INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

20.338 Acres: What the Lease Document Actually Shows

A single instrument of state, issued eight years in the name Mohamed Ali,before Irfaan Ali became president, is now the only verified fact anchoring a controversy his own government says cannot be independently checked.

By Editor, The 592 Guardian  ·  Part I of a Series

The document at the centre of the Long Creek farm controversy is, on its face, unremarkable. It is a lease. It bears a file number, a plan number, a surveyor’s signature, and two names: the Lessor and the Lessee. It says nothing about a ranch, a poultry operation, or a $5 billion valuation. It says nothing about who paid for what came after. What it says, precisely, is this: on terms issued under the State Lands Act, the State of Guyana leased 20.338 acres at Long Creek to a private citizen named Mohamed Ali. That citizen is now the President of the Republic. Everything else in this controversy — the size of the operation today, the financing behind it, whether public resources were used to build it out — sits outside what this document can tell us. This is where the reporting starts: with what is actually on paper, and with the considerable distance between that and what is publicly visible on the ground at Long Creek.

THE INSTRUMENT

The lease is filed under File No. 411123/688 and carries Lease No. A 23480, issued pursuant to Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, Chapter 62:01. The Lessor is recorded as then-President Bharrat Jagdeo, acting on behalf of the State of Guyana. The Lessee is recorded as Mohamed Ali, holder of Passport No. R028239. The land comprises two lots on the western side of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, on the left bank of the Haimaruni River — the area known locally as Long Creek, in the County of Demerara.

Two things follow directly from the document and require no further interpretation. First, the leasehold predates the Ali presidency by close to a decade — the survey plan underlying it is dated 2011, and the lease was issued under the Jagdeo administration, years before Irfaan Ali held national office. Second, the area leased under this instrument is 20.338 acres. Neither of these facts is in dispute. Both are worth stating plainly before the more contested figures enter the record.

THE GAP: TWENTY ACRES, OR A HUNDRED AND FIFTY

Set against the lease figure, the scale of what the public has been shown at Long Creek today is difficult to reconcile. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly described the operation as a roughly 150-acre private ranch, valuing the development at more than $5 billion. This publication’s own satellite polygon trace of the current footprint returns a broadly similar figure — in the neighbourhood of 155 acres. Both estimates sit far outside the 20.338 acres described in the 2011 survey and the lease issued from it.

This is the central arithmetic problem of the Long Creek story, and it is a documentary problem before it is a political one. Somewhere between a State lease for just over 20 acres and a visible operation covering roughly seven times that area, there is a paper trail — further leases, a purchase, a transfer, an allocation under a different instrument, or some combination. That trail has not been made public. This is not an allegation that anything unlawful occurred; it is a statement of what remains undocumented. The 592 Guardian is not in a position, on the evidence presently available, to say how the acreage grew. We are in a position to say that it did, and that the instrument establishing the first 20.338 acres is, at this writing, the only piece of that trail on the public record.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS SAID, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT RESOLVE 

President Ali’s public position, offered in a video statement and in subsequent remarks, is that he acquired the property before assuming the presidency, that its development has been funded through loans, and that reported figures on the farm’s size and value are incorrect. Each of these is a claim capable, in principle, of documentary support: a loan is a matter of record between a borrower and a lender; a disputed acreage figure is a matter of survey. Neither has been supported publicly with the underlying instrument. The President has not named the lending institution or institutions, disclosed the date or terms of the loans, indicated what collateral, if any, was pledged, or produced a survey contradicting the figures now in wide circulation. Until one or more of these is produced, the President’s account and the publicly visible facts remain in the same posture: asserted, not demonstrated.

THE VERIFICATION THE PRESIDENT CITES — AND WHY IT CANNOT HAPPEN

The most consequential sentence in President Ali’s public defence is also the one that undercuts itself on a plain reading of the law. Responding to the allegations, the President said that his asset acquisitions and the source of the funds used for them “are capable of verification through the relevant financial and regulatory records,” and that he has, as required by law, made the appropriate declarations to the Integrity Commission.

The body he is pointing to as proof is, by statute, the one body in Guyana legally forbidden from telling the public what it knows.

Under the Integrity Commission Act, Chapter 26:01, the Commission operates under a strict statutory duty of confidentiality. It is prohibited from disclosing the contents of any declaration or assessment it holds. This is not a discretionary practice or an institutional habit; it is the law under which the Commission is constituted. The consequence is direct: the “verification” the President has invited the public to seek is, by his own government’s statute, unavailable to that public. A journalist, an opposition MP, or an ordinary citizen cannot obtain the Commission’s file on the President’s declared assets, however filed and complete that file may be. The President’s statement is true and beside the point in the same breath — the records may well exist and say everything he claims. No one outside the Commission is permitted to know.

ON THE RECORD: TWO INSTITUTIONAL VOICES, ONE DIAGNOSIS

This is not solely The 592 Guardian’s reading of the statute. Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran, former Speaker of the National Assembly, has renewed a call for reform he has been making since at least 2012 — a call that was, by his own account, a factor in his departure from the People’s Progressive Party after more than five decades of membership. Ramkarran has pointed to jurisdictions where senior officials’ financial declarations are public by law, and to the United States’ Ethics in Government Act as a model requiring presidential financial disclosure, arguing that Guyana’s growing oil-financed budgets have expanded the opportunities for the very conflicts its disclosure regime is unable to surface.

APNU Member of Parliament Dr. Terrence Campbell has gone further, stating that he has drafted an amendment to the Integrity Commission Act that would make certain aspects of high officials’ declarations public, and calling on parliamentary party leaders, the President, and Cabinet to voluntarily release summary declarations for 2025 in the interim, ahead of any legislative change. Separately, Transparency International Guyana has taken the unusual step of ceding control of any inquiry into the Long Creek matter to international TI chapters and independent outside experts — an implicit acknowledgment that the local chapter does not consider itself positioned to investigate credibly on its own.

Taken together, a former Speaker of the governing party’s own political lineage, an opposition parliamentarian with a drafted bill in hand, and the country’s leading anti-corruption watchdog are converging on the same diagnosis from different directions: the law as written cannot produce the verification the President says is available.

WHAT THIS REPORT ESTABLISHES, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

In the interest of the legal defensibility this news-media holds itself to, we state plainly what this first instalment does and does not claim.

Established, from the primary document: a 20.338-acre lease over Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek was issued to Mohamed Ali under the Jagdeo administration, under Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, years before he became President. The statutory confidentiality provision of the Integrity Commission Act, Cap. 26:01, means the Commission cannot legally confirm or disclose the contents of any declaration the President has filed.

Not yet established: how the operative footprint at Long Creek grew from 20.338 leased acres to the roughly 150-to-155 acres now visible; the identity of the lender or lenders behind the President’s stated “bank loans,” their terms, dates, or collateral; and whether any public infrastructure was extended to the property outside the terms available to other applicants. These are the subjects of Part II of this series.

The 592 Guardian is requesting, on the record, that the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, and the Integrity Commission each provide the underlying instruments — the further lease or transfer documents accounting for the acreage beyond the original 20.338, and the loan instruments referenced in the President’s public statement — or state on the record why they will not. We will publish any response in full.

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— The Board, The 592 Guardian