRC did not even know it was happening, despite owning a 20% equity stake in the project. The acquisition occurred entirely onshore, through a Bermuda holding company, and the country received nothing.”
COLUMBIA CENTER ON SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENT, ON THE $2.65 BILLION TENKE FUNGURUME COPPER MINE SALE, 2016

 

Guyana is not alone in this vulnerability—but the global precedents make inaction all the more inexcusable. The Democratic Republic of Congo watched as Freeport McMoRan sold its 56% controlling stake in one of its largest copper mines to China Molybdenum through a Bermuda holding company for $2.65 billion, receiving nothing in return. The DRC did not even know the transaction was occurring. If that scale of loss is possible in a country with a 20% equity stake and formal operator relationships, consider what is possible in a country where the regulatory regime is still being assembled.

1.The Anatomy of an Indirect Transfer

To understand the full scope of the problem, one must understand how these transactions are structured. A mining or resource company wishing to exit a project in a developing country has two broad options: sell the underlying asset directly or sell the shares in a company that holds that asset. The first route is visible, taxable, and open subject to regulatory approval in the host country. The second route—the indirect transfer—occurs in a foreign jurisdiction, sometimes involving multiple layers of holding companies across multiple tax havens.

In Guyana’s case, LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Singapore, held the prospecting license for the Kurupung uranium project. When U92 Energy Corp. acquired LIA Industries, it acquired Guyana’s uranium project. But legally, what was sold was a Singapore company. Singapore received whatever taxes were applicable there. Guyana received none. 

The Platform for Collaboration on Tax—a joint body of the IMF, OECD, UN, and World Bank—has articulated the foundational principle clearly: direct and indirect asset transfers that represent the same transfer of ownership should attract the same tax treatment. Otherwise, the incentive structure actively encourages offshore structuring to avoid the host country’s fiscal claim. 

This is precisely what Guyana’s current framework incentivizes. The country’s tax legislation does not contain provisions to “look through” the offshore holding structure and assert fiscal jurisdiction over gains derived from the underlying Guyanese resource. The result is a system in which the more creative the corporate structure, the less the country collects. 

The UN Handbook on Selected Issues for Taxation of the Extractive Industries—a dedicated technical resource for developing countries— identifies indirect asset transfers as a discrete and serious challenge, dedicating an entire chapter to the design of legal responses. Guyana does not yet appear to have translated that guidance into legislative action. 

COMPARATIVE CASE 
How Tanzania Closed the Gap

Tanzania’s Mining Act and Income Tax Act were amended to treat indirect transfers of mining rights as taxable events, requiring notification and withholding, regardless of where the transaction occurs. The triggering criterion is whether the underlying asset derives its value principally from Tanzanian resources. Similar “principal value” tests have been adopted across Africa and Asia. 

Countries including Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, India, China, and Peru have each, in their own ways, enacted legislation that either taxes indirect transfers directly, requires their notification, or subjects them to approval conditions. Guyana has none of these protections. 

“$2.65B 

 DRC COPPER MINE SOLD OFF SHORE

 0 TAXES TO HOST COUNTRY

 20.6M 

 LBS OF URANIUM 

 ESTIMATED AT 

 KURUPUNG — 

 TRANSFERRED WITHOUT 

 GUYANA AT THE TABLE

 0 

 GUYANESE TAX DOLLARS 

 CAPTURED FROM THE 

 U92/LIA INDUSTRIES 

 TRANSACTION

 

11.A License Is a Public Asset. It Must Be Treated as One.

At the center of this transaction lies a prospecting license—a legal right granted by the Guyanese State to explore and potentially extract a mineral resource that belongs, constitutionally, to the people of

Guyana. It is not a private property right that can circulate freely in commercial channels without State involvement. It is a delegated public right, granted conditionally, revocable in principle, and tied to specific obligations of the licensee. 

Yet the practical reality is that this license has now passed to new beneficial owners—U92 Energy Corp. and its principals—without any formal regulatory approval process specific to the change of control. The license was not transferred. The company holding it was simply sold abroad. And because the license nominally remains in the name of LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., no formal transfer of license was triggered. 

This is the second tier of the governance failure: the disconnect between formal legal title and actual beneficial control. Guyana’s licensing framework does not appear to contain provisions requiring the disclosure or approval of indirect changes of control over license holding entities. The company on the license remains the same; only who owns that company has changed. 

Many jurisdictions have corrected this through what are known as change-of-control provisions in their mining or petroleum legislation. These require that any transaction—whether a direct sale of the license or an indirect acquisition of the controlling interest in the license holder—constitutes a triggering event requiring regulatory notification, review, and in some cases, approval or payment of a transfer fee. 

The absence of such provisions in Guyana creates a dangerous parallel reality: on paper, a State-issued license remains in the hands of the original licensee; in practice, an entirely different set of principals now controls the economic destiny of that resource. 

The implications extend beyond taxation. Questions of beneficial ownership transparency, national security vetting, environmental liability, and regulatory accountability   all hinge on knowing who actually controls a resource asset. If that information can be withheld through offshore corporate structuring, the State is not merely losing revenue—it is losing oversight itself.

