Archive for category: Featured

Published, Not Served: The Legal Vacuum Behind GPF’s Rolling List of Named Traffic Offenders

 0PINION BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026 

 Since President Irfaan Ali’s declaration that government would begin “publishing  the names of individuals with the highest number of outstanding traffic offences” as a matter of accountability policy, the Guyana Police Force has been doing precisely that not once, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a running institutional practice now stretching past one hundred and twenty pages. A list dated 27 August 2026 and circulated under the banner “GUYANA POLICE FORCE — OUTSTANDING TRAFFIC TICKETS — PUBLICATION LIST,” broadcast through the Force’s own Radio Eve Leary channel and redistributed via Facebook and unsolicited text message, places on publicly circulated  pages  the full names, vehicle registration numbers, and ticket counts of Guyanese citizens, some appearing under four separate registrations, their entire unresolved driving history rendered as a public ledger.

A Sample with Names and Plate numbers redacted

The 592 Guardian has examined the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, Chapter 51:02, in both its current L.R.O. 1/2012 revision and its 1998 predecessor, together with the enforcement provisions of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act. The finding is unambiguous: no provision in either statute authorises the Guyana Police Force, the Traffic Department, or any other arm of the executive to publish the identities and violation histories of individual citizens as a mechanism of notice, service, or enforcement. The publication drive rests on nothing more than presidential policy announcement — exercised in a jurisdiction where the one law capable of constraining such disclosure, the Data Protection Act 2023, remains without a functioning commencement order more than three years after passage.

The Act tells you exactly how a citizen is meant to learn they are in breach of it. Mass publication is not that method — it appears nowhere in its 118 sections.

WHAT THE ACT ACTUALLY REQUIRES

Section 8 of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act establishes the traffic ticket itself as the statutory notice mechanism: a document issued by a member of the Guyana Police Force to an individual at the point an offence is committed or alleged. Section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act (numbered 46 in the 1998 revision) reinforces this for the offences most commonly ticketed — speeding, reckless or dangerous driving, careless driving, by requiring that a person cannot be convicted unless one of three conditions is met: a contemporaneous warning at the scene; a summons served on the accused within fourteen days; or written notice served personally or sent by registered post to the accused or the vehicle’s registered owner, also within fourteen days.

Every one of these mechanisms is individualised, time-bound, and directed at a named recipient. None contemplates public disclosure as an alternative or supplement. The Act’s drafters anticipated the problem of an offender who cannot be traced — the proviso at s.45(i)(A) excuses non-compliance only where “neither the name and address of the accused nor the name and address of the owner of the vehicle could with reasonable diligence have been ascertained” — but even this exception produces no publication remedy. It simply permits conviction to proceed without the normally-required notice. At no point does the statute pivot to public identification as a substitute for individualised service.

“PUBLICATION” UNDER THE ACT MEANS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

The Act does contain a publication provision — but it is not the one the Force’s list rests on, whether by design or by conflation. Section 105 (Cap. 51:02, L.R.O. 1/2012) reads in full:

“All orders made by the Minister or by the Commissioner of Police under the powers conferred upon them by this Act shall be published in the Gazette, and shall come into operation on the date of such publication or on such later date as may be specified in the order.”

This is a transparency requirement running in the opposite direction from what the Force’s list purports to do. It obliges the state to publish its own rules — speed limit orders, road-use restrictions, parking designations, and the regulations the Minister is empowered to make under section 104 covering vehicle construction, driver licensing, and public service vehicle conduct — before those rules can bind the public. It has no bearing on, and cannot reasonably be extended to cover, the publication of a private citizen’s name, registration number, and personal violation count. The same logic that requires government to publish its rules before enforcing them contains no reciprocal power to publish a citizen’s record before, or instead of, serving them.

Section 104’s regulation-making power is itself bounded by an exhaustive list; vehicle construction and weight, identification marks, speed limits, driver licensing and testing, traffic and pedestrian regulation, public service vehicle conduct, and goods vehicle conditions — with breach penalties capped at ten thousand dollars or three months’ imprisonment. Nothing in that list, and nothing in the adjoining section 106 (governing duplicate licenses and certificates, a wholly unrelated administrative matter), supplies the missing authority.

