The Triangle Tightens: What Trinidad’s China Spat and Caracas Snub Tell Guyana About Its Own Bargain

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

REGIONAL POSITIONING · ANALYSIS

The Triangle Tightens: What Trinidad’s China Spat and Caracas Snub Tell Guyana About Its Own Bargain

 OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September 2026

A statement from the Chinese Embassy in Port of Spain, posted to Facebook rather than delivered through any formal channel, would ordinarily not detain this desk. Embassies issue such statements often; they are usually theatre for a domestic audience thousands of miles away. But this one is not isolated. It arrives as the third leg of a pattern this media desk  has tracked for months in Guyana’s own dealings with Washington and Beijing —

And last week, a fourth data point emerged eighty miles across the Gulf of Paria, where a Trinidadian foreign minister flew to Caracas and came home having agreed, by his own government’s account, to nothing more than a future agenda.

Put plainly: the contest for the western hemisphere’s northern coast — Guyana, Trinidad, Venezuela — is no longer a matter of inference. It is being conducted in public, in communiqués and Facebook posts and terse ministry statements, and the terms on offer to each capital are not identical. Reading them side by side tells Guyana something about the price of the bargain it has already struck.

THE EMBASSY STATEMENT, STRIPPED OF ITS FRAMING

The Chinese Embassy’s complaint was that unnamed U.S. officials had made “negative comments” about Chinese technology firms operating in Trinidad and Tobago, and that this amounted to political interference in a sovereign state’s right to choose its partners. Beijing’s rebuttal leaned on familiar ground; reliability, competitive pricing, compliance with local law — and then went further, accusing Washington itself of a long record of surveillance and “tapping” across Latin America and the Caribbean.

None of that is new as rhetoric. What is worth registering is the timing and the target. This is not a statement about Guyana, or about Venezuela’s oil. It is Beijing defending its position in the smallest and most industrially developed of the three, and doing so only after months in which the U.S. Secretary of State has told CARICOM leaders, repeatedly and on the record, that countering Chinese influence in the region is a stated American priority — alongside deportations, pressure on Cuba and Venezuela, and the energy roles now assigned to Guyana and Suriname. Trinidad’s prime minister, for her part, has not been a passive audience for that message. She has publicly welcomed U.S. military operations in the southern Caribbean Sea and reaffirmed security cooperation with Washington on narcotics and firearms trafficking. The embassy statement, then, is not paranoia. It is a reaction to a visible and acknowledged campaign.

The question this media room has asked of Guyana’s own agreements applies here too: who is actually the counterparty, and on what terms was the door opened?

CARACAS, AND THE VISIT THAT WASN’T QUITE A VISIT

If Trinidad’s China friction shows one side of the triangle’s pressure, this week’s diplomatic mission to Venezuela shows the other — and it complicates any simple story of Washington versus Beijing for regional loyalty. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar had promised since April that a delegation would travel to Caracas to secure Trinidad’s “just share” of gas resources tied to the Dragon field, a project explicitly described at the time as coordinated with the United States government. That promise sat unfulfilled for five months, through a period in which Persad-Bissessar was declared persona non grata by Venezuela’s National Assembly, a legacy of her criticism of now-Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Only after Trinidad sent earthquake relief following the devastating June 24 tremors did the freeze visibly thaw.

The mission that finally departed on September 3 was led not by Persad-Bissessar and not by her energy minister, but by Foreign Minister Sean Sobers, meeting his Venezuelan counterpart Félix Plasencia for a single day. Acting President Rodríguez did not appear. The two sides agreed on a general work programme — no field allocations, no gas terms, no timeline. Plasencia called it the beginning of a “new era”; Trinidad’s own former diplomatic establishment read the same meeting rather differently. One ex-diplomat noted that Rodríguez had personally received the leaders of Grenada and Barbados in Caracas in recent months, while Trinidad — the country with the actual commercial stake, a thirty-year National Gas Company license on the Dragon field — was received at foreign-minister level only. His verdict was blunt: Venezuela had, in substance, told Trinidad to wait its turn.

Whether that reading is fair or merely wounded pride, the fact pattern supports at least this much:  proximity to Washington does not appear to convert automatically into standing in Caracas.

Trinidad backed U.S. security operations publicly and paid a diplomatic price for it — a persona non grata designation never publicly lifted, a meeting held one rank below what the stakes would suggest, and an energy minister left off the plane.

THE GUYANA COMPARISON THIS PUBLICATION HAS ALREADY MADE

Readers of this publication’s  earlier work on the Berbice port financing shift and the Venezuelan oilfields negotiation will recognize the shape of what follows. We have already documented that Guyana’s own infrastructure story shows a similar drift — Chinese pre-feasibility interest in a Berbice deepwater port, dating to 2015, giving way over a decade to a Bechtel-Hess feasibility study now tied to the Modern Port Act; a security relationship with Washington that has grown from a 2025 Security Cooperation MoU to an August 2026 air-domain-awareness and drone agreement, layered atop a still-entrenched Huawei surveillance footprint in Regions Three and Six that no Guyanese official has yet addressed on the record.

We have also documented, in the Venezuelan case, that the terms Washington is prepared to accept when its own commercial interest is directly at stake bear examination. The equity arrangement reported by Elliott Abrams — a 35 percent U.S. stake and rights to a fifth of output for a full century, negotiated with an unelected acting president and a private Venezuelan company whose principal carries a Swiss money-laundering warrant, with nothing paid to Venezuela itself — is not a template this newsroom would wish on any production-sharing arrangement Guyana might renegotiate.

It is, at minimum, a data point on what Washington will tolerate in a partner’s legitimacy when the resource is large enough.

Trinidad’s experience this month adds a third comparison point, and an uncomfortable one for the theory that alignment with Washington buys goodwill elsewhere. Georgetown has, like Port of Spain, deepened its security cooperation with the United States considerably over the past eighteen months. Georgetown has not, as far as the public record shows, paid an equivalent diplomatic price with Caracas — but the relationship between Guyana and Venezuela was never warm to begin with, and the Essequibo controversy makes the countries’ incentives different in kind, not just degree. What Trinidad’s snub demonstrates is that the region’s smaller states are being asked to absorb costs on both sides of this contest simultaneously: economic exposure to a hardening U.S. posture toward China, and diplomatic exposure to a Venezuela that treats security alignment with Washington as a signal to be repaid in kind, at a time of its own choosing.

Small states do not get to opt out of a great-power contest by picking a side quietly. They discover, usually after the fact, what the side they picked expected in return.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION IS WATCHING NEXT

Three threads converge here and none of them is closed. First, whether Beijing’s public defence of its Trinidad footprint is answered by any comparable statement regarding its interests in Guyana — the Berbice pre-feasibility MoU has never been formally superseded, only quietly overtaken, and a Chinese statement of the kind issued in Port of Spain would be the clearest signal yet of how Beijing now views its standing here. Second, whether Trinidad’s work agenda with Caracas produces anything concrete on the Dragon field before the U.S.-Venezuela equity arrangement forecloses the most attractive terms — Moonilal’s optimism about an evolving U.S.-Venezuela energy arrangement benefiting Trinidad has already drawn scepticism from within his own country’s foreign policy establishment. Third, and most directly relevant to this publication’s mandate, whether Guyana’s own government is prepared to state plainly, in Parliament rather than at a joint press conference, what it believes it has traded for the security guarantees Washington has extended — and whether that trade was negotiated with the same clarity of terms that Elliott Abrams’s reporting suggests Washington demanded of Venezuela.

Guyana has thus far avoided the double exposure Trinidad now carries — a public spat with China on one flank and a diplomatic rebuff from Caracas on the other. That is not evidence of a better strategy. It may simply be evidence that Guyana has not yet been tested the way Trinidad was tested this week. This publication  will be watching for the moment it is.

— The Board

The Nouveau Riche of Oil: How Guyana Grew a Class It Never Had

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The Nouveau Riche of Oil: How Guyana Grew a Class It Never Had

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar . —September 2026 

Guyana was, for most of its post-independence life, a poor country with a flat proletariat– class structure. Not equal — poor. Sugar, rice and bauxite paid wages that kept the majority in a shared, undifferentiated hardship, and the small commercial elite that existed traded in the same narrow, low-margin economy as everyone else.

There was no capital base large enough to produce a true domestic wealthy class, only a colonial one that left with the colonizers and a commercial layer that never approached the scale of what oil has now made possible.

Whatever else can be said about that era, it did not have a Guyanese class of people who could write personal checks in the hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

That class exists now. The question this piece asks is not whether wealth has grown in Guyana since 2019 — it obviously has, nationally, by any macroeconomic measure. The question is whether that wealth has produced, for the first time in the country’s history, a domestic class positioned above the law of ordinary income — a class whose wealth accumulation has outpaced anything a public salary could produce, sitting inside a state that has neither the will nor the machinery to ask how.