“If a company can change hands abroad and automatically retain control of a Guyanese license, then the State has electively relinquished control over who exploits its resources.” — THE PRECIPITATING EDITORIAL ON THE U92 ACQUISITION

III Uranium Is Not Gold. The Governance Stakes Are Higher.

 There is a tendency in resource governance debates to treat all extractive commodities similarly. The Kurupung transaction demands a more differentiated analysis. Uranium is not gold. It is not bauxite. It is not even crude oil, despite that industry’s own considerable governance complexities. 

Uranium is a dual-use material with applications in both civilian energy generation and nuclear weapons development. Its extraction, processing, and trade are subject to international regulatory regimes— including the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards framework—that impose obligations on both states and operators. The identity, affiliations, and security clearances of uranium operators are not merely commercial questions. They are national security questions. 

Guyana enters this sector with what the government has itself acknowledged: no other uranium projects, no established regulatory framework, and no domestic experience with the specific hazards and obligations that uranium extraction entails. That context does not make the resource less valuable—the global nuclear energy renaissance, driven partly by decarbonization commitments, may make Guyanese uranium considerably more valuable over the coming decades. But it does make the governance deficit considerably more dangerous. 

There are four distinct dimensions of risk that Guyana must now navigate simultaneously with respect to Kurupung: 

Radiological and Environmental Risk: Uranium extraction generates radioactive tailings and contaminated water that, if improperly managed, can persist in the environment for centuries. Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and Geology and Mines Commission must have the technical capacity to monitor, inspect, and enforce environmental standards specific to uranium—a very different challenge from gold or bauxite oversight. 

Geopolitical and Security Risk: The identity of the ultimate beneficial owners of a uranium license matter. International safeguards regimes require states to account for nuclear materials within their territory. If Guyana cannot identify who controls its uranium resource at any given time, it may struggle to meet its international reporting obligations—let alone its national security interests.

Regulatory Capacity Risk: The sector is genuinely new to Guyana. Neither the institutional expertise nor the specialized regulatory instruments required for uranium governance have been established. The country is, in effect, being asked to regulate something it has never encountered before—and it is being asked to do so retroactively, after ownership has already changed hands. 

Fiscal Sovereignty Risk: As with all extractive commodities, uranium’s fiscal contribution to Guyana will depend almost entirely on the quality of the fiscal regime that governs it—including royalties, profit taxes, ring-fencing provisions, and yes, taxes on indirect transfers. If those instruments are not in place before production begins, they become extraordinarily difficult to introduce without triggering investor disputes. 

The window for proactive governance is open. It will not remain so indefinitely. Once exploration advances toward development, and once financial commitments compound, the political economy of reform shifts sharply away from the State. 

1v The Systemic Failure: Oil Was the Warning, Uranium Is the Test 

The U92 acquisition did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred against the backdrop of Guyana’s ongoing—and extensively documented—struggles to capture adequate fiscal returns from its petroleum sector. The country’s oil contracts, negotiated under the Stabroek block regime, have been widely criticized by international fiscal governance experts for royalty rates, cost recovery provisions, and ring-fencing structures that limit the State’s take. These were not the product of malice; they were the product of a negotiating context in which the State had less information, less capacity, and less leverage than its counterparts. 

The pattern matters: resource sectors tend to be governed by the frameworks that existed at the time of the first major transaction, not the frameworks that should have existedBy the time the scale of the asset is understood, the contracts are signed, the precedents are set, and the cost of renegotiation—financial, diplomatic, and political—is prohibitive. 

Guyana is now receiving a second notice. The uranium sector is embryonic. There are no production-stage contracts. There are no entrenched investors with sunk capital claiming sovereign protection for existing arrangements. The cost of reform at this stage is political will and legislative time—considerably cheaper than the cost of reform after the fact. 

The IMF, in its own assessments of developing country resource governance, has consistently flagged indirect transfer taxation as one of the areas where developing countries leave the most revenue on the table. The mechanism is technically understood. The legislative models are available. The question is whether Guyana’s institutions will act on the evidence before the window closes. 

The answer to that question will say something lasting about the country’s capacity to govern its resource wealth in the interest of its citizens—not just in uranium, but in whatever comes next.

THE GLOBAL PRECEDENT — INDIA’S GENERAL ANTI-AVOIDANCE RESPONSE 

When Vodafone Sued India for $2 Billion — and India Rewrote the Law 

In 2012, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the government could not tax Vodafone’s acquisition of an Indian telecom business through a Cayman Islands holding company. The transaction—valued at $11 billion—had been structured to route control of the Indian asset through a foreign entity, placing it outside India’s tax jurisdiction. The Supreme Court agreed with Vodafone. India’s Parliament then amended the Income Tax Act retroactively to assert jurisdiction over indirect transfers of assets whose value is substantially derived from Indian sources. The lesson: waiting for litigation is the most expensive way to reform. Guyana should not need a billion-dollar case to prompt action.

  1. What Reform Must Look Like
  3. Reform in this area is achievable. It is technically understood, internationally precedented, and—at this stage of Guyana’s extractive sector development—politically feasible. The following measures constitute a minimum legislative and regulatory agenda, not an aspirational wish list.

