No Law, No Shame: The AG’s Wolf Is Wearing His Own Clothing

No Law, No Shame: The AG’s Wolf Is Wearing His Own Clothing

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar. September 2026

Attorney General Anil Nandlall wants Guyanese to believe that lawyers offering to represent MV Barima families are the threat in this story. He called them reckless. He called them foolish. He said they were “soliciting and touting” and committing criminal offences. He warned grieving families that free legal advice is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The Law He’s Invoking Doesn’t Say What He Needs It to Say

Touting is a real offence in Guyana, and it has been since 1931. But the Legal Practitioners Act defines a tout narrowly: a person who is paid, by a lawyer or on a lawyer’s behalf, to go out and drum up clients for that lawyer. It is a runner’s offence — the person hanging around the courthouse steering business toward an attorney for a fee. It was written for that specific abuse, and it has produced exactly one prosecution in Guyana’s history. The Court of Appeal threw that conviction out in 1971, on the finding that the “legal business” being touted for wasn’t even genuine. Nothing has been successfully prosecuted under this provision in the fifty-five years since.

Separately, the Act restricts attorneys from soliciting retainers directly and forbids advertising legal services. That is a different provision, aimed at a different problem: professional-conduct standards for practicing lawyers, enforced; when it is enforced at all — by the Guyana Bar Association, not by ministerial broadcast.

Neither provision touches what Mr. Nandlall is actually condemning. A qualified attorney offering to represent a grieving family, for free or for a share of an eventual award, is not a tout. It is not solicitation in the sense the Act criminalizes. It is a lawyer doing what lawyers are licensed to do. Contingency and percentage-fee arrangements are lawful, common, and unremarkable in jurisdictions around the world, including this one. If the Attorney General has a specific statute that makes this arrangement a criminal offence, he should cite the section and subsection on air, the way any lawyer defending a legal claim is expected to. He did not. He asserted criminality and moved on, confident that no one watching “Issues in the News” would ask him to show his work.

We are asking.

He Has Done This Before, and We Have the Court Record

Guyanese should not have to reconstruct this pattern from memory. It is documented, litigated, and still before the courts.

On May 21, 2023, a fire at the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory killed twenty children. On July 3, 2023 — forty-two days later; Attorney General Nandlall flew to Mahdia with a government team to meet the families. According to sworn allegations now part of an active High Court claim, the families were pressured to sign settlement agreements on the spot, without independent legal counsel, for five million dollars per child. Parents have alleged they were told, in substance, that if they didn’t sign, they might get more later through a lawsuit — or they might get nothing at all. Some signed under that pressure. The government appointed attorney who represented the state in that room, Keoma Griffith, now sits in Cabinet as Minister of Labour.

Those families are now three years into a High Court battle to have those signatures set aside. In June 2026, Chief Justice Navindra Singh found the case could not be resolved simply by looking at the agreements themselves — it required a full hearing on whether the people who signed even had the legal capacity to settle claims that, in law, belonged to the children’s estates. The Attorney General’s own applications to strike out the case were refused. As recently as September 2, 2026, Mr. Nandlall  now defending the state directly, represented alongside senior counsel — filed a defense denying any negligence at all.

Compare the Two Offers on the Table

Set the two things Mr. Nandlall is denouncing side by side.

What the opposition-aligned lawyers are offering: independent counsel, engaged by the family’s own choice, compensated only if the family recovers something — meaning the lawyer’s incentive is aligned with getting the family the most they can, not the least. Nothing about this requires anyone to sign anything under time pressure. Nothing about it forecloses a family’s right to walk away.

What produced the documented Mahdia harm: a government minister meeting grieving parents forty-two days after their children died, without independent counsel present, with an agreement already drafted, urging signature the same day.

Mr. Nandlall’s own government has been careful, in both the Mahdia and the Barima cases, to insist repeatedly that what it offers is “not compensation” and carries “no admission of liability” — language written by lawyers, for lawyers, to protect the state’s legal position.

Families are entitled to have someone in the room whose only job is to protect theirs. That is not a wolf. That is the floor of what due process requires when the party sitting across the table from a grieving family is the same party that may ultimately be found responsible for their loss.

What We’re Actually Asking

We are not endorsing any specific lawyer, arrangement, or fee structure being offered to Barima families — we have no independent basis to vouch for any of them, and families should scrutinize any arrangement, government or private, before signing it. Independent legal advice is not immune from bad actors either.

But that is precisely why the Attorney General’s intervention is the wrong one. If Mr. Nandlall’s concern is genuinely for these families’ welfare, the honest step is to name the specific statute he says is being broken, refer any suspected violation to the Bar Association or the police for investigation in the ordinary way, and let families make their own choice about representation — free of a state broadcast telling them, before they’ve spoken to anyone, that the people offering to stand between them and the government are the ones to fear.

Guyana is a free society. Self-determination is not a courtesy the state extends to grieving families — it is their right. Families choosing their own lawyers, on their own terms, including a percentage-fee arrangement freely entered into, is lawful. It is standard practice in nearly every common-law jurisdiction on earth.

Mr. Nandlall knows this. What he is running from is not a legal question. It is Mahdia, and the fact that this time, families might have someone in the room whose only client is them.

We renew a demand we have made before, on separate grounds: with the Section 23 limitation clock already running under the Transport and Harbors Act, families need clear, independent legal guidance now, not later — and it should come from counsel who answer to them, not to the ministry that may end up a defendant.

— The Board