Court Denies VAMED’s Injunctions, But Guyana Still Hasn’t Answered the Novation Question

ANALYSIS

Court Denies VAMED’s Injunctions, But Guyana Still Hasn’t Answered the Novation Question

The High Court’s Thursday ruling in the VAMED Engineering dispute is being read by some as vindication for the contractor. It is not. A closer look at what Justice Renita Singh actually ordered — and what the Government still refuses to say — tells a different story

On Thursday, Justice Renita Singh of the High Court delivered a ruling in the dispute between the Ministry of Health and VAMED Engineering GmbH that has already been mischaracterized in parts of the public conversation as a setback for the Government. The record says otherwise. Justice Singh denied VAMED’s application for conservatory orders that would have restrained the Ministry from taking possession of or occupying the Guyana Pediatric and Maternal Hospital (GMPH) site at Ogle and the New Amsterdam Hospital Campus, from expelling VAMED’s personnel or subcontractors, and from enforcing a EUR14.9 million performance bond.

VAMED’s fallback request — that conservatory relief remain in force pending an expedited inter partes hearing or the constitution of a Dispute Adjudication Board or Arbitral Tribunal under clause 21 of the contracts — was refused as well. The court found that VAMED had not demonstrated the urgency required for interim relief.

What Justice Singh did order was narrower and more balanced than VAMED’s public statement suggested. Both parties — not VAMED alone — were directed to preserve the fifty-two containers of equipment on the GMPH site, without opening or interfering with them. Only VAMED’s own security personnel may access the site, and only for the sole purpose of securing those containers.

The Ministry was separately ordered to preserve all contractor documents, property designs, plans, and intellectual property. By consent of Attorney General Anil Nandlall and VAMED’s counsel Nigel Hughes, the site crane is to be returned to VAMED. Critically, these preservation orders expire the moment an Arbitration Tribunal is appointed. This is a holding measure, not a judgment on the merits of either party’s claim.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE CLAIM

VAMED’s arbitration claim, filed as a statement of claim on July 27, 2026, seeks approximately EUR45.53 million. Of that figure, only EUR19.15 million is described as certified payments already approved for work completed. The balance is composed of variations, indexation, additional works, and other contractual entitlements — categories that are, by their nature, contested rather than settled. The Government’s own supervising engineer has separately estimated Guyana’s indebtedness to VAMED at approximately EUR37.94 million, a figure that sits meaningfully below VAMED’s claim and suggests the two sides disagree less about whether money is owed than about how much, and for what.

The underlying contracts are now a matter of public record: a EUR149 million Design-and-Build agreement dated June 8, 2022, for the GMPH facility at Ogle, and a EUR150 million agreement dated July 12, 2023, for the New Amsterdam Hospital Campus in Region Six — together, EUR299 million in public commitment for two hospitals that remain unfinished more than four years after the first contract was signed.

On completion, the two sides are not close to agreement. VAMED maintains that GMPH is 67 percent complete. A Government official, speaking to Demerara Waves, put the figure closer to 50 percent, and added a detail that will matter before an arbitral tribunal: that VAMED has not shipped or installed any biomedical equipment at a facility now a year past its original deadline, and that all subcontractors on the project have been released. If accurate, this is not a minor discrepancy.

A gap of that size between the contractor’s own completion claim and the Government’s — on a project already the subject of a multimillion-euro payment dispute — is exactly the kind of fact an arbitral tribunal exists to resolve, and this newsroom takes no position on which figure is correct.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT’S REBUTTAL SAYS — AND DOES NOT SAY

The Ministry of Health has rejected VAMED’s public account as a “misleading narrative” that omits the contractor’s own performance failures. In its fuller statement, the Government maintains it has remained committed to completing both hospitals given their strategic importance, that it acted in good faith throughout, and that payments under a Design-and-Build contract are properly tied to measured, approved works rather than to the passage of time alone. It states that the Notices of Intention to Terminate, issued on June 2, 2026, followed extensive contractual correspondence over many months documenting delays, missed milestones, and inadequate mobilisation of resources — and that VAMED was given numerous opportunities to remedy these deficiencies before the Ministry exercised its contractual rights.

This is a more procedurally careful defense than the Government’s initial public posture suggested, and it deserves to be weighed on its own terms rather than dismissed. If the documented correspondence trail the Ministry describes holds up before an ICC tribunal, it materially strengthens the Government’s position on the question of who breached first.

But a defense built carefully on milestones and mobilization is conspicuous for what it leaves out. This news outlet asked, in February, whether a Deed of Novation had been executed transferring the Ogle and New Amsterdam contracts from VAMED Engineering to the successor entity now marketing itself in Guyana as VAMED+WWH, following the April 1, 2025 sale of VAMED’s international project business to the WWH Group — a sale VAMED’s own corporate website confirms took place.

We asked whether Performance Bonds and Advance Payment Bonds had been re-issued in the successor’s name, and whether UK Export Finance and Sweden’s export credit agency had authorized any transfer of the financing facilities underwriting these projects. Five months, a Ministerial statement to the National Assembly, an ICC arbitration filing, and two rounds of detailed public rebuttal later, none of those questions has been answered. Not confirmed. Not denied. Simply absent, in a rebuttal otherwise willing to engage on nearly every other point of contention.

A government capable of a paragraph-by-paragraph defense on contractual performance is not a government that forgot to mention novation. The silence is a choice, and it is the same choice that has now persisted across a change of government minister’s statement, an arbitration filing, a High Court hearing, and a written press rebuttal.

Whether that silence reflects an unresolved legal status the Government does not wish to admit to, or simply institutional carelessness about the corporate mechanics underlying a EUR299 million commitment of public and export-credit money, the public still does not know, in law, who the Government’s counterparty actually is.

WHERE THIS LEAVES THE PUBLIC

Thursday’s ruling should not be read as either side’s win. VAMED sought real, substantive protection from the court and was refused on every count save the narrowest possible preservation of disputed property — property whose ownership Justice Singh herself described as being in dispute. The Government avoided a more damaging injunction but has not yet had to answer, under oath or under parliamentary questioning, the single question this publication first raised in February: does a Deed of Novation exist.

Both parties will have their opportunity to present evidence on payment and performance before an ICC tribunal, and that process should be allowed to run its course. But the novation question does not require an arbitral tribunal to answer. It requires a government prepared to name the office responsible for tracking corporate ownership changes on a state infrastructure project financed substantially by sovereign export-credit borrowing, and to put a Deed of Novation — or its absence — on the record. Five months of silence on a question this simple is not an oversight. It is a pattern.

This publication takes no position on which party’s account of performance or payment is accurate; that determination belongs to the ICC tribunal. Figures cited above are drawn from Justice Singh’s ruling, court reporting, VAMED Engineering’s public statements, the Ministry of Health’s public rebuttal, and VAMED’s own corporate disclosures.