01 LEGISLATE INDIRECT TRANSFER TAXATION 

Amend the Income Tax Act to assert Guyana’s fiscal jurisdiction over gains derived from the indirect transfer of assets whose value is principally derived from Guyanese resources. The “principal value test”—requiring that at least 50% or 75% of the entity’s value be attributable to local resource assets—is the standard adopted by Tanzania, Uganda, India, and others. This closes the Singapore-Singapore sale scenario entirely. 

02 MANDATE CHANGE-OF-CONTROL NOTIFICATION AND APPROVAL Amend the Mines Act and relevant petroleum legislation to require that any change in the ultimate beneficial ownership of a license-holding entity—direct or indirect—constitutes a triggering event requiring notification to the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and, for strategic resources, Ministerial approval. This closes the “same license, new owners” loophole. 

03 ESTABLISH BENEFICIAL OWNERSHIP REGISTERS FOR LICENCE HOLDERS 

All companies holding prospecting or mining licenses in Guyana must file and maintain current beneficial ownership 

information, updated within 30 days of any change of control. This registry should be accessible to relevant regulatory bodies and, where national security is implicated, to intelligence agencies. Beneficial ownership transparency is the prerequisite for all other oversight. 

04 DEVELOP A DEDICATED URANIUM REGULATORY FRAMEWORK The Kurupung project cannot be adequately governed under generic mining legislation. A sector-speci5c regulatory framework for uranium—covering radiological safety, tailings management, IAEA safeguards compliance, export controls, and security vetting of operators—must be developed before exploration advances toward development stage. Guyana should engage directly with the IAEA’s technical cooperation 

programmes to build this capacity. 

05 CONDUCT AN IMMEDIATE FISCAL REGIME REVIEW FOR THE URANIUM SECTOR 

Before any development licenses are considered for Kurupung, the Guyana Revenue Authority and Ministry of Finance should commission an independent fiscal regime analysis for uranium, benchmarking royalty rates, profit taxes, ring-fencing 

provisions, and stability clause frameworks against comparable jurisdictions. This analysis should be public and should precede —not follow—any negotiation with the license holder. 

06 REVIEW ALL EXISTING LICENCES FOR UNDISCLOSED INDIRECT TRANSFERS 

The U92 acquisition is unlikely to be the only instance of indirect transfer affecting Guyanese resource licenses. A comprehensive audit of all active prospecting and mining licenses, verifying current beneficial ownership against original applicant identity, would reveal the scope of the problem and inform legislative priorities.

— ◆ — 

There is a phrase that recurs in resource governance literature: “the resource curse is not inevitable—it is a policy choice Countries do not become cursed by oil or gold or uranium. They become cursed by the 

institutional arrangements they fail to build before extraction begins, and by the political environments that make reform feel impossible once the money starts =owing. 

Guyana is not cursed. It is, in fact, one of the few countries in the world that has received clear, repeated, well-documented warnings about the governance gaps in its extractive sector—and still has the time and political space to address them. The oil sector’s fiscal architecture is imperfect but established; reforming it now is difficult. The uranium sector has no such entrenched architecture yet. The cost of building it correctly today is a fraction of the cost of renegotiating it under duress tomorrow. 

The U92 acquisition is not primarily a story about one company, one project, or one transaction. It is a story about what a State owes its citizens when it grants away the right to their natural inheritance. That inheritance does not belong to whoever is clever enough to structure around the rules. It belongs to the people of Guyana. The only question is whether their government will act in time to protect it. 

— ◆ — 

RESOURCE SOVEREIGNTY & GOVERNANCE REVIEW · EDITORIAL BOARD · MAY 2026 · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Citi’s Arrival Is Not Banking Expansion — It Is Strategic Extraction

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Citi’s Arrival Is Not Banking Expansion —

It Is Strategic Extraction

The announcement that global financial giant Citi has received approval to establish a representative office in Guyana is being widely celebrated as a signal of international confidence and a strengthening of the local banking sector. That interpretation is not only misleading—it obscures the true nature of what is unfolding.

This is not banking expansion in any meaningful domestic sense. It is strategic positioning.

A representative office is not a commercial bank. It does not take deposits, issue local loans, or provide retail or broad-based corporate banking services within the domestic economy. Its purpose is far narrower and far more targeted: to facilitate high-value transactions, manage relationships with multinational clients, and channel capital flows through global financial networks.

In plain terms, Citi is not coming to bank Guyana—it is coming to service the upper tier of international business already operating within it.

This distinction matters because it exposes the gap between perception and reality. While the public is being led to believe that this development will expand access to financing, particularly for local enterprises, the opposite is more likely. Citi’s model is structured around large-scale, export-oriented, and foreign-linked transactions. Small and medium-sized Guyanese businesses—the backbone of the domestic economy—will remain largely excluded from its services.

Even among larger local firms, access will likely depend on their integration into international trade or their alignment with sectors such as oil and gas, infrastructure, and export logistics. This is not inclusive banking; it is selective financial intermediation designed for high-value clients operating in foreign currency ecosystems.

And that brings us to the core issue: currency and capital flows.

