The Pool, Not the Project: What President Ali Left Out of His Cost-Oil Math

By The 592 Guardian–Staff Writer August 2026

President Irfaan Ali told a news conference this week that Guyana is about to see a sharply larger share of Stabroek Block oil, now that ExxonMobil and its co-venturers have recovered close to their outstanding costs. He simplified the arithmetic for the public: instead of 75 barrels out of every 100 produced going to cost recovery, only 20 barrels would now be needed — leaving 80 to split, 39.8 for Guyana and 39.8 among the consortium.

The formula he cited — a 75% cost-oil ceiling, with the remainder split 50/50 as profit oil — is real. It is written into Article 11 of the 2016 Petroleum Agreement between the Government of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited, and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited. What Ali did not explain is that the same Article 11 he is relying on also explains why his numbers describe a moment, not a destination — and the contract text says so in language considerably more direct than his press conference did.

WHAT THE CONTRACT ACTUALLY ALLOWS

Article 11.2 of the Agreement sets the ceiling Ali referenced:

“All Recoverable Contract Costs incurred by the Contractor shall… be recovered from the value… of a volume of Crude Oil (‘Cost Oil’) and/or Natural Gas (‘Cost Gas’) produced and sold from the Contract Area and limited in any Month to an amount which equals seventy-five percent (75%) of the total production from the Contract Area for such Month.”

Two words in that clause do most of the work: “Contract Area.” Not “Field.” Not “Project.” The 75% ceiling — and by extension whatever percentage the consortium is currently drawing beneath that ceiling — is calculated against production from the entire Stabroek Block, treated as a single pool.

There is no clause anywhere in the Agreement that assigns a project’s costs to that project’s own output alone.

Article 11.6 removes any ambiguity on this point:

“The quantity of Cost Oil and/or Cost Gas actually utilized in satisfying the Recoverable Contract Costs may be allocated by the Contractor to production from any Field or Fields.”

This is the operative sentence for evaluating the President’s claim. The Agreement gives Esso — as operator — explicit discretion to recover costs from any field in the block, regardless of which field generated them. There is no ring-fencing. A dollar spent developing Uaru, Whiptail, or the incoming fifth FPSO does not sit in a separate account waiting on that project’s own production to pay it back. It is thrown into the same cost pool as Liza Phase 1 and Payara, and recovered against whatever oil the block produces that month.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE “20 BARRELS” CLAIM

Ali’s framing implies a new steady state: cost recovery has dropped to roughly a fifth of production, and Guyana’s larger share is now the going rate. The contract’s own pooling mechanism says otherwise.

ExxonMobil’s Q2 2026 earnings disclosures put recovered costs at approximately US$55 billion — not the roughly US$40 billion, with US$5 billion outstanding, that the President’s figures implied. That gap alone is worth scrutiny. But even taking recovery as substantially complete, the pooled cost bank does not stay empty. The consortium is actively developing Uaru and Whiptail, and the fifth FPSO — arriving this month, according to Ali’s own remarks — carries its own capital costs. Under Article 11.6, every dollar of that new spending is eligible for recovery against total block production, the same pool that just drained toward zero.

Article 11.3 adds a second mechanism working in the same direction. Where Recoverable Contract Costs in a given month exceed the value of Cost Oil and Cost Gas available under the 75% ceiling, the shortfall does not disappear — it carries forward and is recovered from subsequent months’ production. A concentrated burst of commissioning or development spending, in other words, does not just raise the cost-oil share in the month it occurs; it can create a backlog that keeps pulling the percentage upward in the months that follow.

Neither mechanism was mentioned at the President’s news conference. Both are the direct and foreseeable consequence of a pooled, block-wide cost-recovery structure that the government itself signed.

THE OTHER OMISSION: ROYALTY

Ali’s 39.8/39.8 figure describes only the profit-oil split under Article 11.4, which is indeed 50/50 between the Minister and the Contractor. It leaves out Guyana’s 2% royalty on gross production, which is calculated separately and paid to government before cost recovery or profit-sharing even begins. That royalty is not cost-recoverable — a point the Guyana Revenue Authority itself has previously confirmed publicly. Guyana’s actual entitlement in any month is the royalty plus its half of profit oil, not the profit-oil split alone.