The mechanism, not just the outcome

Two documented cases now sit in the public record — not as opposition talking points, but as filings.

Mustapha. The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission’s own Mineral Map shows 7,614 acres of mining land allocated since 2023 to Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s two sons and daughter-in-law — allocations that bypassed long-standing local applicants, according to the allegation that prompted the minister’s public response. Mustapha’s rebuttal does not dispute the acreage; it disputes the characterization, insisting the allocations followed lawful procedure, and counters that the family of his chief accuser, WIN leader Azruddin Mohamed, controls more mining land still. Both things can be true.

What neither side disputes is the underlying fact:the minor children and in-laws of a sitting minister now hold a mining land portfolio that would have been unthinkable for any Guyanese family outside the old commercial elite a decade ago.

Rodrigues. The documentary trail here is this writer’s own, published across a series of Stabroek News letters beginning January 7, 2026, built entirely on public Florida and Broward County records, and unrebutted by any competing document in the nine months since. Florida Division of Corporations filings list Tourism Minister Susan Rodrigues as Manager and Authorized Person of Revelle Investments LLC, registered January 16, 2024, alongside Denisha Bobb — who, per a September 2025 shareholder resolution filed with a separate Guyana-registered company, has since legally changed her name to Denisha Rodrigues by new birth certificate.

On March 11, 2024, a Warranty Deed shows Amil Dial Homes LLC selling a property at 8601 NW 46th Ct, Lauderhill, to “Susan Margaret Rodrigues, Single,” for US$540,000, financed by a US$378,000 mortgage from A&D Mortgage. The very next day, March 12, Rodrigues executed a Quit Claim Deed transferring the same property from her own name into Revelle Investments LLC for a nominal $10 — a deed that, per my own  reporting, specifically states no title search was performed. That deed was recorded with Broward County on April 9, 2024, and the Broward County Property Appraiser’s records now list Revelle Investments LLC as owner.

A&D Mortgage’s own 2024 Form 1098 — the official tax document Rodrigues has pointed to as proof of transparency — shows the loan originating March 11, 2024 at $378,000, and an Ending Principal Balance of $0.00 as of the December 31, 2024 reporting date: a 30-year mortgage apparently extinguished within the same calendar year it began. This writer’s published reporting reads that zero balance as consistent with only two possibilities in ordinary banking practice — the loan was paid in full, or it never functioned as genuine long-term debt to begin with — and notes that Broward County’s public record does not show the Satisfaction of Mortgage that Florida Statute -SS 701.04 would ordinarily require to formally close out a paid loan. No document contradicting that reading — no recorded satisfaction, no assignment, no alternative explanation from Rodrigues or A&D Mortgage — has surfaced in public since that specific reporting was first published in January. Our own findings were formally filed with the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, and remain, as of this writing, under active review. Rodrigues separately acknowledged purchasing two lots at Peters Hall, financed by mortgage—which by AML-CFT rules, ought to have been flagged  by the issuing bank–under qualifying criteria–with title signed October 10, 2024 — while she held a ministerial portfolio overseeing the award of lands and titles.

None of this reporting has been legally challenged by Rodrigues in the months since publication. What she has done instead is emblematic of a pattern this outlet has documented more than once. The Integrity Commission was established by Act No. 20 of 1997 as an autonomous body, explicitly “not subject to the direction or control of any other person or authority.” President Ali, by his own account, personally reviewed the Revelle Investments matter and pronounced himself satisfied — accepting an explanation on the Commission’s behalf before it had so much as issued a subpoena.  This writer’s own published response to that intervention named it directly: Ali acting as Rodrigues’s “private investigator and clearance officer,” the Commission’s silence amounting to accepting its own termination “with a smile,” and the entire arrangement functioning, in this writer’s words, not as a barrier to corruption but as camouflage for it — a “ghost agency” retained chiefly to satisfy international donors with a veneer of legitimacy.

The same reflex surfaced again, days later, in an entirely different institutional setting. Following a government-vehicle crash involving the son of a sitting Home Affairs Minister — an incident that surfaced alongside unresolved public questions about a prior, fatal 2024 crash in which a woman, Salima Heeralal, lost her life — the Guyana Police Force offered no briefing, no preliminary findings, and no visible sign that routine procedure was underway. What filled that silence was not a police statement but a presidential assurance. Once again this writer’s published response to that episode asked the question directly: whether Ali’s early intervention, offered before investigators had spoken, did not so much calm the matter as signal to every level of authority what the acceptable conclusion should be — and whether presidential assurance had, in effect, replaced police investigation as the actual mechanism of accountability.

Three ministers, three entirely different institutions — a constitutional integrity body and a criminal police investigation — and in every instance– the same figure, the President, stepped in ahead of the institution’s own process to declare the matter settled.

That is not a defense mounted through the machinery the law built for the purpose, machinery explicitly designed to be independent of exactly this kind of interference. It is a verdict delivered from the Office of the President, replacing the ones those institutions were never allowed to reach.

The Benchmark: what MV Barima shows about how this administration actually works

By the time the MV Barima disaster occurred, the pattern above was not new — it was escalating. The same reflex that closed the Rodrigues and Waldron matters before their respective institutions could act is visible, at far higher stakes, in how this administration has handled the deaths of 73 people aboard that vessel.

The Commission of Inquiry into that disaster was not assembled through a visibly independent process. It was sworn in unilaterally by President Ali, behind closed doors, without press present, before commissioners’ potential conflicts of interest had been disclosed to the public. Two of those conflicts surfaced only through independent digging: commissioner Nyree Dawn Alfonso’s own law firm’s case record placed her alongside Keoma Griffith — now Ali’s Minister of Labour — as co-counsel in a prior Guyana Supreme Court matter, and Griffith’s professional bio was quietly scrubbed from that firm’s website in the days immediately before Alfonso’s swearing-in. A second appointee, Dr. Ivor English, brought to lead a “Safety and Compliance Audit Team,” turned out to still hold an active MARAD consultancy and a board seat at the Guyana National Shipping Corporation — auditing, in effect, an agency he remained institutionally embedded in. A third, the Commission’s own Secretary, was appointed from a family with a documented multi-decade proximity to the governing party.

None of these connections were volunteered by the Office of the President. All were established after the fact, by outside reporting.

Alongside the Commission sits the Attorney General, who moved within weeks of the disaster to warn grieving families against retaining independent lawyers, calling such representation potentially criminal — while the government’s own compensation channel, explicitly and repeatedly described by the state as “not compensation” and carrying no admission of liability, remained the only sanctioned route to relief. And alongside both sits a demonstrated operational capacity the state has not extended to its own citizens in crisis: when an opposition-led protest breached barricades at a vice-presidential outreach event, Coast Guard, police marine units and joint services mobilized within minutes; when the MV Barima’s captain radioed distress at roughly 10 p.m., the rescue vessel that reached the scene reportedly did not arrive until after 5 a.m. The state’s rapid-response machinery is real. It moves fastest to secure the government’s own comfort, not to save lives it has been slow to prioritize or challenges it would rather not answer.

Read together, this is not a portrait of an administration whose oversight institutions have simply atrophied. It is an administration that has learned to manage the appearance of institutional independence while retaining personal control over its outcome — swearing in inquiries whose composition it does not disclose, delivering verdicts on allegations before its own accountability bodies can rule, and closing off the avenues, legal or investigative, through which an outside party might reach a different conclusion. Once that pattern is visible at the scale of 73 deaths, it should not be read as coincidental at the scale of a minister’s mining acreage or a minister’s Florida LLC.

It is the same reflex, operating at lower volume, on a class of officials whose wealth has grown fastest since 2020, and who now sit inside a system this outlet has watched, case after case, decline to independently verify anything the Office of the President has already pronounced settled.

Why this is structural, not anecdotal

The Mustapha and Rodrigues cases, and the MV Barima Commission, sit inside a wider pattern this outlet has already documented independently:

♦ The REO/PS purge (May 2026): President Ali’s own stated justification for removing Regional Executive Officers and Permanent Secretaries nationwide was that officials and their family members had registered companies and captured public contracts — his government’s own admission that the mechanism exists at the administrative level, not just the ministerial one. Four months later, Vice President Jagdeo delivered nearly the same warning to the replacements, with no disclosed enforcement action in between.

♦ Long Creek: A 2011 State Lands lease names Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and “Mohamed Ali” as Lessee for land at Long Creek; independent satellite tracing puts the developed acreage near 155, against a lower figure implied by the President. Neither the lease nor the acreage gap has been resolved by any independent inquiry, despite a standing public demand for a Commission of Inquiry.