Citi’s operations in Guyana will almost certainly be anchored in U.S. dollar transactions, not Guyana dollar intermediation. This is not incidental—it is fundamental to its business model. The office will function as a conduit for moving capital into and out of Guyana efficiently, ensuring that profits, payments, and financing arrangements remain within Citi’s global system.

In effect, this creates a parallel financial channel—one that operates alongside, but not within, the domestic economy.

The implications are significant. Rather than deepening local financial capacity, such arrangements risk reinforcing an enclave-style economic structure, where high-value activities are externally managed and internally disconnected. Wealth flows through the country, but not necessarily into its broader economic fabric.

This is why the narrative of “confidence” must be treated with caution. Citi is not expressing confidence in Guyana’s domestic financial ecosystem or its small business sector. It is expressing confidence in its ability to extract value from a rapidly expanding, resource-driven economy.

That is a fundamentally different proposition.

The only tangible national benefit from this presence will depend on policy choices—specifically, whether the government ensures that such entities are subject to fair taxation and regulatory oversight. If tax concessions or holidays are granted, as has been the case in other sectors, even that limited benefit could be undermined.

Absent strong policy intervention, Guyana risks repeating a familiar pattern: attracting global players who participate in its growth without meaningfully contributing to its development.

Citi’s move should therefore be understood not as a milestone in banking sector expansion, but as a signal of where value is being concentrated—and who is positioned to capture it.

The real question is not whether Guyana is attracting global institutions. It is whether it is structuring their presence in a way that serves national interests, rather than simply accommodating global capital.

Until that question is answered with clarity and intent, celebrations of “confidence” will remain premature at best—and misleading at worst.

 

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

Flag, Fiasco, Fallout

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Flag, Fiasco, Fallout:

The Desecration of Fort Zeelandia

 

Fort Zeelandia did not deteriorate overnight. Its current condition, following the ill-conceived Independence flag-raising event, is the direct result of decisions—decisions made by public officials entrusted with both national heritage and public funds.

What unfolded was not simply a poorly managed ceremony. It was a failure of governance.

Responsibility begins squarely with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, the state body charged with oversight of national events and the preservation of cultural assets. Any event staged at a site of this magnitude requires meticulous planning, strict usage controls, and, critically, a post-event restoration protocol. The absence of these basic safeguards suggests either a breakdown in administrative competence or a disregard for the site’s historical value.

Equally implicated is the National Trust of Guyana, the statutory agency specifically mandated to protect and manage heritage sites such as Fort Zeelandia. If the Trust approved the use of the site without enforceable preservation conditions, then it failed in its legal and moral duty. If it was bypassed or sidelined, then that raises even more serious questions about governance and institutional integrity.

And above these agencies sits the Cabinet itself, which cannot credibly claim ignorance. National Independence events are not minor undertakings; they are centrally coordinated, politically visible, and funded from the public purse. That means ultimate accountability rests at the highest levels of government, including the Office of the President, which has repeatedly positioned itself as a champion of Guyana’s global environmental and sustainability credentials.

This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

Guyana has aggressively marketed its Low Carbon Development Strategy and carbon credit framework to the international community, positioning itself as a model of environmental stewardship. Billions in climate financing are premised on the idea that this nation understands the value of preservation—that it treats its natural and cultural assets with care, discipline, and respect.

Yet at Fort Zeelandia, we see the opposite: a heritage site treated as a disposable backdrop, left visibly degraded in the wake of a single evening’s spectacle.

Environmental stewardship is not divisible. A government cannot credibly claim to safeguard millions of hectares of forest while failing to protect a single, well-defined national monument. The principles are the same—planning, respect, accountability, and restoration.

What compounds the issue is the question of public funds. How much was spent on this event? Which contractors were engaged? Were there environmental or heritage impact guidelines embedded in those contracts? And crucially, has any allocation been made for the restoration of the site?

Silence on these questions only deepens public suspicion.

This is not merely about optics. It is about governance culture. When state institutions act without consequence—when heritage protections are ignored, when public spending yields damage rather than value, when no official steps forward to accept responsibility—the result is erosion not just of physical sites, but of public trust.

Fort Zeelandia is not an ordinary space. It is a repository of national memory. It carries the weight of Guyana’s colonial history, its struggles, and its evolution into an independent state. To allow it to be mishandled in this way is to diminish that history itself.

The government now faces a simple test.

Will the Ministry of Culture publicly account for its planning failures? Will the National Trust assert its authority and outline corrective measures? Will there be a transparent assessment of damage and a funded restoration plan? And most importantly, will anyone in a position of authority accept responsibility?

Or will this, like too many other episodes, be quietly absorbed into the machinery of impunity?

Guyana cannot afford that outcome—not if it wishes to be taken seriously, either by its own citizens or by the international partners to whom it sells a vision of sustainability and stewardship.

Because stewardship is not declared. It is demonstrated.

And at Fort Zeelandia, the demonstration has been a failure.

 

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

 

 

 

 

Mr. President,  the People Are Still Waiting

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OPINION & EDITORIAL 

THE PUBLIC RECORD 

MAY 2026   EDITORIAL 

Mr. President, the People Are Still Waiting 

Eight years of oil. Sixty years of independence. And more than half the country still lives in poverty. No speech, however soaring, can paper over that arithmetic. 