Presenting 39.8 barrels as the government’s full take understates what the state is contractually owed.

THE BOTTOM LINE

None of this makes President Ali’s underlying description of the formula false. The 75% ceiling exists. The 50/50 profit-oil split exists. What is missing from his account is the mechanism — written into the same Article 11 he is citing — that determines whether “20 barrels for costs” is a new floor or a temporary trough. The Agreement pools costs across the entire Contract Area and allows the operator to recover them against any field’s production, with unrecovered costs carried forward month to month. Sanctioned capital spending already in the pipeline — Uaru, Whiptail, and the fifth FPSO — will draw against that same pool.

The government is entitled to characterize a genuine improvement in Guyana’s near-term oil entitlement as good news. It is not entitled to present a pooled, fluctuating cost-recovery mechanism as though it were a permanent structural shift, when the contract’s own text says it is neither ring-fenced nor fixed.

For more on the agreement : https://petroleum.gov.gy/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Petroleum-Agreement-Oct-7-2016_2.pdf

 Sources: 2016 Petroleum Agreement between the Government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited, and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited, Article 11 (Cost Recovery and Production Sharing); ExxonMobil Q2 2026 earnings call remarks of CFO Neil Hansen; Guyana Revenue Authority public statements on royalty treatment.

Consultation À La Carte

OPINION BY : Staff Writer – August 2026

The President consults promptly on three vacant commissions. On the two judicial offices Guyana has waited twenty years to fill, he has yet to write at all.

P resident Irfaan Ali wants Guyanese to know he takes the Constitution seriously. “Wherever consultation is required in accordance with the Constitution,” he told reporters on Tuesday, “you can be assured that I will fulfill my mandate.” The occasion for the assurance was a genuine one: through Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira, the President has initiated consultation with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed on three constitutional bodies whose membership had lapsed — the Judicial Service Commission, the Local Government Commission, and the Public Service Commission.

By the letter of the process, this looks like the Constitution working as designed. The JSC’s life expired July 13; nine days later, Teixeira wrote proposing the reappointment of retired Justice Carl Singh under Article 198(2). The Local Government Commission Act required three opposition nominees; Mohamed, after consulting APNU’s Aubrey Norton and Forward Guyana’s Amanza Walton, delivered them — Leola Narine and Leslyn Lowe from WIN, Nicholas Chesney from Forward Guyana. The Public Service Commission slate — Maurice Gajadhar, Meleita Bovell, Leila Ramson — was proposed and acknowledged in turn. Three letters, three responses, three commissions moving toward being properly constituted. Whatever one thinks of the individual nominees, the mechanics of consultation were followed.

Which is exactly why what’s missing from that list is so conspicuous.

Mohamed said it plainly: consultation has proceeded on the three commissions, but the President “has not initiated consultation on the substantive appointment of a Chancellor and Chief Justice.” Guyana has gone without a substantive Chancellor since 2005 and without a substantive Chief Justice since Carl Singh — the same Carl Singh now being proposed for the JSC — stepped down from acting as Chancellor in 2017 after twelve years in the role. Justice Ian Chang acted as Chief Justice for fifteen years before that. The current arrangement, with Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire and Justice Navindra Singh both acting, is simply the latest chapter in an impasse now past twenty years old.

Article 127(1) sets out exactly the same mechanism as the commissions the President just moved on: appointment by the President, “acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.”

It is not a more complicated provision than Article 198(2). It does not require different machinery, a different minister, or a different letter-writing process.

Guyana’s own courts have already confirmed there is no legal barrier to the President initiating it at will — a 2023 High Court ruling declined to find that the delay amounted to a dereliction of constitutional duty, but pointedly directed that the political actors involved act with “all convenient speed.”

Three years on, “convenient speed” has yet to arrive.

The pattern is not new, and it is not partisan in a way that lets the President off the hook. When Aubrey Norton held the LOO seat, he was invited to consult on the same two positions and, by his own account, declined — calling the exercise a “waste of time” because he did not believe genuine consultation would follow.

Norton’s reasoning deserves scrutiny of its own; refusing an invitation is not the same as never receiving one. But Mohamed has now held the office for more than six months, and the record shows no comparable invitation extended to him. Asked directly about it, the President’s position has reportedly been that a letter written to a previous Opposition Leader does not automatically carry over to his successor — a technical distinction that, notably, did not stop the administration from moving briskly on three commissions with  different opposition leaderships in the same stretch of time.

