Archive for category: Opinions

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL

Sovereignty at the Edges — Part I. : The Register Gap

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The Ledger Guyana Refuses to Keep: Why the Absence of a Public Extractives Register Is Itself the Story

There is a question the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority have never had to answer, because no institution in this country has been built with the authority to ask it: who currently holds what, and how did they come to hold it?                                                                                        Not what was signed in 2016. Not what was signed with GMIN, or with U92 Energy Corp., or with whichever shell reorganises itself out of Singapore next quarter. What is true today, on the record, checked against a register that a citizen, a parliamentarian, or a journalist can open without a Freedom of Information request that dies quietly in a ministry drawer.

Guyana has no such register. Not for petroleum. Not for mining. Not for the pipeline of Gas-to-Energy reimbursement arrangements that Trinidadian energy strategist Anthony Paul has now, in a third consecutive Kaieteur News column, all but begged this country to build before it is too late. This editorial board has spent extensive energy documenting the individual wounds — the Section 18 gap in the Mining Act that let G2 Goldfields slide GMIN’s ownership sideways without triggering statutory review; the reverse-takeover architecture that delivered U92’s Kurupung uranium project through a Singapore holding chain nobody at GGMC was resourced to interrogate; the sole-source procurement that displaced Method4 Engineering in favour of InterEnergy while Anand Goolsarran’s statutory objections sat unanswered. Each of these was treated, in turn, as a scandal of the week. None of them is. They are symptoms of one untreated condition: Guyana has never built the institutional plumbing to track what happens to extractive rights after the contract is signed.

Public Contracts Were Never the Whole Promise

Government has taken credit, repeatedly and not entirely without justification, for publishing petroleum agreements that Trinidad and Tobago kept behind closed doors for a century. That step was real. It was also, as Paul’s series has now made explicit in language this Board has been circling for two years, the easy half of transparency.

A contract is a photograph. It tells you what existed at the moment of signing. It tells you nothing about what happens next — the farm-ins, the farm-outs, the changes of control, the beneficial ownership that mutates behind a parent company merger in a jurisdiction with no disclosure obligations to Guyana at all.

Petroleum rights, mining licences, and uranium concessions are not static instruments. They move. They are assigned, relinquished, pledged, and quietly restructured through corporate layers designed for exactly that purpose. When GMIN’s change of control moved through indirect transfer rather than a direct, reviewable transaction, it did not break the letter of the Mining Act — it exploited a gap in it that Section 18 has left untouched since long before this administration or the last one. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the kind of gap that persists because no one with the power to close it has ever been made to answer publicly for its cost.

What a Register Would Have Forced Into the Light

Consider what a statutory, searchable extractives register — covering petroleum and mining and the licences GGMC and the Ministry currently treat as administrative ephemera — would have required this country’s regulators to answer, in real time, rather than in a Kaieteur News column three years after the fact:

• Who is the current beneficial owner of GMIN, and through what chain of holding companies did that ownership travel before and after the G2 Goldfields transaction — and did GGMC ever formally assess whether that chain constituted a change of control under Section 18?
• What premium, if any, changed hands in the U92 Energy Corp. reverse takeover of the Kurupung uranium concession, and does the Guyana Revenue Authority have any record of assessing tax liability on that transfer of value?
• On what statutory basis did InterEnergy displace Method4 Engineering in a sole-source procurement that Anand Goolsarran formally objected to, and why does no public record exist showing that objection was ever substantively answered?
• What are the complete terms of the Gas-to-Energy pipeline, cost-recovery, and reimbursement arrangements — including the financing role of Banco San Juan Internacional — and why are these not published with the same posture of openness Government claims for the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement?

These are not abstract questions. Each has already surfaced, piecemeal, through the investigative labour of this outlet and others, because no institution was doing the work of surfacing them systematically. A register does not replace journalism. It replaces leaks, rumour, and scattered company announcements — Paul’s own words — as the primary mechanism by which citizens learn what has happened to resources that belong to them.

The GGMC Audit Backlog Is Not a Coincidence

It should trouble every reader of this news outlet that the Auditor General’s qualified opinion on GGMC’s accounts covers only 2013 to 2016 — a full decade behind the present moment — at precisely the time GGMC is being asked to police the ownership structures of gold, uranium, and rare earth concessions moving through Singapore holding companies and Mauritius jurisdiction fragments. An agency that cannot close its own books within a decade has no plausible capacity to police beneficial ownership in real time. The absence of a public register is not merely a transparency failure. It is the visible edge of a regulatory body operating years behind the transactions it exists to supervise.

This is precisely the trajectory Paul has warned Guyana against by pointing to Trinidad and Tobago’s history: a country with functioning law on the books — a petroleum register and Gazette notice requirement that existed in statute — where practice quietly diverged from law until citizens could no longer track the country’s own petroleum rights.       Guyana is not importing Trinidad’s outcome by accident. It is importing it by omission, one unregistered transfer and one unaudited institution at a time.