THE EDITORS · OPINION 

There is a particular cruelty to eloquence deployed in the presence of deprivation. President Dr. Irfaan Ali’s address on the eve of Guyana’s 60th Independence Anniversary was, by the standards of political oratory, a polished performance. It had rhythm. It had poetry. It had the grand architecture of a speech designed to be quoted, clipped, and circulated. What it did not have — what it conspicuously, almost defiantly, lacked — was an honest reckoning with the country it was delivered in. 

The oil beneath Guyana’s waters is, as the President declared, the property of the people. He is right about that. Which is precisely why the people deserve a government that speaks to them plainly about why, after eight years of oil production and historic revenue windfalls, the majority of Guyanese remain poor.

58% 

POVERTY RATE — AFTER 8 YEARS OF OIL 

Guyana became a major oil producer in 2016. By any credible measurement, the majority of its citizens have yet to feel that transformation in their daily lives. This is not a statistic to be dismissed with a road metaphor.

Let us grant the President his roads and bridges. Infrastructure is real. Construction is visible. Progress can be photographed and inaugurated. But a road that connects a community still mired in poverty, still without reliable electricity, still without clean running water, still without a functioning primary health care system — that road does not connect destinies. It connects misery to more misery, only faster. 

The President told Guyanese that schools “teach children to dream.” But dreams require a foundation. They require a teacher who is paid on time and trained well. They require a school building that does not Nood in the rainy season. They require a child who arrived that morning having eaten. The gap between the rhetoric of dreaming and the reality of classrooms in the hinterland and poor coastal communities is not a gap that poetic language can bridge. 

Hospitals, the President, “affirmed that every Guyanese life has worth“. A beautiful sentiment. And yet Guyanese continue to travel abroad for procedures unavailable at home. The chronically ill navigate a public health system stretched beyond its limits. Maternal mortality remains a scandal. Drug shortages are routine. If hospitals affirm the worth of lives, someone should tell the hospitals. 

The US$100 million STEM program announced in partnership with ExxonMobil deserves scrutiny, not celebration. A knowledge economy built in partnership with the very extractive corporation profiting most handsomely from Guyana’s resources is not a bold vision of sovereignty — it is a continuation of dependency, dressed in the language of innovation. Who negotiated those terms? What does Guyana own of that pro gramme? These are not hostile questions; they are the minimum due diligence a nation owes itself. 

“One Guyana does not mean we are all the same — it means we are all equal.” If equality is the standard, Mr. President, then the standard has not been met“.

The President’s “One Guyana” formulation is ideologically convenient precisely because it asks nothing of those in power. It asks citizens to look past ethnic division, past regional disparity, past historical grievance — and to trust that the government is building toward something better.

But unity without accountability is not unity. It is compliance. And the test of whether a government is governing “for all” is not the number of projects announced, but the number of lives materially improved. 

THE LITANY THE SPEECH DID NOT ADDRESS

01 Poverty at 58% after eight years of oil revenue
No policy explanation. No timeline for reduction. No accountability for why transformation has not reached the majority of citizens who were promised it would. 

02 Cost of living crushing ordinary households

Food prices, fuel costs, and basic necessities continue to strain families whose wages have not kept pace with the oil economy’s growth. The GDP numbers do not eat breakfast. 

03 Corruption and procurement opacity 

Billions in oil revenue flow through government contracting processes with limited independent oversight. The question of who benefits — and who awards the contracts — demands a direct answer, not a sermon about collective patrimony. 

04 Healthcare infrastructure in crisis 

Beyond the ribbon-cutting of new hospital buildings, the functional capacity of Guyana’s health system — staffing, medication supply chains, specialist availability — remains critically deficient for most citizens outside Georgetown. 

05 Hinterland and interior communities left behind

The President’s vision of a child in any region having the same opportunity is belied by the stark reality of Indigenous and interior communities who lack basic services that coastal Guyanese take for granted. Equal rights require equal investment, not equal rhetoric. 

06 Oil contract transparency and sovereign wealth management 

The terms of Guyana’s production-sharing agreements remain poorly understood by the public. “Spending with purpose and saving with discipline” are phrases — not policies. Where are the independent audits? The parliamentary oversight? The citizen dashboards? 

None of this is to say that Guyana has not built things. It has. None of it suggests that government is without genuine intent. Perhaps it has intent in abundance. The problem is not intent — it is delivery. It is the distance between the podium and the yard, between the micro phone and the market stall, between the speech and the school that still floods. 

At sixty years of independence, Guyana deserves a leader who will stand before its people not with poetry, but with plans. Not with vision, but with verifiable targets. Not with the confidence of someone who believes the oil has already won, but with the humility of someone who knows the work has barely started. The test of independence is not whether a president can deliver a stirring address. It is whether the people he addresses can afford to eat, to heal, to educate their children, and to believe — on evidence, not faith — that tomorrow will be better than today. 

The oil is the peoples. Mr. President so is the reckoning. 

“March not with arrogance, but with confidence,” the President urged. We would add “march not with rhetoric, but with results.” 