That contrast is the story. It is one thing to argue, as the Attorney General has in court, that the President is entitled to sequence his constitutional obligations — commissions with vacant seats first, offices that are “occupied and persons are functioning in them” later.

It is another thing to watch that sequencing hold, letter after letter, for every seat except the two that carry the most institutional weight and the least security of tenure for whoever holds them.

A commissioner serves a fixed term. An acting Chancellor or acting Chief Justice serves at the pleasure of whoever keeps them there — a standing incentive, structural rather than personal, for any Executive to prefer the acting arrangement over the substantive one. Twenty years of unbroken continuity in that preference, across administrations, is not proof of a single conspiracy.

It is proof of a mechanism that consistently rewards inaction, regardless of who is in office to benefit from it.

None of this requires reaching for the more explosive allegations now circulating about how the last serious attempt at these appointments actually unfolded — the claims that a sitting CCJ President personally pressed a former Opposition Leader toward a government-preferred slate, or that Justice Cummings-Edwards’s own departure from the acting Chancellorship was less a request than a push. That history is serious enough to warrant its own reckoning, and this news outlet  has been tracking it as such. It does not need to be imported into this piece to make the point that stands on Tuesday’s letters alone: a President who wants credit for constitutional fidelity should be judged by his least convenient obligations, not his easiest ones.

The Leader of the Opposition has the stronger position here, and he should use it. Mohamed does not need to wait for an invitation that has not come. Nothing in Article 127 requires the President to write first any more than nothing in Article 198 required him to write first on the JSC — except that in this case, he already did, to someone else, over a different name. The Opposition Leader should put the President on record: initiate the request himself, in writing, and force a public answer to why the seats that most need a permanent occupant have waited the longest.

Twenty years is not a queue. It’s a choice, renewed every year no one is made to explain it.

— The Board

SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

Guyana Is Building a Surveillance State by Announcement, Not by Law

EDITORIAL◊THE 592 GUARDIAN◊AUGUST,2026

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has now said it twice, four years apart, with the same casual confidence: cameras with facial-recognition software are going up “right across the country.” In November 2022 it was a plan. In February 2025 it was a fact on the ground. In both cases it was announced the way this Government announces most things it does not intend to submit for scrutiny — as an achievement, not as a policy requiring authorization, oversight, or a single line of enabling legislation specific to biometric surveillance.

“Safe Country” or Invasion of Privacy?

This is the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented across a dozen files this year: capacity is built and declared before the legal architecture that would make it accountable is built at all. The Data Protection Act No. 18 of 2023 received presidential assent three years ago. By the reporting available to us, it has still not commenced, because the ministerial order needed to bring it into force has not been made, and the Data Protection Office the Act contemplates has not been established.

A law can sit on the books indefinitely in Guyana while the practice it was meant to govern proceeds anyway. That is not an oversight. It is becoming the operating model.

WHAT THE LAW WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

Had the Act commenced, a nationwide facial-recognition network would not automatically be illegal — but it would be answerable. The statute’s own definition of “sensitive personal data” is instructive, and it should worry anyone who has ever attended a political meeting, a religious service, or a protest in this country. The Act names political opinions and membership of a political body as sensitive categories in their own right, alongside religious belief, health, sexual life, and criminal proceedings.

A camera on a public road is not neutral once it can tell the State who was praying, who was marching, and who was standing next to whom.

Facial-recognition templates are not listed by name as a standalone sensitive category in the Act’s summary text available to us — an omission that itself deserves legislative attention — but that silence is not a license. A face, once matched against a database, is personal data the moment it identifies a living individual, and it becomes sensitive personal data the moment that identification reveals political opinion, religious belief, health status, or alleged criminal involvement. Attendance at a PPP rally, a APNU+AFC meeting, a mosque, a church, a mandir, a picket line outside Parliament, or a lawyer’s office are not abstract hypotheticals in Guyana’s political climate.

They are the precise activities a nationwide camera-and-matching system would be positioned to record, store, and cross-reference — without a Data Protection Office to answer to, because none exists.

