INTERENERGY SOLE-SOURCE CONTRACT

—THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GUYANA  June 2026

US$15.6 Million, Eight Months, and the Lights Are Still On a Rented Ship

The GPL-InterEnergy contract was sole-sourced, apparently in breach of the Procurement Act, displaced a cheaper, competitive winner, and has consumed eight months of public money. The only things shown to the public so far are a PowerPoint and an office ribbon-cutting. The figure for what has actually been paid remains a state secret.

Guyana’s government likes to speak in superlatives. The largest budget in history. The fastest-growing economy on earth. The most ambitious energy transition the Caribbean has ever seen. What it does not speak about and has not spoken about despite four direct parliamentary requests from the opposition, is how much public money has been disbursed to a Dominican Republic power company for a job that, eight months in, the country cannot yet feel.

On October 8, 2025, the Guyana Power and Light Incorporated signed a US$15.6 million contract with InterEnergy Group for what was officially described as Supervisory, Engineering and Project Management Consultancy Services.

At US$650,000 per month across two years, the contract would make InterEnergy the most expensive supervisor in GPL’s history — paid not to build anything, not to own anything, not to operate anything, but to watch other companies build and operate things that Guyanese taxpayers are funding separately.

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Eight months on, the grid is still running on Karpowership’s rented Turkish powerships, still subject to cascading load-shedding, and still months away from the Gas-to-Energy plant whose readiness InterEnergy was ostensibly hired to ensure. What InterEnergy has delivered to the public record is a roadmap — presented to President Ali and select private sector figures in early June 2026 — and a Georgetown office inauguration. Neither is what the Procurement Act’s public interest provisions were designed to purchase.

The contract was sole-sourced. The winning bidder was never told it had won. The government has not disclosed how much has been paid. This is not a procurement irregularity — it is a procurement system in active collapse.

HOW A COMPETITIVE TENDER BECAME A NO-BID CONTRACT

The story begins, as so many of this administration’s embarrassments do, with an item buried in official routine. In December 2024, GPL issued an invitation for proposals for project supervisory services related to the Gas-to-Energy initiative. Bids were opened in January 2025. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board evaluated the submissions and recommended the lowest-qualifying bidder: Method4 Engineering Inc., a Canadian firm.

Method4 was never told. GPL, having received NPTAB’s recommendation in January, said nothing to the winning company. The contract was not awarded, the file was not closed, and Method4 learned it had won only when Stabroek News reported the matter months later. This silence was not negligence — it was preparation. On June 2, 2025, GPL wrote to NPTAB requesting the annulment of the Method4 award. Three weeks later, on July 17, sole-source procurement of InterEnergy went before Cabinet under the Office of the Prime Minister, which gave its no-objection.

Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran — one of the few technocrats in Guyana willing to call procurement violations by their statutory names — was unambiguous: GPL’s failure to notify Method4 of its award was a violation of Section 39 of the Procurement Act. More fundamentally, Goolsarran noted that sole-source procurement cannot legally be used when the services are demonstrably available from other suppliers, as evidenced by the very fact that GPL had already received competitive proposals

. There is no legal corridor between the rejection of Method4 and the engagement of InterEnergy. The government created one anyway.

When Minister Indar was subsequently pressed in Parliament by APNU’s Sherod Duncan, he argued the move was fully justified under the Act due to a critical and urgent need to stabilize the GPL grid. This was the government’s chosen justification for a procurement decision that had been months in preparation, predicated on a Memorandum of Understanding signed with InterEnergy in January 2024 — before the tender was even issued.

GPL issued the tender in December 2024. InterEnergy had an MoU with GPL since January 2024. The competitive process was, in retrospect, a procedural formality that the outcome had already been decided.

THE ARITHMETIC OF THE DEAL

President Ali, in defending the contract prior to signing, argued that comparable services could have cost as much as US$40 million. This framing — that US$15.6 million is a bargain relative to a hypothetical ceiling the government itself invented — is not a procurement justification. It is rhetorical misdirection.

What the government did not say is that Method4’s lowest bid, which NPTAB evaluated and recommended, came in at a figure millions cheaper than InterEnergy’s US$15.6 million. The public has not been given the precise figures for either bid. No tender board minutes have been published. No evaluation criteria have been released. No justification for why InterEnergy’s qualifications outweighed Method4’s has been formally provided. What Vice President Jagdeo called the most cost-effective choice is, by definition, not the cheapest option the competitive process produced.

At US$650,000 per month, InterEnergy is being paid to supervise work that Power China and Indian firm Kalpataru are executing under separate contracts totaling over US$400 million.