A POLICY RUNNING AHEAD OF THE LAW

The publication drive traces to a Department of Public Information report in which President Ali, addressing the rollout of the Safe Road Intelligent System’s automated camera network, announced that government would begin naming individuals with the highest volumes of outstanding tickets. “This is about accountability,” the President said. “The system will only work if we have compliance. And Guyana must do better.” At the time of that announcement, the electronic system had already generated 42,000 tickets, of which only 10,000 had been paid; a compliance gap the publication list appears designed to close through public pressure rather than through any of the enforcement pathways the Act actually provides.

That framing is telling in itself: the President described the measure in the language of policy and compliance strategy, not in the language of legal notice or statutory service. Nothing in the public record reviewed by this newsroom shows the policy being implemented through an amendment to the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, a regulation made and gazetted under section 104/105, or any other instrument that would bring it within the Act’s framework. It appears, instead, to have moved directly from presidential announcement to operational practice; a Traffic Chief briefing the public on outstanding balances via Radio Eve Leary, and a rolling published list executed by the Force without any visible statutory footing.

THE DATA PROTECTION GAP

The absence of authority under the traffic Act would matter less if Guyana’s data protection framework were positioned to test the practice on separate grounds. It is not. The Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023) received presidential assent in August 2023 and would, on its face, govern precisely this kind of processing — the collection, keeping, and dissemination of personal data by a public authority. But as of the most recent independent confirmation available to this newsroom, the Act has not been brought into force. Its commencement requires an order that, unlike the parallel Digital Identity Card Act — gazzetted and operational since March 2026; has not been issued. A Data Protection Commissioner has been appointed and describes the Data Protection Office as still being “actively engaged in the process of formally establishing” itself, language that stops short of confirming the Act’s substantive and enforcement provisions are live.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s final report on Guyana’s September 2025 general and regional elections explicitly warned government to “activate the 2023 Data Protection Act to block a repeat of the malicious use of Guyanese personal data,” after finding that “politically motivated doxing occurred with impunity” in the absence of an operative law and a functioning Data Protection Office. That warning, issued in November 2025, addressed the exposure of cash-grant recipients’ personal data. It applies with equal force to a state agency mass-publishing the names, vehicle registrations, and violation histories of ordinary drivers; some of whom, like the four registrations listed under a single name on page 81 of the 27 August list, have their entire outstanding record compiled into a single public profile with no visible mechanism to contest an entry before it appears.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE TICKET LIST

The traffic list is a small case with a large implication. Guyana is administering an automated, camera-driven ticketing regime — the Safe Road Intelligent System; capable of generating tens of thousands of penalties with minimal human discretion, while simultaneously running a compliance-pressure publication campaign built on no statutory authority, inside a data protection regime that exists in statute but not in practice.

The Force has separately had to warn the public that fraudulent text messages impersonating GPF ticket notices are circulating and directing people instead to the official lookup at speed.gpf.gov.gy. That warning was necessary precisely because GPF-branded, personally identifying financial and legal information moving through informal channels; text blasts, Facebook shares — has become common enough to require a fraud advisory. A genuine GPF publication list, moving through the same informal channels the Force has warned the public to distrust, does nothing to narrow that confusion.

Nothing in this analysis suggests the underlying debts are fictitious, or that the individuals named do not in fact owe outstanding fines. The question this newsroom is raising is narrower and more fundamental: by what legal authority is that information being made public, in this form, through this channel, absent the individualised notice the Act requires and absent any operative check under the law meant to govern the handling of personal data? On the present record, the answer appears to be none. The publication rests on executive policy alone — announced by the President, executed by the Police Force, and unreviewable by any data protection authority that does not yet exist in practice.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

The 592 Guardian is putting the following questions to the Guyana Police Force, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Attorney General’s Chambers, and will publish any response in full:

1. Under what specific statutory provision, regulation, or Cabinet instrument is the Guyana Police Force publishing named individuals’ outstanding traffic ticket records?
2. Does the Force consider inclusion on this list to constitute legal notice for the purposes of section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, and if so, on what basis?
3. What mechanism, if any, exists for a listed individual to contest an entry before or after publication?
4. Has the Attorney General’s Chambers issued any opinion on the compatibility of this practice with the Data Protection Act 2023, notwithstanding its non-commencement?