— The Editor

 

Ambition and Infrastructure: A Necessary Alignment

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THE 592 GUARDIAN OPINION

Recent developments in Kenya offer a timely and instructive lesson for emerging economies seeking to position themselves within the global digital and artificial intelligence landscape. The suspension of a proposed US$1 billion Microsoft-backed data center—on the grounds that it would place unsustainable pressure on the national electricity grid—underscores a fundamental principle of modern development: ambition must be matched by infrastructure.

Kenya, with an installed electricity capacity of approximately 3,000 megawatts and a comparatively advanced renewable energy portfolio, was compelled to acknowledge that a single hyperscale data facility could consume a substantial share of its national supply. The implications were clear. Without adequate surplus capacity and grid resilience, even the most prestigious investments become untenable.

This reality bears direct relevance to Guyana.

In recent public pronouncements, President Irfaan Ali has advanced the vision of establishing a “Silicon Valley” in Guyana—a concept that, while aspirational, appears disconnected from the country’s present infrastructural conditions. Guyana remains in the process of bringing its 300 MW Gas-to-Energy (GtE) project to operational status, a development that is itself critical to stabilizing domestic supply and reducing energy costs. Yet this project, foundational as it is, does not represent surplus capacity; it represents a long-overdue baseline.

Hyperscale data centers—the backbone of any genuine technology hub—are among the most resource-intensive facilities in existence. Their demands extend well beyond electricity. A single large-scale facility can require between 100 MW and 300 MW of continuous power, alongside extensive cooling systems that depend on significant volumes of water. These are not marginal increases in demand; they are industrial-scale requirements that must be sustained without interruption.

Guyana’s current realities raise serious questions about readiness on both fronts.

Electricity supply, while improving, remains constrained and in transition. The completion and integration of the GtE project are prerequisites for stability, not indicators of excess. Equally pressing is the issue of water. Across Georgetown and other regions, citizens and businesses continue to face persistent challenges with water pressure, reliability, and distribution. The notion of diverting large volumes of treated water to support energy-intensive data infrastructure—while sections of the population experience daily shortages—demands careful scrutiny.

Modern data centers often rely on water-based cooling systems that can consume millions of gallons annually, depending on scale and technology. In jurisdictions where such facilities are successfully deployed, water management systems are robust, redundant, and carefully regulated to prevent competition between industrial and domestic needs. 

Guyana has yet to demonstrate that such systems are in place or even in advanced planning.

The broader issue, therefore, is not whether Guyana should aspire to participate in the global digital economy. It should. The issue is sequencing.

Sustainable technological development is built on a hierarchy of prerequisites: reliable and expandable energy generation, resilient transmission networks, secure and sufficient water supply, regulatory clarity, and a skilled workforce. These elements are not optional; they are foundational. Without them, high-level visions risk becoming detached from operational reality.

Kenya’s recent decision illustrates the importance of confronting these constraints early and transparently. It is a reminder that credibility in development policy is earned not through declarations, but through demonstrated capacity and disciplined execution.

Guyana stands at a pivotal moment in its economic trajectory, buoyed by significant resource revenues and international attention. This moment demands not only vision, but precision. Grand announcements must be anchored in verifiable infrastructure plans, with clear timelines, financing strategies, and independent oversight.

A technology-driven future for Guyana is achievable. However, it will not be realized through rhetoric alone. It will require sustained investment in energy and water systems, careful prioritization, and a commitment to aligning national aspirations with material capabilities.

Until such alignment is achieved, proposals of a “Silicon Valley” remain premature. What is required now is not the language of transformation, but the work that makes transformation possible.

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

Two Ambassadors, One Prize:

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EDITORIAL

Guyana as Battleground in the US–China Great Power Contest

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

May 2026

I.  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TIMING WHEN TWO EMPIRES SPOKE

Within days of each other in May 2026, two of the world’s most powerful nations addressed Guyana directly — not through back channels or diplomatic cables, but through the public press, in signed op-eds crafted with evident care and deliberate purpose.

US Ambassador Nicole Theriot marked sixty years of bilateral relations with a warm tribute to partnership, shared history, and the promise of “deeper democracy.” Nine days prior, Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang published a sweeping defense of Beijing’s relationship with Georgetown, titled “Facts Speak Louder Than Words: The Real Story of China–Guyana Cooperation” — using detailed data and pointed language to firmly refute what she called “groundless accusations” by a US congressman about so-called “Chinese influence” in Guyana.

Two ambassadors. Two op-eds. One small nation sitting atop one of the most significant oil discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Coincidence is not a concept that applies to great power diplomacy. What Guyana witnessed in May 2026 was not two friends sending greetings. It was two empires — each with a hundred-year strategic horizon — publicly competing for the allegiance of a nation that has suddenly become indispensable.

Georgetown must read both documents not as tributes, but as bids. And it must read them with eyes wide open.

II.  THE AMERICAN BID: WARMTH WITH CONDITIONS

Ambassador Theriot’s op-ed is eloquent, warm, and genuinely appreciative of a partnership that has delivered real benefits to the Guyanese people. But diplomacy, like oil contracts, requires reading the fine print.

