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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Sigma File: A Bangladesh Shell, a Billion-Dollar Water Contract,and the President’s Brother

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By: Staff Writer — The 592 Guardian– August 2026

On October 6, 2022, a company called Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc was born in Guyana. Its Certificate of Incorporation, filed with the Registrar of Companies, lists Company No. 13572. Its sole director, secretary, and incorporator was a single man: M. Tamjeed Rahmaan, of 225 F New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown.

Seven days later, on October 13, 2022, that one-man company signed a contract with the Government of Guyana worth GYD $3,697,274,857 — nearly US$17.7 million — to design, supply, and install water treatment facilities across three communities in Region Four.

Sigma Engineers had no prior operating history in Guyana. It had existed, on paper, for a week.

Today, that contract has grown to nearly GYD $4 billion. Its Guyana registered address is the same building that houses Gaico Construction, one of the most favored contractors of the Irfaan Ali administration. Its Bangladesh-based parent company faces an unresolved corruption case in its home country, filed by that country’s Anti-Corruption Commission, naming the same men who founded the firm that now builds Guyana’s public water infrastructure. And the President’s own brother, Mohamed Aqtar Ali, sits inside the company as a paid consultant — a fact Sigma disclosed only after being publicly accused, and only in the barest possible terms.

This is the paper trail.

I. Seven Days

The corporate filings are unambiguous. Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc — Company No. 13572 — was incorporated under Guyana’s Companies Act on October 6, 2022. The Notice of Directors and Notice of Secretary, both dated the same day, list one name for every statutory role: M. Tamjeed Rahmaan. Director. Secretary. Incorporator. All at once, all one man, at a residential address in North Cummingsburg.

 

There is nothing illegal about a single-director company. But single-director companies do not, as a rule, win nine-figure state infrastructure contracts within days of coming into existence — unless something about that company’s backing was already known to the people awarding the contract.

The contract in question — GWI 2022/43430, “Procurement of Plant Design, Supply and Installation of Water Treatment Facilities,” tendered as International Competitive Bid No. GWI-GoG-W067-2022 through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board — was a genuine, publicly advertised tender. Bids closed August 9, 2022. Sigma was awarded Lot 3: water treatment plants for Caledonia, Cummings Lodge, and Bachelor’s Adventure, all in Region Four.

The agreement was signed October 13, 2022. Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc had been a legal entity in Guyana for exactly one week.

 

The listed “official address” for the contractor on that agreement is not in Georgetown at all. It is 239–240 Madrasa Road, Tazpur, Ashulia, Savar, Dhaka-1341, Bangladesh — the compound address of Sigma Group, the Bangladeshi engineering conglomerate founded in 1985 by three men: Syed Arshed Reza, Md. Mizanur Rahman, and Syed Md. Kamal. The Guyana entity, in other words, was never really a Guyanese company transacting with a foreign parent. It was, from day one, a local shell wearing the paperwork of incorporation, with the actual contracting party’s real address printed in black and white on the government’s own contract.

II.The Bill Keeps Growing, the Deadlines Keep Slipping

The original contract price was GYD $3,697,274,857. By February 2024, Addendum 2 raised it to GYD $3,951,992,986 — an increase of G$254,718,129 under “Variation Order No. 1.”

The increase was not evenly spread. Two of the three plants actually came in under their original estimates: Caledonia’s price fell by roughly $53.1 million, Cummings Lodge’s by roughly $58.4 million. The entire net increase, and then some, was loaded onto a single plant — Bachelor’s Adventure — which rose by $366.2 million.

The project’s own contractual terms called for completion within 24 months: effective November 10, 2022, with a project end date of November 9, 2024.

None of the three plants met that deadline.

Caledonia was commissioned in January 2025 — roughly two months late.

Cummings Lodge was commissioned October 19, 2025, with President Ali personally in attendance — nearly a year late.

Bachelor’s Adventure, the plant that absorbed almost the entire cost increase, has no confirmed commissioning date in the public record as of this writing — more than 20 months past its own original deadline.

The plant that cost the most extra money is also the plant that has taken the longest, with no public accounting yet for why.

III. A Recruitment Licence That Recruited No One

In February 2024 — the same month the GWI contract’s price was being revised upward — a separate story surfaced. A letter from Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, dated February 5, 2024, authorized Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc to recruit healthcare workers from Bangladesh, reportedly for as many as 500 positions.

The Ministry’s public explanation, when the letter leaked, was that the authorization was issued at Sigma’s own request, framed as a regulatory safeguard against trafficking and improper labor processing amid a genuine health-sector staffing crisis. The Private Sector Commission had been lobbying government for help with skills shortages across health, construction, engineering, and services.

The government later confirmed something else: not a single healthcare worker was ever actually recruited through this authorization. Guyana’s medical shortages continued to be addressed through existing bilateral arrangements, chiefly Cuban medical personnel.