A government that campaigned on transparency owes the public more than the assurance that the underlying debts are real. It owes an accounting of the authority under which their disclosure is made. Until that authority is shown, the publication list is not accountability. It is exposure without a statute behind it.

— The Board

The Outreach Is the Indictment

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– August 2026

In the Sunday Chronicle editorial section,there is a line buried in the case being made for the President’s community outreaches that deserves to be read twice, because on the second reading it does not say what it was written to say. The argument goes that this style of governance matters because “too much can be lost between a complaint made in a community and a report that eventually reaches an office in Georgetown.” When decision-makers are physically present, the argument continues, residents can explain a drainage problem, an unstable electricity supply, a deteriorating road, in terms no paperwork could capture.

Pres. Ali grounding with residents at Kuru Kuru

Read plainly, that sentence is not a description of good governance. It is a confession that the ordinary channel of governance, the one running from a resident’s complaint through an NDC, a Regional Democratic Council, a permanent secretary, a minister’s desk, does not work. It is so unreliable, so lossy, so slow, that the Head of State himself must personally travel to Kuru Kuru, to Moruca, to Melanie Damishana, to hear what a functioning drainage department, a functioning GPL, a functioning public works ministry should already know.

That is not proactive governance. That is triage.

WHAT PROACTIVE GOVERNANCE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Proactive governance does not require the President’s physical presence to discover that a village has a drainage problem after heavy rainfall. It requires an NDC empowered and resourced to log that complaint, a regional engineer’s office that inspects and schedules the fix, and a public works ministry that funds it on a cycle residents can set their watch to — with or without a Presidential motorcade announcing it on the evening news.

Proactive governance looks like a reporting system residents trust enough to use, because they have seen it produce results before. It looks like a Local Government Commission that is more than a name on a letterhead, functioning with real appointees empowered to hold regional administrations accountable between elections, not only during them.

It looks like agencies that publish what they fixed and when, so that “the outreach” is not the only visible evidence that government noticed a problem existed.

What we are shown instead, outreach after outreach, region after region, is the opposite: the President and his ministers doing the job the system was built to do on its own, in public, with cameras present, because the system does not do it quietly, out of public view, on its own.

A MISSION WITH NO END IN SIGHT

The defenders of this approach will say it reflects a President who cares, who listens, who shows up. No one disputes that showing up has value — visibility creates a form of pressure that paperwork cannot. But visibility is not the same as capacity, and the test of any outreach was always going to be what survives after the motorcade leaves.

Kuru Kuru is not the first stop of this kind, and by the government’s own conduct, it will not be the last. Region One in August. Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil before that. Rose Hall. Karrau Village in May. Over forty individual village plans rolled out within a single week during the height of the Model Village tour. The tour does not conclude; it relocates. If the outreach model were actually closing the governance gap it claims to address, the list of communities requiring a Presidential visit to get a pothole noticed should be shrinking. It is not.

It is a rotating itinerary, and every stop on it is itself evidence that the last stop’s promise either has not yet arrived or arrived at a pace no ordinary resident would call urgent.

This is the same pattern this media  has already documented elsewhere. When noise-nuisance complaints resurfaced this month, the government’s answer was self-regulation, soundproofing financing, and a task force — the same instruments tried, and quietly abandoned, in 2022 and again in 2023, down to the same decibel meters handed to the same police force that has never been resourced to use them consistently. The remedy for an unenforced system was announced again, not fixed once. The outreach model is the same instinct scaled up to the size of a country: rather than repair the mechanism that is supposed to catch a complaint the first time, stage the appearance of catching it, on schedule, indefinitely.

THE BILL NO ONE WANTS TO ITEMIZE

Ask what a single day of Presidential outreach costs — the security detail, the ministerial delegations, the technical officers, the transport and logistics of moving Cabinet level government into hinterland sub-regions with no fixed schedule and no announced end date and the answer will not come easily.

No ministry publishes it. No line item in the budget separates “outreach” from ordinary ministerial travel. That is itself worth noting: an initiative repeated often enough to constitute a governing style, yet not transparent enough to be costed for the taxpayers financing it.