What This Board Demands

The 592 Guardian calls on the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority to state, on the public record and within thirty days of this editorial’s publication, whether any of the following exist in any form accessible to the public:

⇒a consolidated register of extractive licences and their beneficial owners;

⇒a documented review of the GMIN change of control under Section 18 of the Mining Act; a published tax assessment, if any was conducted, of the U92 Energy Corp. transaction;

⇒and a substantive, written response to Anand Goolsarran’s objections in the GPL-InterEnergy procurement. Silence in response to this editorial will be treated, and reported, as an answer.

Guyana still has the option Trinidad and Tobago no longer has: the chance to build this architecture before the volume of transactions makes retrofitting it politically and administratively impossible. A public, statutory extractives register — covering petroleum, mining, and the gas infrastructure now rising at Wales — would not embarrass this Government.

It would be the single strongest evidence that Government has nothing left to hide. The refusal to build one is, in itself, the clearest evidence that it does.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

 THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY   •   TRANSPARENCY   • GUYANA

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THE TWO-EVILS TRAP

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Why  Mohamed’s Sins Do Not Measure Irfaan Ali’s Acres

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board  |  July ,2026

Nazim Baksh’s defence of President Irfaan Ali’s Long Creek farm, published in the Guyana Chronicle a week after the story broke, performs a familiar trick. It never contests the central factual claim at issue — that satellite polygon measurement places the cleared acreage at roughly 155 acres, well above the sub-75-acre figure the president’s own account implies. Instead, across some seven hundred words, Baksh redirects the reader toward an entirely different scandal: the United States indictment of Azruddin and Nazar Mohamed on gold-smuggling and sanctions-evasion charges.àThe move is not analysis. It is substitution — trading a live question about the president’s land for a live prosecution of his loudest accuser, as though one settles the other.

COMPARATIVE GUILT IS NOT EXCULPATION

The logic animating Baksh’s piece runs roughly as follows: Azruddin Mohamed has been indicted in the United States for gold smuggling; therefore his accusations against President Ali carry no weight; therefore the president’s farm requires no further scrutiny. Each step in that chain is doing work the evidence does not support. A federal indictment against one citizen speaks to that citizen’s conduct. It does not, by any rule of logic or law, verify or falsify a second citizen’s land holdings. Guyanese readers are entitled to hold both propositions simultaneously — that the Mohamed family faces serious federal charges in the United States, and that the president has not yet released the documentation that would resolve a straightforward acreage dispute. Baksh asks readers to trade one question for the other. The 592 Guardian declines the trade.

A federal indictment against one citizen speaks to that citizen’s conduct. It does not verify or falsify a second citizen’s land holdings.

THE QUESTIONS BAKSH LEAVES UNTOUCHED

What the piece does not do is instructive. It does not address the Google Earth polygon measurement establishing approximately 155 acres of cleared land at Long Creek, set against the sub-75-acre figure implied by the president’s own framing of the property. It does not engage with ENODO Global’s forensic sentiment analysis of the public reaction — a Stability Index of 42.5, a Negative Friction reading of 58 percent, and a fifty-point gap between official narrative and public perception. It does not mention Transparency International Guyana’s formal intervention calling for independent verification of the property’s size and provenance. Nor does it engage Christopher Ram’s public demand for a Commission of Inquiry. A rebuttal that omits every specific, checkable claim in the controversy it purports to rebut has not rebutted anything. It has changed the subject.

THE SIMPLEST ANSWER WAS ALWAYS AVAILABLE

Nothing in this dispute required seven hundred words of character argument, an appeal to the president’s 2025 book on food security, or a nine-year-old armed robbery in Curaçao. It required documents. Title records, survey filings, and clearance permits for Long Creek would settle the acreage question in an afternoon — not through the testimony of sympathetic columnists, but through instruments that either exist or do not, and either match the president’s account or do not. That the government has instead produced editorial defences of the president’s agricultural philosophy, rather than the underlying paperwork, is itself informative. Guyana’s citizens are not asking whether President Ali admires farming. They are asking to see the deed.

A NOTE ON “PUBLIC FUNDS”

Some readers have suggested that columns of this kind are underwritten by public money. The 592 Guardian has not independently verified Nazim Baksh’s funding arrangements, his commissioning relationship with the Guyana Chronicle, or any state involvement in that outlet’s editorial budget, and we decline to assert what we have not confirmed. That question deserves its own investigation, on its own evidence, rather than absorption into the farm controversy as an unproven aside. We raise it here only to flag it as a distinct and open line of inquiry — not to fold it into a claim we cannot yet support.

TWO SEPARATE LEDGERS

Curaçao in 2012 and Soesdyke in 2026 are two different accountability ledgers, involving two different sets of facts, two different sets of accusers and accused, and two different bodies of evidence. Guyanese readers do not owe either man a discount on the other’s account. The Mohamed indictment, if proven, is a matter for U.S. federal courts. The Long Creek acreage, whenever the documents finally surface, will be a matter of survey and title.

Until they do, no quantity of ink spent on the sins of the president’s critics will substitute for the paperwork the president alone controls.