President Ali,155-acre farm at Long Creek

♦  The Development Bank Bill: passed without debate in July 2026, concentrating roughly $40 billion in discretionary allocation power in the Finance Minister’s office — a mechanism, not yet tested, for exactly the kind of capital access that could formalize and accelerate what is currently happening piecemeal through land and mining allocations.

None of these are proof of a coordinated scheme in the conspiratorial sense. They do not need to be. Taken together, they describe something more durable than a scandal:

An administration in which the president’s own pronouncements substitute for institutional verification, consistently, across ministries and across stakes as different as a mining allocation and a maritime disaster — and in which every nominally independent body positioned to check that pattern has, so far, either been appointed with undisclosed ties to it or been preempted by a presidential verdict before it could rule.

What this is not

This is not a claim that Guyana’s oil wealth is being stolen wholesale, and it should not be written as one. Mustapha and Rodrigues have both offered detailed, document-referenced rebuttals; some of what critics allege may be fully lawful. The claim is narrower, and it is not that any single official is guilty of anything a court has found.

It is that Guyana’s oil windfall has created, within six years, a visible domestic wealth tier — measured in mining acreage, US real estate, and corporate structures — with no precedent in the country’s economic history, sitting inside an administration that has repeatedly substituted the President’s own word for the independent verification its institutions exist to provide.

MV Barima shows what that substitution costs when the stakes are 73 lives and a submerged wreck nobody in authority seems in a hurry to raise. The same reflex, applied to a minister’s land holdings, a police investigation, or a minister’s LLC, costs less visibly, but it is drawn from the identical playbook: intervene early, declare the matter settled, and let the institution built to answer the question stand down before it has asked it.

 A closing note, not a verdict

None of what is documented above required this outlet to prove that any individual official broke the law. That was never the test applied here, and readers should notice that it wasn’t — because the pattern holds regardless of how any single case would resolve if it were ever actually tried.

What holds is this: three times, across three different institutions built for three different purposes — an integrity commission empowered by statute to be free of exactly this kind of interference, a police investigation into a fatal crash, a commission of inquiry into 73 deaths — the same office arrived first, spoke last, and closed the question before the institution assigned to it could open one

 

A country can survive individual corruption. Officials take what they shouldn’t, and if the institutions built to catch it are allowed to function, the wealth gets clawed back, the careers end, the system corrects

What a country cannot survive indefinitely is the quieter condition on display here:

A governing class whose fortunes grow fastest precisely where the mechanisms meant to check them have already been answered for, in advance, by the one office no mechanism was built to check. Whether that condition has a name — and what should be done about it — is left, deliberately, to the reader.

 

“There Is No Police Matter”: Singh Says He Won’t Return to Guyana

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“There Is No Police Matter”: Singh Says He Won’t Return to Guyana Unless Police Call Him. His Own Record Says Otherwise About Whether They Should

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Following our report on the fraud allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and its Director of Projects and Construction, Hardeep Singh Bharya — and the company’s denial, issued through Modular Build Guyana and carried by INews — Singh has now spoken at length, twice: first in a written statement; followed by a Facebook live; categorically denying wrongdoing, and then directly to Kaieteur News, which put the allegations to him in an on-record interview published September 8.

We have reviewed both. We stand by our original reporting. Since it was published, that reporting has been overtaken by three developments Singh did not anticipate and does not fully address: a confirmed prior fraud conviction in the United Kingdom, a bounced cheque to a Guyanese supplier accompanied by word that the company is being sold, and a stalled government housing contract in Barbados that mirrors, in outline, exactly what is now alleged in Guyana.

What Singh has now said, on the record, twice

Singh’s written statement denied the allegations in categorical terms: “I categorically deny allegations that I have defrauded clients of GYD $145 million, misappropriated client funds, deliberately taken money without intending to perform contracted works, or ‘fled’ Guyana to escape responsibility.” He argued that delay and dispute on a construction contract are not proof of fraudulent intent, that the $145 million figure improperly aggregates four separate contracts, and that Modular Builds holds documentation capable of demonstrating work was actually undertaken — available, he said, for independent professional assessment.

Speaking directly to Kaieteur News days later, Singh went further, and became considerably more combative. Asked whether he intends to return to Guyana to address the police investigation, he said he would not, absent direct contact from senior GPF officials: “There is no police matter because I have spoken to my contacts in the Guyana Police Force, which are probably higher than people who you know, and there is no evidence, there is no fact.” He said he had not been contacted by police at all:

“They haven’t contacted me once, the GPF, whoever is in charge has not contacted me once. I answer all my calls. You think I am hiding from you guys? I am not hiding from you guys.”

He confirmed he relocated from Guyana last September; a year before the allegations became public — and argued that a business owner need not be physically present for operations to continue. He said he would fly back “on the next flight” if a senior police official called him, but not before, and described the four clients’ allegations as fabricated.

He also confirmed, unprompted, that he has “established a similar business in Barbados and plans to open another in Jamaica” — the first time Singh himself, rather than inference from public records, has confirmed the cross-border scope of Modular Builds’ operations

What neither statement disputes

Across both statements, Singh has not disputed that four Guyanese clients paid a combined $145 million, and that none of the four contracted projects was completed to anything close to its agreed scope. He disputes only the characterisation of that outcome as intentional fraud rather than commercial failure.

That is a narrower position than his “categorically deny” framing suggests, and it has grown narrower still against a widening set of facts that ordinary commercial delay does not comfortably explain.

A conviction Singh did not volunteer

Kaieteur News has now confirmed, and this newsroom has independently verified, that Hardeep Singh — operating under the name Hardeep Bharya — was convicted at Harrow Crown Court on 8 June 2016 and served three years and four months in prison for fraud. He admitted two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by abuse of position, one count of possessing or controlling an article for use in fraud, and one count of dishonestly making a false representation to make a gain. According to UK outlet MyLondon, the scheme was carried out with the assistance of a bank insider — a former employee of the branch involved — and the group laundered proceeds and sent them overseas to be withdrawn. Kaieteur News also reports Bharya had previously been implicated in a separate fraudulent scheme involving a driver-training company, Fast Track HGV, prior to the Lloyds conviction.

Asked in his Kaieteur News interview about his previous conviction, Singh did not dispute it. He said he had served his sentence, and objected that repeatedly raising the matter in the media had defamed him and caused problems with other business ventures in the Caribbean.

We are not suggesting a prior conviction proves the current allegations. It does not. But it materially changes how his own defence reads. Singh’s central argument — that a project running late or over budget is ordinary commercial misfortune, not evidence of intent — is harder to accept at face value from a man previously convicted of using a position of trust to move client money through a banking system and out of the country, laundered, before facing any consequence.

The pattern he now describes as fabrication bears a structural resemblance to the pattern for which he has already been convicted once.

A bounced cheque, and a company reportedly for sale

Kaieteur News has also reported, and published an image of, a cheque issued by Modular Builds Guyana Inc. to a concrete supplier that subsequently bounced. When the supplier queried the outstanding payment, the company’s reported response was that it was being sold, and that the buyer would assume responsibility for its liabilities. Asked directly about the bounced cheque, Singh told Kaieteur News: “I am not sure who you are talking about, but I can look into it and, if there is an issue, then I can obviously sort it out.”

A company citing an impending sale as the reason a trade creditor will not be paid, while its director simultaneously promises new contractors will arrive on September 15 to resume stalled residential projects, is a combination worth stating plainly rather than interpreting for the reader: those two claims sit uneasily together.

A buyer assuming liabilities on a sale, and a director promising fresh personnel to complete outstanding client work, describe two different futures for the same company. Only one of them can be true, and Singh’s statements to Kaieteur News do not reconcile which.

The Barbados contract neither statement mentions

Neither of Singh’s statements addresses Modular Builds’ operations outside Guyana — an omission that reads differently now that he has confirmed those operations exist in his own words. In November 2025, Modular Builds Guyana; then barely two months old on Barbados’s corporate register — was awarded a contract by that country’s state housing agency, HOPE Inc., to build 86 steel-framed homes at Fustic Gardens, St Lucy. The award drew scrutiny at the time: Opposition Senator Ryan Walters publicly questioned how a company almost nobody in Barbados had heard of, including some state officials, had secured a large government contract within weeks of registration. HOPE’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Williamson, defended the award as the result of “a rigorous tendering process” and told Barbados Today the first phase — ten houses; would be complete by April 2026.