EIGHT QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ANSWERED

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that Guyana should have no cameras. Public safety is a legitimate government interest, and CCTV recording an event for later review is categorically different from a system that can identify and track a citizen in real time against a watchlist. It is that distinction — event-recording versus identification-and-tracking — that the Government has never publicly acknowledged, let alone regulated.

Before another camera goes up, the public is owed answers to at least the following:

• Which agency owns and controls each camera network, and under what statutory authority.
• Whether facial recognition is operational, on trial, or merely proposed — Jagdeo’s own statements have blurred this for four years.
• What databases or watchlists a face or number plate is matched against.
• Who is authorized to run a search, and on what legal threshold.
• How long footage, templates, and match records are retained before deletion.
• What independent body audits the system and hears complaints of misuse.
• What remedy exists for a citizen wrongly flagged by a false match.
• Whether an ordinary Guyanese can obtain the footage and data held about them — and on what timeline before it is overwritten.

Jagdeo has also linked the initiative to “potential use by the banking sector,” a phrase that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it has. If a State-operated facial-recognition capability is being contemplated for private commercial use, that is no longer a public-safety program at all. It is a biometric identity infrastructure being built for reasons that have never been debated in the National Assembly, priced for the public, or subjected to a procurement record anyone outside Cabinet has seen.

THE REMEDY IS NOT OUTRAGE. IT IS A PAPER TRAIL.

Guyana does not litigate under the American Fourth Amendment, and importing that language wholesale into a Guyanese constitutional argument would be a category error. But the underlying principle translates without difficulty: a democratic government does not get to build an architecture of indiscriminate, searchable monitoring of its own population and then decline to say, in enforceable law, who controls it and under what limits. Necessity, proportionality, legality, transparency, and independent oversight are not American inventions. They are the baseline of any constitutional order that takes privacy, expression, and association seriously — all of which appear in Guyana’s own Constitution.

For any citizen who believes they have been recorded, matched, or flagged, the practical route runs through preservation before it runs through protest. Surveillance systems overwrite footage on short cycles. A letter to the Commissioner of Police, the responsible ministry, and any identified contractor — demanding preservation of footage, search logs, match records, and the underlying vendor contract, before requesting access to one’s own data — is not a symbolic gesture.

It is the only way to convert a system designed to be unaccountable into one that can, eventually, be made to answer in court, through judicial review, or through whatever mechanism the Data Protection Act supplies once it is finally switched on.

Until it is switched on — until there is a named agency, a published policy, an independent regulator, and a retention schedule a citizen can actually read — “Safe Country” is not a security policy.

It is a euphemism for a surveillance capability introduced by press statement, operated without a supervising law, and answerable to no one but the Vice President who announced it.

— The Board

A Baby Died Waiting on a WhatsApp Group

EDITORIAL · HEALTH MINISTRY ACCOUNTABILITY

OPINION BY: Staff Writer – August 2026

Guyana calls itself one of the fastest-growing economies on earth and promises a “world-class” emergency care system. It has spent five months and a $161.1 billion health budget without buying a single air ambulance. A three-day-old infant in Mabaruma paid the difference between the promise and the balance sheet.

On 10th August, Stacy Correia, a healthcare worker at Matthews Ridge (Pakera) Hospital, gave birth at Mabaruma Regional Hospital following a high-risk pregnancy and a two-hospital referral chain. Her son developed severe respiratory distress within hours. Nursing staff found him cyanotic, with a Random Blood Sugar reading of 23 — a level that in any resourced facility triggers immediate transfer, not a queue. He was placed on CPAP. By Tuesday, doctors had determined he needed Georgetown-level neonatal intensive care. No bed was available until Wednesday, when space opened at West Demerara Regional Hospital. He never reached it.

He died Thursday afternoon at Mabaruma, three days old, while the country’s medical evacuation system — in practice, a WhatsApp group monitored by the Ministry of Health and populated by private commercial pilots — failed to produce a plane.

Aircrafts readily available for political outreaches

This board does not traffic in anecdote as indictment. We traffic in the distance between what a government has promised on the record and what it has delivered on the ground. On this measure, the Correia infant’s death is not a tragic outlier. It is the predictable output of a system this administration has described in public, budgeted for in writing, and left unbuilt.