So a license was issued, in the health sector, at a company’s own request — and it produced nothing. Meanwhile, that same company’s engineering contract, in an entirely different sector, continued to operate using labour that appears — on the evidence below — to have come from the same country the healthcare authorization was meant to cover.

IV. Who Is Actually Building Guyana’s Water Plants?

In late 2024, Guyana Water Incorporated posted photographs to its own official Facebook page of GWI’s CEO, Shaik Baksh, posing with the construction crew at the New Cummings Lodge Water Treatment Plant.

The post’s caption is direct: “The New Cummings Lodge Water Treatment Plant was constructed by Sigma Engineering Ltd at a cost of GYD $1.3 billion, with a team comprising of several Guyanese staff.”

The $1.3 billion figure in that caption lines up closely with the $1,304,444,724 total contract price recorded for Cummings Lodge in the project’s own change-order documentation — confirming this photograph documents the same plant tracked in the contract paper trail above.

The photograph itself shows more than two dozen workers in matching Sigma-branded uniforms, standing behind Baksh as he shakes hands with another man in a dark suit. Every visible member of that crew — with the sole exception of Baksh and one other man in Western business attire — appears South Asian.

GWI’s own caption asserts the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” Nobody visibly identifiable as Guyanese appears in the photograph GWI selected to illustrate that claim.

A second set of photographs, obtained separately, shows a similarly large Sigma crew — again uniformly South Asian in appearance — posed in front of completed water storage tanks at what appears to be the same or a comparable Region Four site. Two men in business suits are pictured with the group.

Taken together, these are not opposition talking points. One set of images comes from GWI’s own institutional Facebook page, captioned by GWI itself, with GWI’s own CEO physically present and smiling for the camera. If the workforce building a billion-dollar public water plant was substantially foreign, GWI’s own communications team photographed it, published it, and then wrote a caption claiming otherwise.

V. The Legal Question GWI’s Photo Raises

Guyana’s work permit regime, administered through the Ministry of Home Affairs, requires labour market testing: an employer seeking to bring in foreign workers must demonstrate that the positions cannot be filled by Guyanese nationals. Guyana’s Local Content Act further identifies 40 ring-fenced sub-sectors — including engineering, consulting, and professional/technical services — where local hiring and content requirements apply, and the government has stated publicly that it is stepping up enforcement against companies “rotating foreign workers to circumvent local hiring obligations or evading local content mandates.”

It should be noted precisely: Guyana’s Local Content Certificate regime, administered by the Local Content Secretariat under the Ministry of Natural Resources, is scoped specifically to the petroleum sector — it does not directly govern a water-utility contract like Sigma’s GWI agreement. The applicable framework here is the general work permit and labor market testing process, not the oil-and-gas-specific LCC.

That distinction does not weaken the underlying question — it sharpens it. Sigma’s only publicly documented authorization to import foreign labour was the February 2024 Ministry of Foreign Affairs letter — and that letter covered healthcare workers, not construction or engineering labour, and produced zero actual recruits.

If the workforce photographed at the Cummings Lodge plant was substantially Bangladeshi, as GWI’s own photograph suggests, the relevant question is straightforward: under what authorization, and with what labour market testing, did that workforce enter and work in Guyana? No public record answers that question. GWI’s own caption — asserting Guyanese participation that its own photograph does not show — does not answer it either.

VI . The Bangladesh File

Sigma Group’s roots run to 1985, when Syed Arshed Reza, Md. Mizanur Rahman, and Syed Md. Kamal founded Sigma Engineers as a partnership of three engineers in Dhaka. The firm grew into Bangladesh’s dominant water infrastructure contractor — deep tube wells, water treatment plants, later power generation and heavy civil works. It has a legitimate, audited financing history: World Bank-linked IPFF facility records show Sigma Engineers Ltd received commercial bank loans in 2016–17 for water treatment plants in the Comilla and Adamjee export processing zones, audited without qualification.

But the same company’s leadership also faces an unresolved corruption case in its home country.

On October 21, 2020, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission filed a case against eleven people — eight engineers of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, and three Sigma Engineers Limited executives: Chairman Syed Arshed Reza, Managing Director Syed Md Kamal, and General Manager Abdus Salam. The allegation: the accused misappropriated Tk 34.42 crore — more than US$3 million at the time — through the procurement of water pumps for the Kashimpur Pump House Rehabilitation, under the Manu River Irrigation Project. BWDB engineers allegedly paid Sigma Tk 61.60 crore for pumps valued at Tk 34.42 crore less than that.

A single BWDB engineer had formed a one-member evaluation committee and recommended Sigma for the work without consulting outside experts. The underlying investigation had been running since 2019, a year before charges were filed — this was not a rushed or politically opportunistic filing.