That deadline has now passed by five months. As of this newsroom’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own promotional website this month, the company’s published Barbados project photographs show no completed or handed-over home — only a single structure at steel-frame stage, with roof sheeting recently begun, and an aerial image of the wider site showing multiple foundation slabs laid but no further structures raised. This is the company’s own chosen evidence of its progress, on a platform it controls. For an operation whose commercial pitch across three countries rests on speed — a seven-day first home in Guyana, “14-day turnkey” builds advertised repeatedly in its own marketing — the absence of a single finished unit to show, five months past a publicly stated deadline, is not a detail.

It is the same story unfolding a second time, in a second country, under a company Singh has now confirmed is his.

Barbados’s state housing agency has, separately, an audited history of exactly this kind of failure with a different Guyanese contractor — a 2023 arrangement in which HOPE Inc. advanced $3.5 million to a hardwood-house supplier with no contract or bond in place, delivered only 60 of 350 contracted units, and saw its own board’s termination recommendation go seemingly unactioned by the responsible ministry. This newsroom has not established a corporate link between that supplier and Modular Builds Guyana Inc.

What is established is that the institutional conditions that allowed one Guyanese contractor to fail a Barbadian state housing programme with minimal consequence were still in place when Modular Builds arrived two years later.

Where this leaves Singh’s position

Singh has said, in his own words, that he takes “any legitimate police enquiry extremely seriously,” that he answers all his calls, and that he will fly to Guyana the moment police contact him. He has not explained why, if that is true, he has not proactively offered the documentation he says exists to the four affected clients, to this newsroom, or to Kaieteur News, rather than waiting to be summoned. He has not reconciled the reported sale of his company with his promise of new contractors arriving September 15. He has not addressed the state of his Barbados contract at all, despite confirming its existence himself.

And he has not explained why a pattern he characterizes as ordinary commercial difficulty in Guyana is, on the public record his own company has published, repeating itself in a second country under the same brand.

We renew the invitation extended in our previous coverage: a direct, specific response from Singh, from Modular Builds, or from HOPE Inc., addressing the true status of every outstanding project in every jurisdiction, and a firm account of what happened to the money paid against each.

Until that response comes, in evidence rather than in interview, Singh’s own standard — that a complaint is not proof of the allegations within it — cuts both ways. Neither is a denial.

This is a follow-up to The 592 Guardian’s original report on the allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and Hardeep Singh. Kaieteur News’s September 8, 2026 interview with Singh and its reporting on his prior UK conviction and the bounced supplier cheque; the Barbados Audit Office’s special audit of HOPE Inc.‘s building programmes; Barbados Today’s reporting on the Fustic Gardens contract award; UK court reporting via MyLondon on Singh/Bharya’s 2016 conviction; and this newspaper’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own published project materials. The 592 Guardian sought comment from Modular Builds, Singh, and HOPE Inc. on the matters raised in this piece prior to publication.Should we receive a response to our request , it would be published in its entirety.

 

 

 

“Highly Sustainable” Is Not a Licence for Fiscal Evasion

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“Highly Sustainable” Is Not a Licence for Fiscal Evasion

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– August 2026

T he Inter-American Development Bank has delivered the Government of Guyana a headline it will no doubt repeat with satisfaction: Guyana’s debt remains “highly sustainable.” But that phrase must not be allowed to become a political shield, a substitute for disclosure, or an excuse to avoid scrutiny of where the country’s oil wealth is going.

The IDB report does not describe a country in a debt crisis. It does, however, document a country in which public debt increased, the external share of that debt rose, capital expenditure lost relative weight, and improved fiscal performance depended substantially on withdrawals from petroleum profits. Those are not trivial matters. They are precisely the facts that require the closest public examination in an oil-rich state.

A debt ratio that remains manageable is not proof that fiscal policy is prudent. It merely means Guyana still possesses room to make mistakes. The question is whether the Government is using that room to build a productive, resilient, and equitable country—or to establish recurrent spending habits, subsidy arrangements, and discretionary distribution networks that will become politically difficult and fiscally costly to unwind.

The comforting headline

According to the IDB, Guyana’s debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 24.3 percent in 2024 to 28.6 percent in 2025. The Bank nevertheless concludes that overall debt remains “highly sustainable.”

No responsible commentator should distort that finding. A 28.6 percent debt ratio is not, by regional standards, an alarming figure. Guyana is not Barbados at the height of its debt distress; it is not Jamaica before its prolonged fiscal adjustment; it is not a state trapped beneath an unsustainable mountain of obligations.

But neither should the Government distort the opposite point. Guyana’s debt ratio rose by 4.3 percentage points in one year. That is not a meaningless movement. It is an increase taking place during an era of exceptional oil receipts, unprecedented access to petroleum revenues, and repeated government assurances that the country is enjoying an economic transformation unlike anything in its history.

The public is therefore entitled to ask a basic question: if the country is receiving vast and growing oil income, why is its debt burden rising at the same time?

The answer may be legitimate. Large-scale infrastructure can require borrowing before its economic returns are realized. Development needs are real. Roads, bridges, energy systems, drainage, hospitals, schools, ports, housing, and climate-resilient works cannot all wait. Borrowing itself is not mismanagement.

But debt must always be judged by purpose, terms, transparency, and results—not by whether an international institution has concluded that the Government can still afford it.

“Highly sustainable” is not a certificate of fiscal virtue. It is not an audit clearance. It is not a declaration that every dollar borrowed, withdrawn, transferred, subsidised, or spent has been properly prioritized

.A changing spending pattern

The most revealing aspect of the IDB’s analysis is not its reassuring conclusion. It is the changing composition of expenditure beneath that conclusion.

The report records that capital expenditure, while still substantial, fell as a proportion of total expenditure—from 53.8 percent in 2024 to 50.7 percent in 2025. It also fell as a share of GDP, from 11.5 percent to 10.2 percent. The IDB identifies this as the first decline in Guyana’s capital-expenditure ratios since oil production began.

This point must be handled honestly. The figures do not prove that capital spending collapsed. Nor do they establish that every dollar no longer reflected in the capital ratio was redirected into cash grants. Such claims would be simplistic and vulnerable to rebuttal.

The more important point is this: the Government’s expenditure mix changed.

At the very moment when capital expenditure lost relative weight, total expenditure continued to rise. The IDB attributes part of that increase to higher transfer payments, including transfers associated with the universal cash grants. It also reports that the improved fiscal result depended on a larger increase in revenues, notably non-tax revenues and oil-profit withdrawals.

This means Guyana’s fiscal position is no longer explained merely by the familiar formula of oil money being converted into roads, buildings, bridges, and other physical assets. Increasingly, the national accounts must be examined for what is occurring outside the headline capital programme: transfers, subsidies, utility support, sectoral assistance, state-enterprise financing, arrears, guarantees, concessions, and other recurrent or quasi-recurrent obligations.

That is where the public’s right to know becomes urgent.

The subsidy question cannot remain hidden

A subsidy is not a magic word. It is public money, foregone revenue, or a cost absorbed by the state on behalf of another person, company, class of consumers, or institution.

It may be justified. Low-income households may need relief from electricity costs. Farmers may need assistance during genuine shocks. Vulnerable communities may require targeted support. Strategic industries may warrant narrowly defined, performance-based assistance where a clear public benefit exists.

But none of that excuses secrecy.

Every subsidy should be capable of answering four straightforward questions: who received it; how much was received; under what published criteria was it granted; and what measurable public benefit resulted?

Where electricity support is concerned, the public must be able to see the complete picture. What is the total fiscal cost? How much of the support benefits ordinary households? How much is absorbed through the operations of the public utility? How much benefits commercial or industrial consumers? Are there special arrangements, concessionary rates, connection support, arrears treatment, or other relief measures for selected firms, sectors, or communities?

And, most importantly, are these governed by transparent national rules—or by discretion exercised behind closed doors?

It is not enough for the Government to announce “relief.” Relief for whom? At whose cost? Under what conditions? For how long? And why?Without that information, the public cannot distinguish legitimate social policy from a structure of selective state favour.

Oil withdrawals demand a higher standard

The IDB notes that the stronger revenue performance in 2025 was driven substantially by non-tax revenues, including withdrawals of oil profits. That fact deserves far more scrutiny than it will receive from the Government’s propagandists.

Petroleum revenue is not ordinary revenue in the same sense as income tax, value-added tax, customs duties, or business taxes. It is the monetisation of a finite national asset. Every withdrawal represents a decision to convert part of Guyana’s irreplaceable oil wealth into present-day expenditure.

That decision may be defensible. But it must be defended.

The Government cannot simply point to an improved fiscal outcome and expect applause because oil withdrawals made the books look stronger. The real question is what those withdrawals purchased for the country.

Did they create durable public assets? Did they build infrastructure that will lower production costs, improve competitiveness, reduce vulnerability to flooding and climate shocks, expand access to quality health and education, and deliver long-term returns?