— The Board

 

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism for Guyana

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EDITORIAL  By  Staff Writer 

The Wrong Question: Why the COI Debate Is Burying the One Thing That Matters

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July, 2026

Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom and Christopher Ram’s Kiskadee Watch letter have spent the past few days arguing past each other, and Guyana is worse off for it. One side insists a Commission of Inquiry cannot be conjured from suspicion alone. The other insists that in a captured institutional environment, suspicion is all a citizen will ever be permitted to have. Both are half right, which is the same as saying both are incomplete — and the debate between them has quietly become a substitute for the disclosure it was supposed to force.

We take no institutional pleasure in adjudicating a fight between a satirist and a chartered accountant. But the stakes here are not rhetorical. They concern whether a sitting Head of State’s acquisition of roughly 155 acres of state or formerly state-adjacent land, financed by mechanisms he has not detailed, developed under a permanent corporation-tax exemption his own government legislated for the sector he operates in, is a matter the public is entitled to verify — and through what mechanism.

WHERE PEEPING TOM IS RIGHT

The columnist’s core legal point survives scrutiny: a Commission of Inquiry is not a general-purpose instrument for resolving public curiosity. It is expensive, coercive, and traditionally reserved for matters where a prima facie case already exists — an identifiable incident, a specific transaction, a documented failure. Handing the machinery of the state to a fishing expedition, however well-intentioned, sets a precedent that could just as easily be turned against any successful Guyanese entrepreneur a future government wishes to harass. That is not a hypothetical concern in this country’s political history.

Peeping Tom is also correct that voluntary non-disclosure, standing alone, is not evidence of wrongdoing. The burden of proof runs from accuser to accused, not the reverse. A citizen does not forfeit that principle merely because the citizen in question happens to be President.

WHERE RAM IS RIGHT

But Peeping Tom’s framework only holds in a jurisdiction where the ordinary channels — the Integrity Commission, the Auditor General, an independent DPP, a functioning parliamentary oversight committee — are actually available to generate that prima facie case before a COI becomes necessary. Guyana’s institutional record over the past several years does not support the assumption that those channels are open. The Integrity Commission’s history of inertia on comparable matters, the six-year Public Accounts Committee audit backlog, the reduction in sectoral committee meetings, the pattern by which watchdog bodies have been either understaffed, underfunded, or stocked with appointees answerable to the very administration they are meant to scrutinise — these are not abstractions. They are the documented operating conditions of the state Ram is writing into.

Ram’s strongest point is not the COI demand itself. It is the one Peeping Tom’s rebuttal treats too lightly: the corporation-tax removal on agriculture and agro-processing, legislated by the President’s own government, does not merely raise a generic conflict-of-interest question.

It raises a specific, checkaItble one — whether the President declared his own agricultural holdings and recused himself from a decision that directly benefits them. That is not speculation dressed as a question. It is a request for a documented fact: was the declaration made, and was the recusal taken. Either the record shows it or it does not.

THE THIRD POSITION

The debate as currently framed offers Guyanese only two options: a COI that may or may not be warranted, or silence dressed as due process. Both outlets have missed a narrower, faster, and more defensible path that does not require resolving the abstract argument about what a COI is for.

The Integrity Commission already possesses, by statute, the authority to receive and examine the President’s asset declarations, verify the source of funds behind acquisitions, and confirm whether conflicts of interest were declared ahead of the corporation-tax decision.

That is not an extraordinary instrument requiring a prima facie threshold — it is the ordinary one, sitting idle. The Guardian’s position is that the Commission’s chair should be asked, on the record, whether that examination has occurred, and if not, why not.

If the Commission is, as its critics allege, structurally incapable of independent action, that failure should be documented publicly and specifically, not inferred rhetorically. A pattern of institutional refusal, established fact by fact, is itself the prima facie case a COI would eventually need — and it would be considerably harder for any administration to wave away than a satirical letter.

Separately, the specific documents Ram has requested — the loan agreements, the environmental permits, the financial statements — do not require a Commission of Inquiry to be produced. They require only that the President, or the financial institution involved, choose to release them. Nothing in Peeping Tom’s argument explains why that voluntary step should not happen now, regardless of whether a COI is ever appointed

The absence of disclosure may not be proof of wrongdoing, but neither is silence proof of innocence, and the President is the only person who can end the ambiguity by choosing transparency over assurance

WHAT WE BELIEVE, AND WHY WE ARE NOT STOPPING HERE

We are on record, and remain, in favour of independent verification over personal assurance — not as a rhetorical flourish, but as institutional practice.

ENODO Global’s forensic sentiment analysis of the public reaction to this controversy, and TIGI’s formal intervention on related transparency questions, both point to the same underlying deficit: a widening gap between what citizens are told and what they are shown.

There is more to this story than either Peeping Tom’s procedural caution or Ram’s satirical demand has yet surfaced — the chronology of the acquisition, the identity of the lender, the sequencing of the tax decision against the President’s declared interests, and the actual state of Integrity Commission practice on this file. We intend to pursue each of those threads on the facts, independent of which side of the COI argument they end up supporting.

Readers should expect follow-up reporting, not further commentary on the commentary.

— The Board