THE PROMISE, IN THE GOVERNMENT’S OWN WORDS

In March 2026, addressing the commissioning of a hospital pavilion, President Irfaan Ali unveiled the National Ambulance Authority — a centralized command intended to bring “world-class emergency care nationwide,” built on “land, air, and river ambulances,” pre-deployed units, GPS-tracked response, and a stated target of a 15-minute golden window for the first emergency call. Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony, presenting the parallel Guyana Emergency Medical Authority (GEMA) initiative to the National Assembly during Estimates, said the explicit ambition was to “replicate an emergency service as they have in North America.” Funding, he told Parliament, had already been allocated.

“We are also building out an emergency-care system that ensures every second counts.” — President Irfaan Ali, March 2026, five months before a three-day-old child ran out of seconds in Mabaruma.

Five months separate that podium and this obituary. In that interval, the National Ambulance Authority produced no air ambulance capable of reaching Region One. The Ministry of Health’s actual evacuation protocol, as reported and as this board has independently confirmed against the public record, remains a WhatsApp group: doctors post a request, private commercial operators — who fly the Mabaruma route on ordinary business daily, and who were confirmed present in the area the week before this death for a government outreach event — decide whether to divert. None did. No emergency charter was arranged. The Guyana Defence Force, which had itself publicised a Bartica-to-Georgetown medevac on 1st January as proof of “the Force’s readiness to support national emergency response efforts,” did not deploy.

THE MONEY WAS NEVER THE CONSTRAINT

Budget 2026 is $1.558 trillion, a 307 percent increase over 2021, financed in part by a $495 billion (US$2.37 billion) transfer from the Natural Resource Fund — oil money, drawn against a fund that held roughly US$3.96 billion at the end of May. Health alone received $161.1 billion, part of a $503.8 billion allocation to education, health and housing that the Finance Minister described in the Assembly as ‘foundations of a more prosperous, secure society,’ not expenses.

The Guyana Defence Force’s own budget has grown by more than 800 percent in proportional terms since 2021, reaching roughly US$250 million in 2025 — spent substantially on maritime patrol assets to guard offshore oil infrastructure. The Air Corps that budget built has three helicopters and no dedicated medevac airframe. Guyana’s air power ranks 148th of the countries measured worldwide.

None of this is a poverty story. It is an allocation story.

SIX BEDS, ONE WARNING

The government’s own referral hospital confirmed the same failure in the same week, on the coast, in full view. On 11th August, the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation — the country’s Level V national referral centre, the last stop for the most critical cases in the country — issued a public release warning motorists to drive more carefully. Buried inside it was an admission that should have been the headline: the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit was running on six beds. Four of them, at the moment of filming, held patients with severe brain injuries. GPHC did not lead with that number. It led with a lecture to pedestrians. That ordering is not incidental. It is the story.

A national referral hospital with a six-bed ICU is not a hospital under temporary strain. It is a hospital operating at the edge of its capacity as a matter of routine, one bad accident weekend away from having nowhere to put the next critical patient — hinterland or coastal. This is the same institution the Correia infant was ultimately being routed toward when a NICU bed was finally located at West Demerara on Wednesday. The capacity gap that killed him in Mabaruma does not end at Georgetown’s city limits.

A SECOND AUGUST DEATH TOLL, DISPUTED BUT UNRESOLVED

The Correia infant’s death is not the only maternal-and-newborn-care failure under public scrutiny this month. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly named four women — including Emily Singh, 24, and Rictecia Semple, 24 —  who lost their babies at the $6.6 billion Bath Regional Hospital in Region Five between June and August 2026, arguing that state-of-the-art infrastructure must be matched by the resources, expertise and systems needed to save lives. Bath Regional Hospital has publicly rejected the characterisation, citing 314 successful deliveries since its 2025 opening and cautioning against turning grief into unsupported allegations. This board treats the claim as a serious, contested allegation, not a verified finding — but an allegation of four infants deaths at a flagship $6.6 billion facility, unresolved a year after its ribbon-cutting, is itself a matter the National Assembly should not be permitted to leave uninvestigated.