Or did they fund growing recurrent commitments that will require ever larger annual injections—subsidies, transfers, utility shortfalls, politically convenient programmes, and expanding expectations that the state must continually distribute what should have been conserved, invested, or transparently allocated?

A country can squander immense wealth without ever technically defaulting on a loan. Fiscal sustainability is not the only test of responsible government. Intergenerational fairness is also a test. Transparency is a test. Value for money is a test. Equal treatment is a test.

External debt is not a footnote

The IDB further reports that external debt increased to 56.3 percent of Guyana’s total debt stock. This cannot be brushed aside merely because the overall debt ratio remains manageable.

External borrowing brings exposure to foreign creditors, repayment schedules, currencies, interest rates, procurement arrangements, project-delivery risks, and future budgetary obligations. It is not necessarily reckless. Indeed, concessional external financing can be sensible where it funds economically sound projects with clearly established returns.

But the burden is on the Government to show the public the full terms.

◊  Which creditors account for the increase in external debt?               

◊  What are the interest rates, grace periods, maturities, and currency risks?                                                                                                                   

◊Which projects received the financing?                                                     

◊What has actually been disbursed?                                                             

◊What has been completed? What remains stalled?                                   

◊ What is the projected return on each major investment?                   

◊  How much borrowed money is tied to projects, and how much is being absorbed by entities or programs with weak public reporting?

These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions a serious democracy asks of a government entrusted with extraordinary wealth and unprecedented borrowing power.

 Sustainability is not stewardship

The IDB’s report should be read as a warning against complacency, not as a permission slip for fiscal self-congratulation.

Guyana may be able to carry more debt than many Caribbean countries because petroleum income has transformed the country’s revenue outlook. But that very advantage creates a danger. A government with abundant revenues can conceal poor choices longer than a government living under strict fiscal constraint.

Oil wealth can mask inefficiency. It can postpone accountability. It can permit projects to be over-priced, subsidies to become permanent, state entities to evade discipline, and political preferences to be dressed up as development policy.

That is why the standard must be higher, not lower.

The central issue is not whether Guyana can continue borrowing. The IDB believes it can. The central issue is whether Guyana is building a transparent fiscal system in which every withdrawal from oil wealth, every expansion of debt, every subsidy, every transfer, and every state-supported benefit can withstand public scrutiny.

The Government must publish a complete and intelligible breakdown for 2024 through 2026 of transfers, subsidies, electricity-related support, assistance to state entities, beneficiary categories, regional allocations, sectoral programmes, and recurrent expenditures financed directly or indirectly from petroleum revenues.

It must show the people not merely that debt is sustainable, but that their wealth is being used sustainably.

Because a nation can survive a 28.6 percent debt ratio. What it cannot easily survive is a political culture in which “highly sustainable” becomes the official euphemism for: do not ask where the money went.

When Government Finally Chooses the People

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA 

When Government Finally Chooses the People

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Mayor Mamdani’s release of the long-cloaked 9/11 air-quality report is more than an act of disclosure. It is a long-overdue affirmation of what accountability, transparency, and integrity in public office should look like.

For 25 years, vital information concerning the air breathed by first responders, recovery workers, residents, students, and workers in Lower Manhattan remained beyond the full reach of the people most affected by it. Four previous city administrations came and went while families continued to live with illness, uncertainty, grief, and unanswered questions. The consequences were not abstract. Thousands of people who responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and many who simply lived or worked near Ground Zero, have endured serious health conditions whose full dimensions demanded honesty from every level of government.

By placing this report before the public, Mayor Mamdani has made an essential statement: government records that bear on people’s health, safety, and lives do not belong in a vault. They belong to the public.

The disclosure also delivers a serious indictment of the city, state, and federal institutions that, for too long, appeared more concerned with restoring commercial activity, calming markets, limiting liability, and projecting normalcy than with giving New Yorkers a complete account of the risks they faced. The rush to reopen Lower Manhattan may have served powerful economic interests, but public officials had an equal—if not greater—obligation to tell people the truth and allow them to make informed decisions for themselves and their families.

That obligation was not met.

People-centered governance begins with a simple principle: human life must take precedence over political convenience, institutional reputation, and private profit. It insists that officials do not hide behind bureaucracy when communities seek answers. It recognizes that transparency delayed can become justice denied—especially when the information withheld concerns contaminated air, unsafe water, public health, housing, policing, schools, or environmental hazards.

The dividends of this approach are profound.

First, transparency restores public trust. Citizens are more likely to believe in public institutions when those institutions acknowledge mistakes, release the evidence, and accept scrutiny rather than manage appearances.

Second, openness allows people to protect themselves. Families, workers, doctors, advocates, and researchers cannot respond properly to a public-health crisis if the government withholds the information needed to understand it. Truth is not merely a historical record; it is a tool for survival, treatment, prevention, and accountability.

Third, people-centered governance strengthens democracy. It shifts power away from closed-door decision-makers and toward the public whose lives are affected by policy. It gives communities the ability to question, organize, demand remedies, and insist that future decisions are made differently.

Finally, it establishes a better standard for public leadership. A mayor, governor, or president should not be judged only by ribbon-cuttings, economic statistics, or polished press conferences. They should be judged by whether they tell the truth when it is difficult, whether they defend people when powerful interests object, and whether they use public office to serve the public rather than protect the system.

Mayor Mamdani’s action should not be treated as a novelty. It should be the standard.

Across the United States, communities are still waiting for candor about environmental contamination, industrial pollution, unsafe infrastructure, public contracts, policing failures, health inequities, and the influence of corporations over public policy.

Too often, residents learn the truth only after irreversible harm has been done—or after years of litigation, advocacy, and personal loss.

The lesson of the 9/11 air-quality report is clear: governments must not wait decades to do what conscience and duty require immediately. They must disclose. They must explain. They must answer. And where harm has been done, they must repair it.

New York now has an opportunity to demonstrate that governance can be rooted in moral courage rather than managed secrecy. If Mayor Mamdani continues to lead with the belief that public office is a contract with the people—not an arrangement with the powerful—then his administration can offer more than a local model. It can help build a national expectation.

The people do not need another fashionable theory of government. They need leaders who regard truth as non-negotiable, public health as sacred, and accountability as a daily obligation.

That is the promise of people-centered governance. And that is the standard the nation should now demand.

—The Board

THE STATE THAT CANNOT SAY NO

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 THE STATE

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar —September 2026

Part IV — The Regulator Walks Away

On September 7, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission wrote to Toshao Nikita Miller to say it was stepping back. GGMC Commissioner Newell Dennison’s letter — copied to Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat ; offered no finding, no accounting, and no acknowledgment of who had done what to whom. “The initiative for a mediated solution between the parties appears to have been overtaken by developments and circumstances affecting both sides,” Dennison wrote. The Council, he added, “remain[s] at liberty to pursue whatever legal avenues” it deems appropriate.

Copy of GGMC Letter to Village Council -Chinese Landing

It is worth sitting with that sentence. “Circumstances affecting both sides” is the language of a coin toss, not a mediation. It assigns no responsibility to a process that, on GGMC’s own record, broke down for a specific and undisputed reason: the Council had told GGMC it would not sit down while Vieira’s machinery remained on Tassawini Landing. That machinery did not leave. It moved — first blocked at Tassawini, then barged to Kariako in an attempt to enter by another route, then stopped there too. The Council’s precondition was never met. GGMC did not say so. It said only that things had changed for everyone.

This newsroom has already documented what preceded the collapse: a Guyana Geology and Mines Commission officer stationed on-site at Tassawini on August 21 who was, in the Council’s account, either unable or unwilling to stop Vieira’s equipment from entering. Under Section 53 of the Amerindian Act, GGMC is require; before it issues or permits activity on Village lands — to satisfy itself the mining will not cause harm. An officer who stands and watches equipment cross into titled land without intervening is not neutral. He is the Commission failing its own statutory duty in real time, and then, three weeks later, walking away from the table before that failure could be examined by anyone with the standing to ask about it.

That is what “unconscionable” looks like in a regulatory letter: not an absence of language, but the presence of exactly enough language to close a file.

A STANDARD SET BEFORE THE TEST BEGAN

Before any of this — before the machinery, before the barges, before Dennison’s letter;  the South Rupununi District Council had already said what a fair process would require. Its statement, issued as the mediation was being organized, was not a verdict on what followed; it was a specification, offered in good faith, of what would need to be true for a mediated resolution to mean anything. Equal footing between the parties. Recognition of the Village Council as the community’s legitimate representative. Independent technical and legal advice, and adequate time to weigh it. A process addressing the underlying land, legal, and environmental questions — not merely the immediate confrontation.