We will not manufacture a number the government has not disclosed. But readers do not need a number to draw the obvious inference. A multi-region tour with Cabinet level participation, replicated month after month with no terminal date, is not a free exercise. Every day a minister spends in a village listening to a complaint that a functioning regional office should have already logged is a day of that minister’s time, that ministry’s transport budget, and that delegation’s security costs spent compensating for an institution that was never fixed.

Multiply that across the “several years, and especially in recent months” the practice has run, across every region it has covered, and ask what that same money and that same senior attention could have done if it had gone instead into resourcing the NDCs, the regional engineers’ offices, and the reporting systems whose absence necessitated the outreach in the first place.

That comparison is not a figure. It is an indictment that does not require one.

FIX THE SYSTEM ONCE

There is a name for solving the same problem in the same way indefinitely rather than solving it once: not governance, but micromanagement dressed as governance. A president should not have to personally hear about a drainage problem in Kuru Kuru for that drainage problem to reach a work order. The fact that he does, repeatedly, and that the practice shows no sign of concluding, is not a credit to this administration’s attentiveness. It is the clearest evidence available that the machinery beneath the outreach, the actual departments, actual budgets, and actual accountability lines this government inherited and has had years to strengthen, remains broken.

“Hit dem in the pocket. Everything else is a press conference” — and the same discipline applies here: fix the mechanism, not the messaging.

Fix the system once. Regulate it. Resource the local government bodies whose statutory job this already is. Publish what gets fixed and when, so residents do not need a Presidential visit to find out whether their complaint was heard. Do that, and the outreach becomes unnecessary, which is the actual measure of whether it ever should have been necessary at all.

— The Board

“Facts Before Facebook — Except When Crossfire Needs Them”

OP-ED BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

A response to Michael Younge’s “Crossfire” column on the Mohamed river interception

Mr. Younge  opens by demanding Guyana “pull itself back” from a culture where allegation substitutes for fact. The Board agrees completely. Which is why his own column deserves the standard he invokes.

The timing he doesn’t examine. Crossfire accepts at face value that a “routine” joint Coast Guard–Police patrol happened to be on the Demerara River at 9:45 p.m. But this publication has already documented, in real time, the government’s own stated position that maritime and Coast Guard response capacity does not extend reliably to nighttime hours — that was the explanation offered for the delayed MV Barima rescue response. 

Crossfire does not ask why a “routine” patrol was active at night, on the exact evening the Leader of the Opposition was known to be returning from a humanitarian visit to Barima survivors in Region One — a visit that was itself public and reported. We do not assert this was a directed stakeout; we do not have the evidence to say so, and neither does Crossfire have the evidence to call it routine.

The honest position is: this contradiction has not been explained, and the government owes the public that explanation before anyone, Crossfire included — gets to call the encounter self-evidently lawful.

The footage that doesn’t exist. 

Crossfire repeats the officers’ claim that a bag was thrown into the river, unable to say by whom or what it held. He does not ask the obvious next question: where is the bodycam footage? A joint-services maritime operation, ending in the arrest of a sitting Leader of the Opposition and a sitting MPs, is precisely the kind of encounter bodycam policy exists to document. None has been produced. None has even been referenced by the police, MARAD, or the government’s defenders — Crossfire included. An unproduced recording is not corroboration; it is a gap. Guyana does not resolve gaps by filling them with the officers’ word and calling that “facts before Facebook.”

The line Crossfire crosses himself. 

Crossfire devotes real estate to the conduct of MPs Odessa Primus and Natasha Smith-Lewis, reaching for a “comedian” and “devout Muslim” framing that reads less like accountability journalism and more like personal characterization of two women parliamentarians. If the standard is that public office demands restraint and seriousness, that standard applies to columnists describing MPs as much as it applies to the MPs themselves.

The admission buried in his own conclusion. 

Crossfire closes by demanding “the government must enforce the law.” Set aside the rhetoric , that sentence concedes the very thing under dispute.

In a functioning constitutional order, the Guyana Police Force and GDF Coast Guard enforce the law on their own institutional authority, not as an arm directed by the executive. 

If Crossfire believes government must be the one enforcing it, he has conceded the opposition’s underlying complaint: that this operation carries the fingerprints of political direction rather than routine policing. That is not a defense of institutional independence. It is a description of its absence.