THE NATIONAL NUMBERS BEHIND THE INDIVIDUAL DEATHS

Individual tragedies invite individual explanations — a power outage, a missing bed, a WhatsApp group that failed to produce a plane. But Guyana’s national health indicators show these are not isolated breakdowns. Guyana’s neonatal mortality rate stands at roughly 16 deaths per 1,000 live births; its infant mortality rate at roughly 22 to 24 per 1,000; its maternal mortality ratio at roughly 75 to 112 per 100,000 live births, depending on the year measured — translating to an estimated 13 to 18 maternal hospital deaths nationwide annually. All three figures sit above the regional Americas averages.

PAHO’s most recent published measure of Guyana’s treatable premature mortality — deaths that should not occur if health systems function properly, from causes that timely, effective care can address — stood at approximately 287.7 per 100,000 population. Applied to Guyana’s current population, that rate implies roughly 2,870 deaths every year from causes medicine already knows how to prevent. This board offers that figure as its own extrapolation from PAHO’s published rate, not as a number PAHO itself has certified for 2026 — but even treated as an estimate, it reframes the Correia infant’s death and the Bath Regional Hospital allegations from anomalies into arithmetic. A system that cannot reliably staff a medevac request, keep a NICU powered, more than six ICU beds at its flagship hospital is not failing occasionally. It is failing at scale, and the scale has a number.

A country that positions itself for foreign patients while its own maternity wards run short of beds and its flagship ICU runs on six is not building a health system. It is building a brochure.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This board has tracked this administration’s signature failure mode across multiple ministries this year: the Neurological Rehabilitation Centre, announced in Budget 2026 against a PAHO/Lancet study ranking Guyana among the Americas’ worst for neurological disease burden, remains an unstaffed line item with no disclosed bed capacity or referral pathway. Ministry of Health contract nurses have gone as long as eight months unpaid because payroll renewal is still processed on paper, a collapse the Minister answered by redirecting nurses to a deputy permanent secretary’s office rather than fixing the system. The National Ambulance Authority and GEMA now join that list: announced with North American ambition, budgeted in writing, and absent at the one moment a family in Region One needed it to exist.

The common thread is not incompetence at the point of care. Mabaruma’s nurses did their jobs — they escalated on schedule, placed the infant on CPAP, and kept him alive through repeated power outages that, compounding the crisis, disrupted his oxygen delivery equipment.

The failure sits above them, in an administration that budgets for capacity it has not built and announces systems it has not staffed, then relies on the goodwill of private pilots to cover the gap.

WHAT THIS BOARD DEMANDS

1. A public, dated implementation timeline for the National Ambulance Authority and GEMA’s air and river ambulance components, including procurement status for any dedicated aircraft, to be tabled in the National Assembly within 30 days.
2. Full disclosure of the Ministry of Health’s current hinterland medevac protocol, including the terms under which the ministry relies on private commercial operators, and what obligation — if any — those operators carry to respond to a logged emergency.
3. An independent inquiry into the Correia infant’s death, examining the referral delay, the ICU/NICU bed shortage, the power outages at Mabaruma Regional Hospital, and the medevac failure as a single chain of causation — not four separate excuses.
4. A published accounting of why Guyana Defence Force air assets were not deployed when commercial evacuation failed, given the Force’s own public claim to “readiness” following its January Bartica medevac.
5. Regional Health Authority disclosure of backup power and oxygen-delivery redundancy status at every hinterland hospital equipped with a NICU or ICU.

The family, Kaieteur News reports, does not expect anything to come of this. This board’s purpose is to make that expectation wrong.

— THE BOARD

Sealed Bids for a Sunken Truth

OPINION BY: STAFF WRITER– August 2026

What the Government’s Silence on the MV Barima Salvage Bidders Reveals About Its Real Commitment to Transparency

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation and the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) chose, of their own volition, to run an open tendering process for the salvage of the MV Barima. Nobody forced that choice on them. Open tendering is not merely a procedural label — it is a public promise. It tells citizens: watch us, because we have nothing to hide. Guyana’s Procurement Act attaches a plain expectation to that promise — that once bids close, the identity of bidders and the sums they quoted become public record, subject to review by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB).