And, at the center of it, free, prior and informed consent treated as the basis of any agreement, not as a signature collected after the fact to ratify a decision already made.

Neither SRDC nor the Amerindian Peoples Association has yet spoken to the collapse itself. That silence should not be read as agreement with how it ended. It is more likely the ordinary lag between an institutional statement and an institutional response — and this news-media will be watching for it. But the standard SRDC set down does not require their commentary to be applied. It can be measured against what is now a matter of public record.

Equal footing: a Village Council was asked to sit down with a mining operation still holding the machinery that had triggered the standoff in the first place — the precise imbalance the Council’s own precondition was designed to correct. Consent as a starting point, not a formality: the same operation had, weeks earlier, sought individual signatures from residents for a labour arrangement; nine residents and two non-residents, by the Council’s count outside the Village-Council-level process Section 48 of the Amerindian Act requires. A process addressing the underlying legal questions: the process ended before any of them were addressed, with the Council’s substantive land claim still sitting, unheard, before the Court of Appeal, more than three years after the 2021 High Court ruled against it on the merits.

By its own standard — set out before anyone knew how this would end — the process that just collapsed does not appear to have met the test.

WHAT “AT LIBERTY TO PURSUE LEGAL AVENUES” ACTUALLY MEANS

Dennison’s letter points the Council back toward the courts, as if that were a neutral off-ramp rather than the same road that has already failed it. The Council’s 2021 claim against GGMC and Vieira was dismissed on the merits — the High Court held that minerals vest in the state and that Vieira did not require the Council’s consent to access his permitted claims. That ruling has sat on appeal, without a hearing, since 2021. GGMC inviting the Council to pursue “legal avenues” is not an alternative to the mediation that just ended.

It is a redirection to a courtroom that has already ruled once and has not been heard from since — with no timeline for when, or whether, it will be again.

 A regulator does not get to offer the courts as its exit strategy while the same courts sit on the very appeal that would resolve the underlying dispute. If GGMC believes the judiciary is the proper venue, it might ask, on the Council’s behalf, why the Court of Appeal has taken three years to not hold a hearing. It has not asked. It has simply stepped back and pointed.

— The Board

Jagdeo runs to front, reads the riot act

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Jagdeo runs to front, reads the riot act

OPINIONS BY: GHK LALL September 2026

Great to see Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Vice President, taking control.  Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Regional Executive Officers, and assorted others summoned to a session with the new Minister for Virtue and against Vice
Dr. Jagdeo is the best man for that job.  He knows the territory, having long travelled it repeatedly in some fashion.  But when VP Jagdeo is compelled to leave his other priority duties to lecture ministers, PSs, REOs, and that odd lot, it inspires several strains of thought.  Try these published ones.

For starters, it reinforces that matters have really gone off the deep end in PPP management land.  Management land has metastasized into advanced corruption land, stage IV.  I use the vocabulary of cancer, with which I have much familiarity, to relay how unbelievably and undeniably bad corruption is in the PPP Govt.  For a former president, and Guyana’s Oil President, to separate from the nation’s riches, even for a moment, is all that Guyanese need to know about how far and self-destructive chronic corruption has become in the PPP Govt. 

Corruption inside the PPP.  Corruption around the PPP.  Corruption over and under and all over the PPP -government and party, most players and practitioners of the art of stewardship in times of gushing oil.

Then, for Excellency Jagdeo to go to the lengths he did with his high-powered and highflying (and high-skilled and high energy [think of those two]) audience conveys that there’s a huge, telling, and glaring deficit in the PPP Govt relative to corruption containment.  The other excellencies are not up to the job.  So, it falls on him to sound off (carefully), read the riot act (tactfully), and fill the void (cleverly).  Give a caution, but don’t give away too much.  Why expose the PPP unnecessarily?  Why serve up sacrificial lambs for the news hounds and others waiting to feast?  Those who should lead the way on corruption, and give the older, busier, Dr. Jagdeo a breather must be sluggish, self-centered, and have the strangest ideas about honesty, integrity, ethics, and the ethos of democratic and clean politics.

Dr. Jagdeo’s own words offer the best testimony of what he sees is in dire need of correction.  He was on the move and in the face of ministers, PSs and REOs about their “ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations while ensuring sound and efficient management of the public resources allocated and entrusted to their respective ministries, regions, and agencies.”  Ye gods!  When Jagdeo has to take off the gloves and throwdown a hissing cobra into the midst of his audience, it is time for a Guyanese expression on corruption.  Boat dun gaan ah falz.  Boat and passengers gone overboard.  They are expendable.  Jagdeo’s PPP is not.

I scratch my head.  When was the last time that Dr. Jagdeo, in any of his PPP leadership capacities, saw it fit to insist on “ensuring compliance with applicable law and regulations?”  It means that it is not happening at all.  Things gone downhill and taking the PPP into a dunghill.  Messy business, that is.  Or it is not happening anywhere close to the required minimum, if only to give the PPP Govt and Excellency Bharrat some wriggle room, a needed boost where in counts.  In the court of critical and now contemptuous public opinion.

Next, what Guyana’s 2nd Vice President did at the Arthur Chung Convention Center is not really his call.  In effect, to call a public PPP dressing down.  The 1st Vice President, General Mark Phillips, has the first claim on such a move and engagement, and only after the president has given his nod of approval.  What all of this emphasizes to me is that Bharrat Jagdeo grew tired of all the dropped balls, all the flagrant fouls, and all the unpardonable slippages, so he took the bit in his teeth, and commanded his audience to turn up.  Or else….  Now that’s the Jagdeo I like, propaganda value, maneuver, and whatever aside.

Wrapping up with a red ribbon.  Vice President Jagdeo had no choice but to deal in transparency and accountability.  Since, there is no other.  Ow bhaiya!  That’s showing who is still the real boss.  Blessed day.

Oil, Power and the Price of Silence

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Oil, Power and the Price of Silence

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— September 2026

Washington’s apparent Venezuelan oil gambit is a warning to Guyana: in the new Western Hemisphere energy contest, great powers will defend interests before principles. Guyana must welcome support but never confuse it with a guarantee. Its border, oil wealth and sovereign future cannot be left to the discretion of foreign governments whose alliances may change with the price of crude.

For too long, too many Guyanese have been encouraged to take comfort in the warmth of foreign statements, military exercises, diplomatic visits and the strategic interest now attached to our oil industry. Support matters. Partnerships matter. The international recognition of Guyana’s sovereignty matters. But none of these things removes the hard lesson of history: powerful countries do not conduct foreign policy as charities. They pursue advantage.

Today, Guyana is useful to Washington as an emerging oil producer, a democratic partner, a counterweight to Venezuelan instability and a strategically located state in a hemisphere being contested by the United States, China, Russia and other interests. That usefulness may strengthen Guyana’s hand. But usefulness is not the same thing as inviolability.

The reported U.S.-backed oil arrangement in Venezuela should therefore not be read in Georgetown as a simple victory for regional stability. It may indeed reduce the immediate danger of confrontation by giving Washington a commercial and strategic stake in a more stable Venezuela. A Venezuela tied to U.S. capital, U.S. markets and U.S. security calculations may have more to lose from provoking a crisis with Guyana.

But the same arrangement carries another possibility—one Guyana cannot afford to ignore.

If the United States becomes deeply invested in rehabilitating Venezuelan oil production, restoring Venezuelan export capacity and securing reliable access to Venezuelan crude, then Washington will acquire a powerful reason to keep Caracas cooperative. And when great powers seek cooperation, smaller states are often told to be “flexible,” “pragmatic,” “constructive,” or “mindful of regional peace.”

Those words can sound harmless. In the hands of diplomats, they can become instruments of pressure.

Guyana must never accept a situation in which its legitimate exercise of sovereignty is treated as an obstacle to someone else’s oil bargain. The Essequibo is not a regional irritant to be managed behind closed doors. It is Guyanese territory, administered by Guyana, inhabited by Guyanese, and protected by the law, history and the 1899 Arbitral Award.

There can be no energy bargain in Caracas or Washington that changes that fact.

This is why Guyana must remain alert to the danger of what may be called oil-for-silence diplomacy. Venezuela, facing economic distress and international isolation, has every incentive to use its oil reserves as leverage for political rehabilitation. It may seek investment, sanctions relief, diplomatic acceptance and access to markets. It may also seek to soften international resistance to its aggressive posture on Essequibo.

Guyana must ensure that those two matters are never allowed to merge.

Venezuela may receive investment. Its people may benefit from economic recovery. Its oil industry may be rebuilt. None of that is objectionable in itself. The Venezuelan people should not be condemned to permanent hardship, nor should Guyana desire instability across its western border.