Syed Arshed Reza and Syed Md Kamal are the same two men identified as founders of the Sigma Group entity now operating in Guyana.

No public record establishes the current status of that Bangladesh case —  whether it proceeded to trial, was dismissed, or remains pending

It should be treated, honestly, as an unresolved allegation against named individuals, not a proven or closed matter. But it is a documented fact that Sigma’s own leadership, in its home jurisdiction, is on record facing a criminal case alleging exactly the kind of single-evaluator, inflated-price contracting irregularity that Guyanese authorities do not appear to have asked about before handing that same leadership’s Guyana entity a nearly $4 billion water contract.

VII. 225 New Market Street

Sigma’s registered Guyana address — 225 New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown — is not an obscure residential lot. It is the headquarters of Gaico Construction & General Services Inc., one of the most consistently favoured contractors of the current administration. Gaico’s own public listings confirm the address as its head office, the “GAICO Construction Building.”

Gaico’s recent contract history speaks for itself: a $3.3 billion award for its lot of the New Parika Modern Port Facility in 2025 — the largest of three lots let — and a subcontracted role in the $865 million Belle Vue project, brought in by the original contractor after the fact in an arrangement that drew pointed questions from opposition MPs in Parliament this past February.

No evidence has yet surfaced of a direct joint venture, shared contract, or ownership link between Sigma and Gaico. The confirmed fact is narrower and still worth stating plainly: a Bangladesh-linked company that won a billion-dollar state contract one week after incorporation is registered at the same physical address as Guyana’s most prominently favoured domestic contractor.

Whether that reflects a formal business relationship, an accommodation arrangement, or something GWI and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs never thought to ask about, remains an open question — and one worth putting to both companies directly.

VIII. The President’s Brother, Undisclosed Until Accused

In August 2026, Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed publicly alleged that Sigma Engineers was connected to Mohamed Aqtar Ali — the brother of President Irfaan Ali — and challenged the company’s account of its own establishment and government contracts.

Sigma’s response, reported by HGP Nightly News, was to reject the allegations as “serious misrepresentations,” announce it had engaged legal counsel, and threaten “appropriate legal action.” In the same statement, Sigma confirmed — for the first time publicly — that Mohamed Aqtar Ali is engaged by Sigma Engineers Limited Incorporated in Guyana as a “senior technical consultant.” The company offered no further detail: no date of engagement, no description of his responsibilities, no terms of compensation. It stated only that he has “no affiliation” with Sigma’s Bangladesh entity.

The family relationship is not in dispute; it is a matter of public record. What is notable is the sequence: Sigma disclosed the President’s brother’s role inside the company only after being publicly accused of concealing it, and even then disclosed the barest fact of his employment without any of the specifics that would let the public assess what that role actually involves.

Sigma’s rebuttal also contains a claim that does not survive contact with the documents underlying this story. The company told HGP that, despite its October 2022 Guyana registration, its “first contract” in Guyana was not awarded until 2026 — roughly four years later — via national competitive bidding through NPTAB. The contract examined throughout this piece — GWI 2022/43430, Lot 3 — is dated October 13, 2022. It is not a 2026 contract. It is not Sigma’s first Guyana contract by four years’ delay; it is Sigma’s first Guyana contract, full stop, and it was signed one week after the company existed.

That is not a matter of interpretation. It is a conflict between what Sigma told the Guyanese public, under the shadow of a legal threat, and what the government’s own contract documents say.

What Remains Unanswered

This investigation does not claim to have proven a conspiracy. It documents a paper trail, and the trail raises questions that neither Sigma, GWI, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has yet answered on the public record:

⇒ Why was a single-director company with no operating history awarded a nearly $4 billion state contract within seven days of its incorporation?

⇒What labour market testing, if any, was conducted before the workforce photographed at the Cummings Lodge plant — a workforce that appears substantially foreign — was brought into the country, given that the only publicly documented import authorization Sigma held was for healthcare workers, not engineering labour?

⇒ Why does GWI’s own published caption claim “several Guyanese staff” on a project photograph that shows none?

⇒ Did GWI or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs know, at the time of contracting or authorization, that Sigma’s named Bangladesh leadership faced an unresolved Anti-Corruption Commission case in their home country?

⇒ What is the nature of the relationship, if any, between Sigma’s Guyana registration and Gaico Construction, whose headquarters Sigma shares as its registered address?

⇒ What, specifically, does Mohamed Aqtar Ali do for Sigma Engineers, when did that engagement begin, and what is he paid?

Sigma has said it wants public discourse “based on accurate and verifiable information.” This piece is built from nothing else: a certificate of incorporation, a signed contract, a change order, a Ministry letter, a foreign anti-corruption filing, and photographs GWI published itself. The company, and the government agencies that contracted with it, now have the documents in front of them. The 592 Guardian has put the same questions to Sigma Engineers ♦GWI  the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and will publish any response in full.