None of this requires believing Mohamed’s account over the police’s, or vice versa. It requires believing that MARAD’s licensing finding, the unexplained overnight patrol timing, the missing bodycam footage, and the loose talk of government “directing” enforcement are all facts that belong in the same column that lectures Guyana about facts.

Mr. Younge asked the right question — accountability for everyone, regardless of power or popularity. The Board simply insists he answer it about the state as rigorously as he answers it about the Leader of the Opposition.

—The Board

 A Brother’s Fortune: Inside the Sigma Engineers Contracts and the President’s Family at State House

OPINION BY: Staff Writer – August 2026

Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed alleges a company tied to President Irfaan Ali’s brother collected over $12 billion in GWI contracts within years of incorporation. The 592 Guardian examines the documented record and calls for the claims that go beyond it to be independently tested.

What Is Documented

Sigma Engineers Limited was incorporated on October 6, 2022. Corporate incorporation filings reviewed by this newsroom identify Tamjeed Rahmaan   a Bangladeshi-Canadian national, as incorporator and director, and list him also as company secretary, with a registered address at 225F New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown , a commercial, not residential, address.                   

Public procurement records confirm Sigma Engineers as an active bidder and awardee on multiple Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) contracts processed through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB), a pattern corroborated independently by prior reporting on GWI’s water treatment expansion program.

The documented contract record, as compiled by the Leader of the Opposition and reviewed by this newsroom, includes:

Figures as presented by Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed; this newsroom has independently corroborated Sigma Engineers’ status as a named GWI/NPTAB contractor but has not independently verified every individual contract value or award date listed above.

The Family Connection

Mohammed Aqtar  Ali, brother of President Irfaan Ali, returned to Guyana from Canada in 2022, two years into his brother’s presidency and the year of Sigma’s incorporation. Mohamed alleges that Aqtar Ali — previously a factory worker in Canada with no prior business record — is the true beneficial party behind Sigma, with Rahmaan fronting as the named director. This newsroom has reviewed the incorporation and financial documents Mohamed cites; they establish Rahmaan’s formal roles and Aqtar  Ali’s appearance on Sigma’s financial records.

Enitity Documents for Sigma Engineering

They do not, on their face, establish a beneficial-ownership or control arrangement — that characterization is Mohamed’s allegation and remains to be tested by an independent authority with investigative and subpoena power.

“How does a newly incorporated company move from being an unregistered entity to receiving billions of dollars in government contracts in five working days?”

— Azruddin Mohamed, Leader of the Opposition

Mohamed further alleges that Junaid Bayat — described as Aqtar Ali’s religious leader, formerly an imam in Toronto, joined Sigma as a director in May 2024 despite no disclosed business or engineering background, and that Bayat used mosque pulpits during last year’s campaign to attack Mohamed politically. This newsroom has not independently verified Bayat’s compensation history in Canada or the pulpit conduct alleged; both are reported here as Mohamed’s claims.

The Phagwah Day Drowning

Ten-year-old Jayden DeCourcy and his eight-year-old sister Tiana drowned on March 3, 2026, near the GWI facility at Bachelor’s Adventure. Technical and GWI documentation reviewed by this newsroom establishes that a backwash discharge from the water treatment system at Bachelor’s Adventure, the facility built under Sigma’s contract  is documented as a factor in the conditions at the site where the children died. This is the most serious element of the record and, unlike the ownership and fronting allegations above, is treated by this newsroom as independently documented rather than as attributed claim alone. The 592 Guardian is seeking comment from GWI and the Ministry of Housing and Water on the facility’s backwash protocols and any internal review conducted since March.

Procurement: Ten Bidders, One Winner

Mohamed’s account of the well-drilling tenders describes a pattern in which ten contractors bid and nine were rejected, with Sigma awarded the work — repeated, he says, across separate NPTAB tenders for wells at Melanie, Friendship, Westminster, GWI headquarters, Port Mourant, Garden of Eden, Shirley Field-Ridley, Better Hope and Goed Fortuin. This newsroom has reviewed NPTAB bid-opening records for at least one of these tenders showing multiple bidders including Sigma; it has not yet independently confirmed the full nine-rejected pattern across every tender listed and is seeking the underlying evaluation reports from NPTAB.