But Venezuela cannot be permitted to monetise its oil while maintaining a claim to two-thirds of Guyana’s territory. It cannot seek the benefits of international partnership while threatening Guyana’s territorial integrity. It cannot demand respect for its sovereignty while refusing to respect ours.

That is the line Georgetown must draw—with clarity, consistency and courage.

The danger for Guyana is not only military. It is diplomatic and commercial. A revived Venezuelan oil sector could give Caracas new revenues, new confidence and new international influence. It could strengthen its ability to fund military activity, maintain naval operations, finance propaganda and sustain the fiction that Essequibo is somehow available for political negotiation.

That fiction must be destroyed every time it appears.

Guyana’s leaders must therefore resist the temptation to outsource national security to any foreign capital. The United States may be a valuable ally. So may Brazil, CARICOM, the Commonwealth, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and other democratic partners. But an ally is not an owner of Guyana’s destiny.

Nor can any government in Georgetown allow the country’s territorial integrity to become dependent on the mood, election cycle, oil price or commercial appetite of a foreign administration.

A country that has discovered vast petroleum wealth must understand that it has entered a harder world. Oil brings revenue, but it also attracts appetite. It draws corporations, governments, financiers, military planners and geopolitical competitors. It turns national waters into strategic territory and makes weak institutions a national-security threat.

Guyana’s response cannot be complacency disguised as diplomacy.

The country must strengthen its maritime surveillance, coast-guard capacity, defence readiness and protection of offshore installations. It must deepen relationships across the region and beyond, rather than placing its security future in the hands of one benefactor. It must remain firm before the International Court of Justice and reject every suggestion that the Essequibo controversy should be settled through political compromise.

Most importantly, Guyana must govern its own oil sector with greater transparency, competence and national purpose. A country cannot speak boldly about sovereignty abroad while surrendering too much authority over its national patrimony at home. The defence of Essequibo and the defence of Guyana’s oil wealth are not separate struggles. Both concern whether Guyanese will retain meaningful control over the land, waters and resources that define their future.

That is the real warning contained in Washington’s Venezuelan oil gambit.

The great powers will make their arrangements. Energy companies will pursue their profits. Venezuela will pursue its recovery and its interests. The question is whether Guyana will pursue its own with equal seriousness.

We must welcome friendship, but reject dependency. We must accept support, but refuse subordination. We must seek peace, but never at the price of silence.

No Venezuelan concession, no U.S. equity stake and no barrel of crude must ever become the currency for compromise over Essequibo.

 

 

When the Lights Go Out, So Does the Spin

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

When the Lights Go Out, So Does the Spin

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September 2026

For two long weeks, Guyanese households, businesses, schoolchildren, vendors, offices and communities have been forced to live with a familiar national affliction: uncertainty over whether electricity will be available when it is needed most

In the middle of blistering El Niño conditions, power failures have become more than an inconvenience. They have become a daily assault on ordinary life. Food spoils. Appliances are damaged. Small businesses lose sales. Families cannot sleep. Children cannot study. Water systems fail where pumps depend on electricity. Workers who depend on the internet, refrigeration, machinery or basic lighting find their income and productivity placed at the mercy of a network that repeatedly collapses.

And what has been GPL’s answer? Substation faults. Feeder trips. Emergency works. Analytics. Conservation.

The people are being asked to absorb technical explanations while sitting in darkness. They are being urged to reduce consumption during peak periods while many are simply trying to operate a fan, preserve food in a refrigerator, pump water into a tank, keep a small business open, or find relief from oppressive heat.

No reasonable person disputes the value of conservation. Efficient use of electricity is good policy in any country. But GPL’s message becomes offensive when it appears to shift responsibility toward customers at a time when the utility itself has failed to provide the basic service for which citizens pay.

This is where the public-relations machinery at GPL may finally meet its limit. The spin doctors can continue to issue polished statements about a “smarter grid,” “resilience,” “network analytics” and “long-term transformation.” But rhetoric cannot cool a house without power. It cannot restore a freezer full of spoiled food. It cannot reimburse a shopkeeper for a lost day’s trade. It cannot undo damage to a family’s appliances after repeated surges and outages.

At some point, every explanation begins to sound like an excuse.

The question now facing GPL is simple: what conceivable explanation remains when blackouts persist, generation remains inadequate, the transmission and distribution system remains fragile, and every new problem seems to be met with another announcement rather than a lasting solution?

The public is entitled to ask whether these recurring failures are isolated incidents or evidence of a system that is dangerously unprepared for the demands Guyana is placing upon it.

A “World-Class” Country Cannot Run on Excuses

The Government’s development narrative is ambitious. Guyana, we are told, is becoming a world-class destination for investment. It will diversify beyond oil. It will build industries. It will process raw materials. It will create jobs. It will become a regional center for commerce, services and manufacturing.

These are attractive promises .They are also impossible to fulfil without dependable,affordable and sufficient electricity

Manufacturing does not run on speeches. Factories cannot operate on press releases. Investors do not make multimillion-dollar decisions based on slogans about transformation while production lines, cold-storage facilities, data systems and machinery face the constant threat of outages.

A serious manufacturing economy requires electricity that is stable It requires confidence that a business can sign contracts, employ workers, meet export deadlines and keep machinery operational without being crippled by recurring blackouts.

Guyana is nowhere near that standard today.

It is one thing to aspire to become a manufacturing powerhouse. It is another to possess the energy foundation required to make that aspiration credible. While communities are losing power for hours and sometimes entire days, the country remains light-years away from presenting itself as an industrially reliable jurisdiction.

The energy reality is contradicting the development rhetoric.

The US $800 Million Question

Against this backdrop, GPL has announced an approximately US-$800 -million program to modernize the transmission and distribution network.

The company speaks of new 230-kilovolt transmission lines, new substations, additional 69-kilovolt infrastructure, approximately 350 kilometres of medium-voltage distribution network, feeder upgrades and a smart grid by 2030

There is nothing inherently wrong with these objectives. Guyana urgently needs investments in transmission and distribution. The country’s expanding population, construction boom, new commercial activity, oil-sector development and prospective industrial expansion will place greater strain on an already overstretched grid.

But the issue is not whether improvements are needed. The issue is whether the public has been given sufficient reason to trust that another massive infrastructure program will be prudently designed, competitively procured, properly supervised and delivered on time

US $800 million is not a routine expenditure. It is an enormous national commitment, particularly when compared with the costs repeatedly associated with the Wales gas-to-energy project. It raises an unavoidable question: are Guyanese being asked to accept yet another vast bill because the country failed to plan, maintain and expand its power system before it reached crisis point?

Even more troubling is the apparent request by the gas-to-energy contractors for an additional US $200million to complete the project. If that figure is accurate, the public must be told exactly why the additional money is needed, what work remains outstanding, who bears contractual responsibility for the increased cost, and what revised completion date is being proposed.

There must be no blank cheque.

It is not enough for officials to acknowledge a higher cost while declining to identify how long it will take to spend the additional money—or when Guyanese can finally expect the project’s promised benefits. Cost escalation without a revised, verifiable schedule is not a plan. It is an invitation to uncertainty.

The Failure of Accountability

The people of Guyana are tired of being told to wait.

They have waited for dependable generation. They have waited for upgrades to aged feeders and substations. They have waited for the gas-to-energy project. They have waited for lower electricity costs. They have waited for a modern grid. They have waited while millions and billions are announced, allocated, borrowed and spent.

Meanwhile, they continue to buy generators, inverters, batteries, fuel, surge protectors and replacement appliances out of their own pockets. These are hidden electricity costs imposed on citizens because the national utility has not delivered reliable service.

Every blackout transfers part of GPL’s failure onto the public.

It transfers costs to households that must replace food and damaged electronics. It transfers costs to business owners who lose inventory and revenue. It transfers costs to workers whose productivity depends on reliable connectivity. It transfers costs to patients, the elderly and families caring for vulnerable relatives in unbearable heat.

The Government and GPL cannot credibly claim that Guyana is advancing toward a high-income, industrial future while treating these hardships as routine inconveniences.

A modern country does not simply announce projects. It publishes the evidence that the projects will work.

What GPL Must Disclose

GPL must move beyond carefully managed press conferences and provide the public with a full, accessible account of its plans, finances and obligations.

At a minimum, the company and the Government should publish:

♦ A complete breakdown of the proposed US $800million grid-modernization program, including each project, its location, purpose, estimated cost, funding source and anticipated completion date.

♦ The engineering studies, demand forecasts and reliability assessments used to justify the program.

♦ The procurement method for each major component, including tender documents, bid evaluations, contract awards and beneficial ownership disclosures for major contractors.