The 592 Guardian will continue to track this story. Readers with additional documentation — contracts, work permit records, or employment data relevant to Sigma Engineers’ Guyana operations — are invited to contact the editor directly.

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

OPINION BY : Staff Writer– August 2026

The President’s picks for the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission each already hold a second post close enough to the first to demand an answer before confirmation, not after.

T wo of the President’s nominees to Guyana’s constitutional commissions arrive already carrying another job — and in both cases, the second job sits close enough to the first to raise the kind of question that ought to be answered before either appointment is finalised, not after.

Retired Justice Carl Singh has been proposed for reappointment to the Judicial Service Commission, the body that expired on July 13 and that the President is now moving to reconstitute under Article 198(2). Singh is a natural pick on paper — a former Chancellor of the Judiciary, credentialed and well known to the institution.

“He is also, at this moment, the sitting Chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission, appointed to that post by President Ali and sworn in alongside seventeen other commissioners in April 2024.”

The overlap is not cosmetic. The JSC’s own composition is built around the Chancellorship: by constitutional design, the Chancellor chairs the Commission, the Chief Justice sits on it, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission sits on it as well.

A retired Chancellor joining that body is not an outsider being added to an unrelated panel — he is stepping into the specific institutional lineage the JSC was built to run through. That alone might be unremarkable, given Singh’s background. What makes it worth a second look is that Singh simultaneously chairs the body Guyana convened specifically to review and recommend changes to the machinery of constitutional appointments — including, potentially, the very judicial appointment provisions the JSC operates under. One man sitting at the head of both the commission that might reform the rules and the commission that operates under them is not evidence of wrongdoing.

It is, at minimum, a structural question about whether reform recommendations touching judicial appointments can be seen as arriving independently of the people who currently sit inside that system.

The Constitutional Reform Commission has itself struggled for legitimacy on unrelated grounds — the Guyana Human Rights Association called for Singh and the full membership to resign last September, citing the commission’s inertia and the shifted political landscape since its 2024 swearing-in. Singh has publicly acknowledged the commission’s sluggish pace, attributing it to administrative delay rather than institutional design.

Whatever the merits of that defence, it does not touch the separate question raised by his JSC nomination: whether the same person should simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the body reviewing the constitutional order and a seat inside the judicial body that order currently produces.

The second nomination raises a cleaner conflict. Maurice Gajadhar has been proposed for the Public Service Commission, the body responsible under Article 200 for appointments, discipline and removal across Guyana’s public service. Gajadhar is also, and has been since 2020, Chairman of the Board of Guyana Power and Light — a state-owned corporation, and not a small one.

That chairmanship already produced a public conflict-of-interest controversy on Gajadhar’s watch. In 2021, GPL purchased two vehicles from Rudisa Motor Company Guyana Inc., a company for which Gajadhar serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Former-Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson called it plainly: “That is a clear conflict of interest.” GPL’s response at the time did not deny the transaction — it defended the purchase as having gone through a National Competitive Bidding Process, which addresses the procurement mechanics without addressing the more basic problem: a state corporation buying vehicles from a company run by its own board chairman is a conflict irrespective of how the invoice was generated. Gajadhar was still chairing the GPL board as recently as February of this year, when he led a board inspection of the utility’s new National Control Centre.

To be precise about the shape of the concern: the Public Service Commission does not regulate GPL directly. Its Article 200 jurisdiction runs to the public service — the civil service proper — not to the governance of state-owned commercial entities, so this is not a case of Gajadhar being asked to police his own corporation from a new perch. The more grounded question is one of fitness. The PSC exists to safeguard the integrity of appointments and discipline across the public service; it is difficult to square that mandate with elevating a nominee whose own record as a public-corporation chairman includes a documented, publicly contested instance of exactly the kind of self-dealing the Commission is meant to guard against elsewhere in the state.

Neither of these facts, on its own, disqualifies either man. Guyana is a small country with a shallow bench of people credentialed enough to fill these seats, and some overlap between public roles is close to unavoidable. But “unavoidable in general” is not the same as “unexamined in this instance,” and nothing in the correspondence between Minister Teixeira and Opposition Leader Mohamed — nor in the Opposition’s brief, non-committal acknowledgments of the nominees — indicates that either overlap was raised, let alone resolved, before the names went forward.

The Opposition Leader’s responses to date have noted the nominees and their curricula vitae without expressly endorsing or objecting to either. That may still be the right posture while the record is incomplete. But it should not be the final posture.

Before Mohamed’s office signs off on Singh for the JSC or Gajadhar for the PSC, both men’s dual roles deserve a direct question, asked and answered on the record: what happens to the other seat if this one is confirmed. A commission built to guard against exactly this kind of overlap should not be the one asking Guyanese to take it on faith.

— The Board