FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED

FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED:

What Fip Motilall’s Grocery Store Should Have Taught Guyana About Vetting Foreign Contractors — and Why GWI Didn’t Learn It

In 2010, the Government of Guyana handed Makeshwar “Fip” Motilall a US$15.4 million contract to build the access road to the Amaila Falls hydro site, on the strength of a company, Synergy Holdings Inc, whose listed American headquarters turned out to be a grocery supermarket in Florida. Motilall admitted it himself, at a press conference, after the contract collapsed.

Fourteen years later, Guyana Water Incorporated signed a GYD $1.49 billion contract with a joint venture whose listed Canadian headquarters is a house on a residential street in Scarborough, Ontario.

Nobody at GWI has admitted anything, because — as far as the public record shows — nobody at GWI has asked.

THE PRECEDENT GUYANA ALREADY PAID FOR

Motilall’s Synergy Holdings Inc was awarded the Amaila access road contract in March 2010, tasked with upgrading roughly 85km of existing roadway and constructing 110km of virgin roadway through some of Guyana’s most difficult terrain, plus two river crossings. Its listed head office was 951 Sansbury’s Way, Suite 204, West Palm Beach, Florida — an address shared with a second Motilall entity, Synergy Energy Solutions Inc, according to Florida’s own corporate registry. Independent investigations at the time found no evidence Motilall had ever built a road, managed a hydroelectric project, or employed technical staff of the kind the contract required.

The government defended the award anyway. Then-Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh and Winston Brassington, head of the Privatisation Unit, both went before the press to vouch for Motilall’s qualifications. Brassington predicted the project would finish on time and “in excellent fashion.” By December 2011, only 40 percent of the works were complete. Motilall himself later conceded that of 161km of contracted road, only 9km had been finished to specification.

The contract was terminated in January 2012, days after failing to meet the deadline for submitting the new valid performance bond from an acceptable financial institution. —by the Jagdeo administration who was in his second term in  office — and Motilall, cornered by reporters, admitted the truth about his American headquarters at a press conference rather than in response to any government audit or due-diligence review that caught it first.

The government didn’t catch the grocery store. Motilall confessed to it, after the money was already spent.

THE PATTERN REPEATS

Guyana Water Incorporated’s October 2024 contract with the Sigma Engineers Ltd & Hebei Wansheng Environmental Protection Engineering Co. Ltd joint venture — GYD $1,486,448,800 for water treatment facilities at Leguan and Wakenaam — names the JV’s principal place of business as 6 Poplar Road, Toronto, Ontario, and describes it in the contract’s own text as “a company under the Laws of Canada.” This publication obtained a street-level image confirming that address is an ordinary detached house: driveway, garage, personal vehicles parked outside. Nothing about it resembles the office of an international engineering joint venture executing a nine-figure public contract.

A subsequent title search through Ontario’s land registry, detailed in our earlier reporting, found no name connected to Sigma, its Guyana director M. Tamjeed Rahmaan, or Mohamed Aqtar Ali anywhere in that property’s ownership history.

That absence does not resolve the question of why the address appears on the contract at all — it sharpens it.

Whoever drafted, reviewed, and signed this agreement on GWI’s behalf allowed a residential address to stand as the registered seat of a Canadian corporate partner in a public contract worth close to a billion and a half Guyana dollars, without — so far as the public record shows — verifying it.

SIDE BY SIDE

The two cases differ in scale and in the nationality of the address involved. They do not differ in the underlying failure: a foreign-registered address attached to a Guyanese public contract, unverified before signature, discovered only by outside scrutiny after the fact.

GWI CEO Shaik Baksh has publicly defended Sigma’s contracts as the product of competitive, NPTAB-run tenders and stated he was unaware of any involvement by Aqtar Ali in the procurement process. That defense addresses bidding process. It says nothing about whether GWI verified the physical, operational reality of the Canadian entity named as co-contractor on a JV worth GYD $1.49 billion — the same category of gap that let Motilall’s grocery-store headquarters go unnoticed in 2010.

WHAT DUE DILIGENCE WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE

Confirming that a joint-venture partner’s listed address corresponds to an actual business premises is not a forensic undertaking. It requires a property search, a corporate registry check, and — at minimum — a phone call.

Ontario’s land registry, the same public tool this publication used to trace 6 Poplar Road’s ownership history, was available to NPTAB and GWI before either signed the CDB Lot 2 contract in October 2024.

There is no indication either institution used it, or any equivalent Bangladesh-side verification of Sigma’s own claimed “more than two decades of engineering experience” — a claim GWI’s own contracting behavior appears to have simply accepted. 

If it did , it would have discovered that Sigma Engineering Inc. was under investigation by Bangladesh Anti- Corruption Commission for contract fixing since 2019 and was subsequently charged in 2020

Guyana does not lack the institutional memory to know better. The Motilall case was extensively documented by Stabroek News, Kaieteur News, and other outlets across four years, and it cost the country a road that still, by Motilall’s own admission, was barely a sixth complete when the contract collapsed. The lesson available from that failure — verify the contractor’s stated address before, not after, signing — does not appear to have reached the officials responsible for vetting Sigma’s Canadian joint venture partner fourteen years later.

WHAT THIS IS, AND ISN’T

This is not an allegation that Sigma Engineers or the Hebei Wansheng joint venture will fail to deliver the Leguan and Wakenaam facilities, or that the arrangement mirrors Motilall’s in outcome.                  Hebei Wansheng is a real, independently operating manufacturer with its own factory in Hebei Province, China — a fact this publication confirmed and has already reported.

What this is, is a documented pattern in how Guyana’s procurement institutions treat the addresses foreign contractors supply: as details to be recorded, not verified.

Fourteen years and one failed hydro road separate the grocery store in Florida from the house in Scarborough. The distance between them, institutionally, appears to be zero.

— The Board