The submission window for the salvage contract closed on August 14, 2026. As of this writing, the public has been told nothing. Not how many companies responded. Not their names. Not what they bid. APNU Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul has rightly demanded MARAD and the Ministry explain the delay, and has directed his question specifically at whether NPTAB — the body constitutionally tasked with making such information public — has been permitted to do its job.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This newsroom does not treat this in isolation, because the government has not earned the benefit of the doubt on this file. Readers of this platform  will recall the sequence already documented: in late July, MARAD privately invited a Dutch salvage firm, KMS, to submit a proposal — days before any public Request for Proposals existed. That invitation went to a company whose principal has a documented history of fraud-related litigation abroad, a fact this news-room  reported at length. Only after public exposure of that arrangement did government pivot to an open Expression of Interest process.

A leaked internal document, reported by Kaieteur News, showed the invited firm had already quoted a price — an US$8 million figure — before the public process the government now points to as proof of its transparency had even opened.

Now, at the very next procedural juncture where transparency was actually costless — disclosing who responded and what they offered, a step that discloses no trade secret and delays no salvage timeline — the government has again chosen silence. Three junctures. Three opportunities to demonstrate the process was real. Three times government chose the version that keeps the public guessing.

What conceivable reason could government possibly have for the constant cloak-and-dagger machinations surrounding a national tragedy?

THE WRECK IS THE EVIDENCE

This is not an abstract procurement quarrel. The MV Barima is not simply a vessel to be raised; it is the single largest piece of physical evidence in a disaster that has claimed 73 confirmed lives, left roughly 30 people still unaccounted for, and now sits under formal examination by an international Commission of Inquiry.          Whoever wins this contract will control the chain of custody over that evidence during the most sensitive phase of its recovery. A public unable to see who is competing for that role, and on what terms, cannot judge whether the eventual winner was chosen on merit or convenience.

We note, too, that the August 14 deadline was for Expressions of Interest, not a final sealed tender. MARAD’s own advertisement reserves the right to shortlist firms and negotiate a fuller Request for Proposals with selected companies only — a further, narrower, less visible stage still to come. That structure makes today’s disclosure more urgent, not less: if the identities of respondents to even the open, publicly advertised stage are being withheld, what confidence can the public have that the shortlisting stage that follows will be any more visible?

AN HONEST ACCOUNTING OF MAHIPAUL’S POSITION

In fairness to the record, Mr. Mahipaul’s own position has moved. In early August he argued against the open-tender approach altogether, urging government to invoke emergency procurement powers to save time. He has since accepted that the tender process is what government chose, and now insists government honour that choice’s transparency obligations.

That is not inconsistency. It is exactly what a functioning opposition does — adapt its pressure to the terrain government itself has selected, rather than abandon the accountability question because the underlying dispute over process speed was not resolved its way.

GRIEF DESERVES BETTER THAN GUESSWORK

Seventy-three families have buried their dead. Roughly thirty more are still waiting for word on the missing. For them, every week this file spends shrouded in unexplained secrecy is a week stolen from grieving in the open, with full knowledge of what happened to the vessel and why. Secrecy surrounding a national tragedy of this scale should not be met with quiet acceptance. It should provoke real public outrage and sustained pressure until government supplies an answer that survives scrutiny — because right now, none has been offered at all.

This publication renews its standing call, first made in the days after the Koole/KMS revelations, for full public disclosure of every communication, invitation, and proposal touching this salvage contract. Today we add to it.

FORMAL DEMANDS

1. MARAD and the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation immediately publish the number of Expressions of Interest received by the August 14, 2026 deadline, the name of every submitting company, and the value of every bid submitted.
2. NPTAB confirm publicly whether it has received the bid file for evaluation, and state on what statutory basis, if any, disclosure has been withheld beyond the customary evaluation period.
3. Government disclose whether KMS — the firm privately invited to submit a proposal on July 28 — is among the respondents to the subsequent open EOI process, so the public can judge whether the earlier private invitation ever gave that firm an advantage.
4. The Commission of Inquiry be granted express, binding authority to review and approve the eventual salvage contractor selection, given the wreck’s status as evidence central to its mandate.
5. Government commit, in advance of the next procedural stage — the narrower Request for Proposals to shortlisted firms — to publish shortlisting criteria and outcomes as they occur, rather than leave that stage to be reconstructed after the fact through leaks and freedom-of-information requests.

Guyanese are not asking for anything unusual. They are asking government to do what it already announced it would do — run an open, transparent tender — and to prove that word meant something. Nothing more, and nothing less.

— The Board