Approval Letters from NPTAB

On the pricing question, Mohamed cites unnamed engineering sources placing markups on some Sigma contracts at 70 to 100 percent above comparable cost — a figure this newsroom is reporting as an anonymously sourced allegation, not a verified finding. No named quantity surveyor or engineer has been produced to attach their professional judgment to that number, and The 592 Guardian has not independently reviewed a bill of quantities for any Sigma contract. Readers should treat the 70–100 percent figure accordingly, pending named or documentary corroboration.

State House and Community Land

Mohamed alleges that Aqtar Ali resides at State House and exercises influence over staff there, and that a portion of community land at Eccles , previously earmarked for community purposes and the subject of resident displacement — was made available for a Sigma bond, generating complaints from residents about dust, noise and disruption. These are presented here as Mohamed’s claims; this newsroom has not independently confirmed Aqtar Ali’s residency arrangements or the land-allocation decision and has sought comment from the Office of the President and the relevant regional authority.

The Call for Investigation

Mohamed has called on the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to investigate the Sigma contracts — the procurement process, the bid evaluations, the beneficial ownership, and the flow of funds. He has also directed a public challenge to Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, in his capacity as PPP General Secretary, to act on the allegations rather than remain silent.

“Irfan has corruption in his DNA, and the entire PPP knows this.” — Azruddin Mohamed

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to adjudicate the central allegation — that Sigma Engineers functions as a vehicle for the president’s brother, sustained by preferential procurement  on the documents made available to us alone. What is established on the record is narrower but still serious: a company with no operating history prior to October 2022 secured over $12 billion in GWI contracts within four years, its named director’s professional background does not evidently correspond to engineering or water infrastructure, and a technically documented backwash issue at one of its facilities coincided with the deaths of two children. Those facts alone warrant the SOCU and FIU review Mohamed has demanded.

The remaining allegations — fronting, beneficial ownership, the scale of markups, and the conduct of individuals connected to the president’s family , are serious enough that they should not rest on a political speech in either direction. They require subpoena power, not press conferences.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

Editor’s note: This report is based on a public statement by Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed and on documents provided to this newsroom. Claims attributed to Mr. Mohamed are reported as allegations pending independent verification, except where this newsroom states it has separately corroborated the underlying record. The 592 Guardian has sought comment from the Office of the President, Guyana Water Inc., and the individuals named, and will publish any response received.

 THE PRICE OF NOT LOOKING

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar —August 2026

How a company convicted of bribery in Ecuador became the lowest bidder on Guyana’s largest hydropower project — and why no one at NPTAB appears to have asked why

On Thursday August 27 , an Ecuadorean tribunal sentenced former President Lenin Moreno to five years in prison and barred him permanently from public office. His crime: presiding, as vice president and later president, over a bribery network built around the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant — a network that, according to Ecuador’s Attorney General, moved roughly US$76.1 million from Sinohydro Corporation Limited into the pockets of Moreno’s family and business associates between 2009 and 2018. China’s former ambassador to Quito, Cai Runguo, was jailed alongside him. Nineteen other defendants were convicted.

Sixteen  weeks earlier, on May 8, 2026, that same company — Sinohydro Corporation Limited — submitted the lowest bid on file for Guyana’s Amaila Falls Hydropower Project: US$416,866,949.21, for a 165-megawatt facility that this government has called the cornerstone of its renewable energy strategy. Five companies bid. Sinohydro’s proposal is the cheapest. As of this writing, it remains under evaluation by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, with no award announced. 

This newsroom  does not allege that anyone in Guyana’s procurement apparatus has been bribed. We make a narrower and, in some ways, more damning claim: that it should not have taken a foreign courtroom to make Sinohydro’s history relevant to this government’s evaluation of its bid — because that history was never a secret.

It was published. It was public record before the RFP was even reissued. And nothing in the public account of this procurement suggests anyone asked about it.

A RECORD IN PLAIN SIGHT

Sinohydro’s presence in Guyana is not new. In 2020, Zijin Mining Group contracted the company to perform stripping works at the Aurora Gold Mine after acquiring the site from Guyana Goldfields. That arrangement itself drew scrutiny — the Ministry of Labour publicly stated that Zijin’s transfer of roughly 141 AGM employees to Sinohydro’s payroll did not comply with Guyana’s labour laws.