Just weeks before her anniversary tribute, Ambassador Theriot sat before a Guyanese television audience and delivered what can only be described as a threat dressed in diplomatic clothing. As the representative of the US Government, she declared it “incredibly dangerous” to start talking about renegotiation of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil — warning that doing so “sends a terrible signal to international investors all over the world.”

The numbers make the stakes plain. In 2024 alone, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC collectively earned US$8.4 billion in profits from Guyana’s Stabroek Block, while Guyana — despite owning the resource — received just US$2.6 billion. Under the 2016 PSA, 75 percent of oil produced is set aside for the international oil companies to recoup their investments, with only the remaining 25 percent split equally between Guyana and the consortium, alongside a mere 2 percent royalty.

The 2016 agreement prohibits the Government from imposing any windfall tax — and requires Guyana to pay Exxon’s corporate income tax liabilities out of its own share of profit oil.

What makes this position especially extraordinary is its sharp departure from prior US diplomatic posture. In April 2019, then-Ambassador Sarah Ann Lynch stated clearly that “it is within Guyana’s right to renegotiate the controversial Production Sharing Agreement” and that the US “certainly wouldn’t interfere with that.” Ambassador Theriot in April 2026 calls even thinking about renegotiation “incredibly dangerous” and “a very bad idea.” Same flag. Dramatically different instructions.

What changed? The scale of the discovery. With Guyana now producing nearly 900,000 barrels per day and the block proven to hold over 11 billion barrels, the stakes for ExxonMobil — and by extension for Washington — are existential. So serious is the US position that when Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helsberg visited recently, though he chose softer language than the Ambassador, his meaning was identical: Washington will not countenance any maneuver that upsets the current arrangement.

III.  THE DOUBLE GAME IN PLAIN SIGHT

Ambassador Theriot assures Guyana that Washington stands “firmly” behind its territorial integrity, invoking Secretary Rubio’s 2025 visit to Georgetown as evidence of commitment. And yet, simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in one of the most consequential geopolitical pivots in the Western Hemisphere — a systematic re-engagement with Venezuela, the very nation whose territorial aggression against Guyana the Ambassador so eloquently condemns.

Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces in January 2026, a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal was announced with the remaining Venezuelan government, new hydrocarbons privatization laws were passed, and the US lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil trade. By February 2026, OFAC had issued the broadest easing of Venezuela-related sanctions in years. Chevron mentioned Venezuela twelve times in its 2025 lobbying filings. White House meetings with oil executives about Venezuelan reconstruction investment followed days later.

Let the significance of this sink in. Washington’s security guarantee to Guyana and Washington’s commercial re-engagement with Venezuela are not contradictory policies in the minds of American strategists. They are complementary ones. The United States wants stable oil flows from both nations, leverage over both capitals, and the indispensable role of arbiter between them.

This is not cynicism. It is the most rational foreign policy imaginable — from Washington’s perspective. It is only naïve from Georgetown’s.

Washington’s ideal outcome is a Western Hemisphere in which it controls access to two of the region’s most significant oil jurisdictions — Guyana through commercial dominance and security partnership, Venezuela through post-Maduro reconstruction and investment. In that scenario, the United States is not Guyana’s partner. It is Guyana’s landlord

1v.THE CHINESE BID: INFRASTRUCTURE WITH STRINGS UNACKNOWLEDGED

Ambassador Yang Yang’s op-ed is a masterpiece of soft power framing. The facts she presents are largely accurate, and genuinely impressive. By the end of 2025, cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana had reached approximately US$13 billion, while bilateral trade totaled US$2.89 billion — more than double the previous year. Chinese companies built the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals now fully operational, and the China–Guyana Joe Vieira Friendship Park. Since 1993, over 300 Chinese medical professionals have treated more than 1.3 million Guyanese patients.

These are not phantom achievements. They are tangible contributions to Guyanese life, and they deserve honest acknowledgment just as the US contributions do.

But Ambassador Yang’s eloquence carefully omits what her government’s global track record makes impossible to ignore. In 2025 alone, developing countries owed China US$35 billion in BRI-related repayments — a record — with US$22 billion of that burden falling on the world’s 75 poorest nations. China’s outstanding overseas BRI debt has surpassed US$1 trillion, with infrastructure projects across multiple regions struggling to meet even interest payments.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port was also built under principles of “mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.” It was leased to China for 99 years after debt default.

Guyana is not Sri Lanka. Its oil revenues provide a cushion that most BRI recipients do not have. But a nation flush with new wealth is also a nation newly attractive to predatory partnership structures — and US$13 billion in cumulative Chinese investment, against a Guyanese GDP that was barely US$14 billion as recently as 2022, represents a level of economic penetration that warrants serious scrutiny.

Ambassador Yang’s article was triggered not by goodwill alone, but by a specific challenge: US Congressman Gabe Evans had publicly raised concerns about Chinese influence in Guyana. The fact that a sitting US congressman felt compelled to write about Chinese influence, and that the Chinese Ambassador responded within days through the Guyanese press, tells you everything about what Georgetown has become: a theatre of great power competition being conducted, politely but intensely, on Guyanese soil.