The supervisor costs more per month than many of the infrastructure subcomponents being supervised. The taxpayer funds the infrastructure, funds the supervision, funds the power ships keeping the lights on in the interim, and receives no itemized accounting for any of it.

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THE WALL OF SILENCE

APNU has now asked four times, through parliamentary channels, for the full procurement records of the InterEnergy contract: tender board minutes, evaluation criteria, and the justification for sole-source selection. The government has not provided them. Minister Indar has offered parliamentary answers that defend the outcome without disclosing the process. GPL, NPTAB, and the Office of the Prime Minister have collectively maintained what Goolsarran described as a blackout on information.

When Stabroek News put the procurement legality question directly to InterEnergy Chairman Rolando González Bunster in October 2025, his response was instructive. He recounted that President Ali had visited InterEnergy’s operations in the Dominican Republic, was impressed by what he saw, and that a partnership followed.

Asked specifically whether he was concerned that the contract appeared to violate Guyana’s procurement law, González Bunster said it was none of his business. He later approached the reporter who had asked and suggested the line of questioning indicated a desire to exclude InterEnergy from future Guyanese business.

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This is the posture of a company that has been given every reason to believe the rules do not apply to it: a head of state personally enchanted by its facilities, a Cabinet that produced no-objection without competitive evaluation, and a government that treats parliamentary scrutiny as an inconvenience rather than a constitutional requirement.

When the Chairman of a foreign contractor calls procurement law enforcement ‘none of my business,’ the question is not about his conduct — it is about the government that has made him so comfortable in that view.

EIGHT MONTHS: WHAT HAS BEEN DELIVERED

The contract was signed October 8, 2025. By the time InterEnergy presented its roadmap to President Ali in early June 2026 and inaugurated its Georgetown office, eight months of the two-year contract had elapsed — representing, at the contracted rate, approximately US$5.2 million in payments assuming disbursement on schedule. The government has confirmed none of this. No payment schedule has been published. No milestone report has been tabled in Parliament. No progress audit has been commissioned or released.

What InterEnergy has publicly cited as evidence of its work includes supervision of over 350 kilometers of transmission lines, 16 new or expanded substations, and the deployment of 20,000 smart meters — all projects that were already underway or contracted before InterEnergy’s engagement, built by other companies, financed by public capital, and which would have proceeded regardless of whether a Dominican Republic management consultancy was watching. The claim of supervision over work that was already in motion is not a deliverable. It is a description of proximity.

The grid, meanwhile, remains dependent on Karpowership’s Turkish power ships. Load-shedding continues. The Gas-to-Energy plant, whose supervisory readiness InterEnergy was hired to ensure, is still not operational. APNU this week filed a parliamentary question about the status of power ship contract renewals and whether Guyana’s grid would survive the transition if either vessel ceased operations before Wales comes online. The government broke its silence only after the question was filed. The power ship dependency that InterEnergy was engaged to help end has not ended.

WHAT MUST BE ANSWERED

This editorial makes no allegation of corruption in the criminal sense. It makes a simpler and more verifiable demand: that a government which spends public money on sole-sourced contracts, displaces competitive bidders without notification, and refuses to disclose payment records to elected representatives is not governing in the public interest. It is governing against it.

The following are not opposition talking points. They are the minimum requirements of statutory accountability under the Procurement Act, the Financial Administration and Audit Act, and the basic obligations of a Parliament whose members were elected to exercise oversight:

1. GPL and the Ministry of Public Utilities must immediately publish the full NPTAB evaluation records for the December 2024 tender, including Method4’s bid amount, InterEnergy’s proposal, and the evaluation scores for each.
2. Cabinet must release the sole-source justification document submitted on July 17, 2025, including the legal opinion — if one was obtained — on whether InterEnergy’s engagement satisfied the Procurement Act’s criteria for single-source award.
3. GPL must table a full payment schedule and disbursement record showing every sum paid to InterEnergy from contract inception through the current date, certified by the Auditor General.
4. InterEnergy must submit to Parliament a formal progress report against agreed contractual milestones, separating its own deliverables from infrastructure work performed by other contractors under separate agreements.
5. The Audit Committee of Parliament must initiate a formal inquiry into the procurement process, with terms wide enough to examine the relationship between the January 2024 MoU, the December 2024 tender, the June 2025 annulment request, and the July 2025 Cabinet no-objection.

This is a public utility that Guyanese depend on for their homes, their businesses, and their futures. Its US$15.6 million consultancy contract is not an abstraction. It is money drawn from an oil-era fiscal ledger that was supposed to close the gap between what this country has been promised and what it actually receives. Until the government opens its books, that gap — like the lights in too many Guyanese homes — remains dark.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.