So the company was already known to regulators here, under circumstances already flagged as irregular.

Its international record runs considerably longer and darker. Investigators for the African Development Bank’s Office of Integrity and Anti-Corruption found that Sinohydro misrepresented its prior project experience while bidding for a Uganda road contract in 2013, using references to projects that had not been substantially completed. The World Bank’s Sanctions Board separately reprimanded the company over violations tied to the construction of a hydroelectric plant in Mali. Botswana terminated a Sinohydro airport-expansion contract outright for non-fulfilment of its terms. A Nigerian energy company has pursued an international arbitration claim against Sinohydro. None of this required Ecuador’s verdict to surface — Kaieteur News itself reported in November 2021, on the record, that Sinohydro was among three Chinese firms bidding for the Amaila Falls project that carried prior World Bank blacklisting.

The question is not whether Guyana’s government read Ecuador’s verdict. The question is why it apparently never read its own newspapers.

THE REGULATIONS ALREADY EXIST

Guyana is not without the legal architecture to act on precisely this kind of history. The Procurement Act 2003 and the regulations governing the Public Procurement Commission establish a debarment regime: Regulation 3(1) empowers the Commission to debar or suspend a supplier or contractor found to have engaged in prohibited conduct; Regulations 13 and 14 prohibit any procuring entity from soliciting or considering bids from a debarred or suspended contractor or its affiliates; Regulation 16 requires the Commission to publicise debarments and maintain a public register.

What the Act does not do — so far as this newsroom has been able to establish — is compel Guyana’s evaluators to cross-reference the debarment registers of the multilateral institutions whose own investigators have already done this work. A firm barred by the World Bank or the African Development Bank is not automatically barred in Georgetown. That gap is not a technicality. It is the precise seam through which a company with Sinohydro’s documented history can walk, unremarked, into a $417 million tender for a national infrastructure asset.

This is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is, on the available record, the one we are in. President Ali has recently and publicly proposed a digital procurement system that would track “beneficial ownership, tax and social-security compliance, contractor classification, past performance, debarments and suspensions” for every bidder — a system he has described as necessary precisely because none of that information currently follows a contractor through the process. The Amaila Falls tender is the argument for that system, made in real time, using this government’s own pending decision as the exhibit.

NOT AN ISOLATED SEAM

Sinohydro is not the only name in this government’s contractor pool that should trouble anyone charged with due diligence. This publication’s  ongoing examination of Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. — a Bangladesh-linked contractor holding water-infrastructure and recruitment contracts with Guyana Water Inc. — has documented an open anti-corruption charge against the company in Bangladesh, and an address listed on a Guyana government document that resolves, on inspection, to a private residence in Toronto.

Different company, different sector, same structural failure: a government relying on a bidder’s own paperwork rather than independently verifying who it is dealing with.

Two cases do not yet prove a pattern is policy. They are, at minimum, sufficient to demand one. A procurement system that cannot distinguish a company convicted of bribery abroad, or blacklisted by the world’s principal development lenders, from any other bidder is not a neutral process awaiting the lowest price. It is an open door.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION  IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to determine, from public documents alone, whether Sinohydro’s bid was flagged internally and set aside for other reasons, or whether it was evaluated as though its record did not exist. That distinction matters, and only the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board and the Office of the Prime Minister can resolve it. We are asking them to.

Specifically:

♦Did NPTAB’s evaluation committee for the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project review Sinohydro Corporation Limited’s debarment or sanctions history with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, or any other multilateral lender prior to or during bid evaluation?     

♦Does Guyana’s procurement framework require such a check as a matter of standard practice, for this tender or any other above the high financial threshold?                                                                            ♦And if no such check occurred here, will the government now conduct one before any award is made — rather than after?

Guyana did not create Sinohydro’s record. Ecuador’s courts did not create Guyana’s obligation to examine it. But a government that has spent the better part of this year promising a procurement system capable of catching exactly this kind of history has, in the Amaila Falls tender, a bid sitting in front of it right now that tests whether that promise is real.

The lowest price on the table is not the only number that matters. The public should not have to wait for a verdict in Quito to learn what its own tender board already had reason to ask in Georgetown.

— The Board