♦ Annual reliability targets, including outage frequency, outage duration, feeder performance, restoration times and the number of customers affected.

♦ A public report on every major outage, identifying the cause, affected areas, duration, corrective work, prevention measures and responsibility where negligence is found.

♦ A full accounting of spending already made on generation, substations, transmission and distribution improvements.

♦ The contractual status of the Wales gas-to-energy project, including the reported request for an additional (US\$200) million, the explanation for any cost increase, outstanding work and a revised delivery date.

♦ A clear explanation of who will pay for escalating costs: taxpayers, GPL customers, the Natural Resource Fund, future borrowers or some combination of all four.

Without that disclosure, the public is entitled to view grand new figures with skepticism.

No More Darkness, No More Diversions

The current crisis should be the proverbial straw that breaks the back of GPL’s culture of excuses.

The utility cannot keep cycling through the same formula: a blackout, an explanation, an apology, an announcement, a promise of future works, and then another blackout. Guyanese deserve a utility that anticipates faults, maintains infrastructure, communicates honestly, restores service rapidly and accepts accountability when it fails.

There are only so many times a nation can be told that the future will be brighter while the present remains dark.

If Guyana truly intends to become a manufacturing powerhouse, it must first become a country in which electricity is not a gamble. It must build generation capacity before demand overwhelms supply, reinforce the network before feeders fail, hold contractors accountable before costs balloon and publish the facts before asking citizens to trust another billion-dollar promise.

The country’s ambitions cannot be powered by spin. They must be powered by electricity.

—The Board

 

Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

OPINION BY: – Staff Writer – September 2026

Following our report on the fraud allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and its Director of Projects and Construction, Hardeep Singh — and the company’s earlier denial, issued through Modular Build Guyana and carried by INews — Singh has now issued a personal statement responding directly to the allegations. We have reviewed that statement in full. We stand by our original reporting. And in the course of examining Singh’s response, we have uncovered a second, independent body of evidence he did not address, and which we do not believe he anticipated would surface: a parallel, contracted, government-backed housing project in Barbados that is, as of this writing, five months past its own stated deadline; with no completed home to show for it.

What Singh actually said

In a formal statement issued on social media, Singh rejected the allegations reported in our original piece in categorical terms:

“I categorically deny allegations that I have defrauded clients of GYD $145 million, misappropriated client funds, deliberately taken money without intending to perform contracted works, or ‘fled’ Guyana to escape responsibility.”

He specifically rejected the characterization of his absence from Guyana as evidence of flight: “I am a British national involved in international business activities and travel internationally. My presence outside Guyana should not be misrepresented as evidence of guilt or an attempt to evade legitimate obligations.” He said he would cooperate with any formal police inquiry, stating he takes “any legitimate police enquiry extremely seriously,” and objected to the allegations being treated as established fact merely because complaints had been filed:

“What I will not accept is the existence of a complaint being portrayed publicly as proof that the allegations contained within that complaint are true.”,

On the substance of the four Guyanese clients’ claims, Singh did not dispute that the projects were delayed or incomplete. He disputed only the characterization of that outcome as fraud: “I will not claim that every Modular Builds project has proceeded without difficulty. There have been delays, commercial pressures and disputes… But accepting that projects have experienced difficulties is fundamentally different from accepting an allegation that I entered those contracts intending to steal clients’ money. I reject that allegation.” He said the $145 million figure improperly aggregates four separate contracts into a single sum, and that Modular Builds holds documentation — expenditure records, procurement records, construction activity — capable of demonstrating work was actually undertaken on each project, which he says is available for independent professional assessment. He gave an undertaking that works would be resume in it’s  entirety from Sept 15. We await confirmation of the resumption and will publish same . 

What the statement does not say

Read closely, Singh’s statement is narrower than its categorical language suggests. He denies intent to defraud. He does not dispute the underlying facts our original reporting relied on: that four clients paid a combined $145 million, and that none of the four projects was completed to anything close to its contracted scope. A statement that concedes delay and dispute while denying only the characterization of that delay as deliberate is not a rebuttal of what was reported — it is an argument about how to interpret it.

Nor does Singh say where he currently is, when he last had direct contact with the four affected clients, or why — if the documentation he describes exists and demonstrates good-faith performance — it has not yet been produced to the clients themselves, to Kaieteur News, or to this newsroom. “Documentation capable of demonstrating expenditure” is a claim that evidence exists. It is not evidence.

Most notably, Singh’s statement addresses only the Guyana allegations. It says nothing about Modular Builds’ operations outside Guyana. We do not believe that omission was strategic. We believe it is because, until now, the Barbados side of Modular Builds’ record has not been examined publicly. It is being examined now.

The Barbados contract Singh’s statement does not mention

In November 2025, Modular Builds Guyana; at the time barely two months old on Barbados’s corporate register; was awarded a contract by that country’s state housing agency, HOPE Inc., to build 86 steel-framed homes at Fustic Gardens, St Lucy. The award drew immediate scrutiny: Opposition Senator Ryan Walters publicly questioned how a company almost nobody in Barbados had heard of, including some state officials, had secured a large government housing contract within weeks of its registration. HOPE’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Williamson, defended the process as “a rigorous tendering process” fully compliant with Chief Procurement Office regulations, and told Barbados Today the first phase — ten houses — would be complete by April 2026.

That deadline has now passed by five months. As of this newsroom’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own promotional website this month, the company’s published Barbados project photographs show no completed or handed-over home. What they show is a single structure at steel-frame stage — roof sheeting only recently begun — and an aerial image of the wider Fustic Gardens site showing multiple foundation slabs laid but no additional structures raised beyond that single frame. This is the company’s own chosen evidence of its progress, published on a platform it controls and updates at will.

For an operation whose entire public pitch rests on speed — homes built in seven days in Guyana, “14-day turnkey” builds advertised repeatedly across its own marketing — the absence of a single finished unit to showcase, months past a public deadline its own CEO’s counterpart announced, is not a detail. It is the story.

A pattern Barbados’s own auditors have already documented — with a different company

Modular Builds’ difficulties in Barbados do not exist in isolation from that country’s institutional history. A 2025 Barbados Audit Office special report into HOPE Inc.‘s building programmes documents an earlier, separate arrangement with an unnamed Guyanese supplier of prefabricated hardwood houses, contracted under a different HOPE programme in May 2023. The findings are stark: a $3.5 million advance paid to the Guyanese company with no contract, performance bond, or advance-payment bond in place at the time of payment; HOPE’s own due diligence flagging that the company had no prior contracts exceeding US$100,000 and liabilities exceeding its assets — a company HOPE’s own investigators considered a credit risk before a dollar changed hands; a performance bond that lapsed after the company failed to secure a replacement from any Barbadian financial institution; and, of 350 contracted housing units, only 60 ever delivered, several incomplete. HOPE’s own board voted to terminate the arrangement in November 2023. The audit found no evidence the responsible ministry ever acted on that recommendation.

We want to be precise about what we are, and are not, asserting. We have not established that the unnamed Guyanese hardwood-house supplier in the 2023 audit and Modular Builds Guyana Inc. are the same company. The two arrangements involve different HOPE programmes, different construction methods, and were struck roughly two years apart. What the audit establishes independently of that question is this: Barbados’s state housing agency has an official, audited record of advancing significant public money to Guyanese contractors without the bonding or verified capacity to justify it — and the Fustic Gardens contract, on the evidence of Modular Builds’ own published record, now appears to be following a strikingly similar trajectory, whoever ultimately built each.

Why this matters to the Guyana allegations

Singh’s defense, distilled, is that delay and dispute are not proof of fraud, and that a company can fall behind on a contract without intending to defraud anyone. That is true as a general proposition. It is harder to sustain when the same company, operating under the same brand, marketing the same speed-built promise, is simultaneously running months behind on a second, entirely separate, government-backed contract in a second country — with nothing publicly shown for it. One late project might be commercial misfortune. A company with two major contracts in two countries, both stalled, both past their stated deadlines, invites a different question than the one Singh’s statement answers: not whether any single failure proves intent, but whether Modular Builds currently has the operational capacity to deliver on its contracts anywhere at all.

Singh has said he welcomes scrutiny and stands ready to cooperate with any formal inquiry. We take him at his word, and we extend the same invitation his statement extends to others: we welcome a direct, specific response — from Singh, from Modular Builds, or from HOPE Inc. — addressing the current status of the Fustic Gardens contract, the reason for its delay, and a firm date by which the outstanding homes, in Guyana and in Barbados, will actually be completed.

Until that response comes, the documentation he says exists remains, as he himself put it of the allegations against him, a claim rather than a proof.

—The Board