V.  CNOOC: THE SILENT PLAYER IN THE ROOM

There is a dimension of the China–Guyana relationship that Ambassador Yang’s lyrical op-ed does not address, and which Ambassador Theriot’s partnership language deliberately obscures: CNOOC — China National Offshore Oil Corporation — is a direct partner in the very Stabroek Block that Washington is so anxious to protect.

CNOOC holds a 25 percent stake in the Stabroek consortium alongside ExxonMobil and Chevron. This means that every barrel produced from Guyana’s most valuable oil asset flows simultaneously to American and Chinese state interests. The two powers publicly competing for Guyana’s geopolitical allegiance are already, quietly, business partners in Georgetown’s oil field.

The battle for Guyana’s allegiance is not merely political. It is a battle over who controls — and who profits from — the extraction of a finite and extraordinary natural resource.

VI. THE PROPOGANDA PARALLEL : READING BOTH OP-EDS TOGETHER

Placed side by side, the Theriot and Yang op-eds reveal a structural similarity that is both instructive and troubling for Guyanese readers.

Both ambassadors lead with history and friendship. Both marshal specific projects and achievements as evidence of benevolent partnership. Both invoke shared values — democracy and sovereignty in Theriot’s case, mutual respect and the Global South in Yang’s. Both are responding, at least in part, to the other power’s moves. And crucially, both are silent about the ways their respective nations’ interests diverge from Guyana’s own.

Theriot does not mention the lopsidedness of the Stabroek contract. Yang does not mention BRI debt diplomacy. Theriot celebrates Exxon’s community investment signs in Mabaruma without noting that Exxon earned US$4.7 billion from Guyana in 2024 alone. Yang celebrates the Demerara River Bridge without disclosing the full terms of the financing that built it.

Both documents are truthful in what they include. Both are strategic in what they omit. That is the definition of propaganda — not fabrication, but selective presentation in service of national interest.

VII.  THE GEOPOLITICAL TRAP: CHOOSING SIDES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

The deepest danger facing Guyana in this moment is not Venezuela’s territorial aggression, though that is real. It is not the lopsided oil contract, though that requires correction. It is the gravitational pull toward choosing sides in a US–China rivalry that Guyana did not start, does not control, and could be badly damaged by.

Washington wants Guyana firmly in the Western camp — a reliable partner against Chinese influence in the Caribbean and a secure platform for American energy interests. Beijing wants Guyana as a Belt and Road success story, a CNOOC-holding ally, and a demonstration that the Global South can build prosperity outside the US-dominated financial architecture.

Both wants are legitimate from their respective perspectives. Neither is primarily about Guyana’s wellbeing.

The nations that have fared best in this rivalry are those that have refused to be captured by either pole — that have taken infrastructure from China while maintaining security ties with the West, extracted investment from both without surrendering sovereign decision-making to either. Vietnam. Indonesia. Brazil, under its more strategically coherent moments. These are the models Georgetown should study.

Lord Palmerston settled the matter in 1848: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Both Washington and Beijing operate on that doctrine. So must Georgetown.

VIII.  WHAT SOVEREIGN GUYANA LOOKS LIKE

Genuine sovereignty in Guyana’s current position looks like this:

It takes the US security guarantee seriously while refusing to become a wholly owned subsidiary of American foreign policy. It welcomes Chinese infrastructure investment while insisting on transparent loan terms, competitive bidding, and contractual protections against asset seizure. It renegotiates the Stabroek Block agreement toward terms that reflect the now-known scale of the discovery — not because it is anti-American, but because it is pro-Guyanese. It builds military and intelligence relationships with Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, and CARICOM alongside its American MOU. And it uses its Natural Resource Fund as a genuine sovereign wealth instrument, not a political tool.

It reads every op-ed published by a foreign ambassador — however eloquently written, however warmly intended — as what it is: a bid, not a gift.

One American ambassador said Guyana had every right to renegotiate its oil contract. Another called it “incredibly dangerous” even to raise the subject. One Chinese ambassador builds hospitals and bridges while her government’s BRI architecture has placed dozens of developing nations in unsustainable debt. The world’s most powerful nations have revealed, through these contradictions, that their relationship with Guyana is fundamentally transactional.

There is no shame in that. Transactional relationships can be enormously beneficial — if both parties understand the transaction clearly. Guyana must understand the transaction clearly.

IX.  A MESSAGE TO BOTH AMBASSADORS

To Ambassador Theriot: We value the sixty-year relationship. We honor the highway, the vaccines, the security partnership, and the genuine commitment to our sovereignty against Venezuelan aggression. We ask only that you extend to us the same honest respect you would give a true sovereign partner — including the acknowledgment that Guyana has every right, as your predecessor confirmed, to seek fair terms for its own natural resources.

To Ambassador Yang: We are grateful for the hospitals, the bridge, the medical brigades, and the trade relationship that has grown impressively. We ask only that you accompany those gifts with full transparency about loan terms, contract conditions, and the documented experience of other nations that walked the Belt and Road before us.

To both: Guyana is not a prize. It is not a theatre. It is not a demonstration project for your competing visions of world order.

It is a sovereign nation, newly wealthy, historically overlooked, and finally in a position to demand that the world treat it accordingly.

We intend to collect on that demand — from Washington and Beijing alike.

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board

Georgetown, Guyana  |  May 2026

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