Par for the Course

Par for the Course

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026 

BBCI’s former company chairman says the government paid $400 million for 400 million ordinary shares at $1 apiece. That confirms an arithmetic exercise, not a valuation — and it leaves the only question that matters to the public unanswered.

Kiskadee Watch’s report on the winding-up of the Berbice Bridge Company Inc. (BBCI) has been described, including by its own framing, as bringing clarity to the government’s acquisition of the bridge. It does nothing of the sort. What  Paul Cheong disclosed to that outlet is a division of a sum, not an accounting of value. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the entire story. 

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY DISCLOSED

According to Cheong’s account, six shareholders held BBCI’s ordinary shares between them, and each was paid the par value of their holding, in full:

The arithmetic is clean, and there is no reason to doubt it: 400,000,000 shares at $1 each produces exactly $400,000,000, which matches the figure originally reported. Cheong further stated that BBCI’s “other outstanding obligations were settled from the company’s own funds,” without identifying what those obligations were, their total value, or what was paid to holders of preference shares, bonds, or subordinated debt. He declined to release the Cabinet memorandum authorising the acquisition, calling it a confidential Cabinet document, and directed further questions to the Secretary to the Cabinet.

PAR VALUE IS NOT VALUE

An ordinary share is a unit of ownership in a company, not a claim on any specific asset the company holds. BBCI shareholders owned a proportional stake in the corporate entity that held the concession to operate the Berbice River Bridge and collect tolls on it — not a physical fraction of the bridge itself.

The figure Cheong provided — $1 per share — is the par value: a nominal figure fixed at incorporation for legal and accounting purposes, unrelated to what the company, or the asset it controls, is actually worth. A company can carry a $1 par value on its shares while the underlying enterprise is worth billions, or comparatively little, depending entirely on the balance sheet behind it. Confirming that the government paid par confirms only that — not that par reflected the bridge’s value, BBCI’s asset base, or the state’s total cost of assuming control.

The $400 million figure prices one instrument, at a nominal rate, with no balance sheet attached to it. It is not a valuation of the bridge. It was never presented as one.

THE NUMBER THAT WAS NOT ASKED FOR

Former Public Works Minister David Patterson has said the $400 million price struck him as “surprisingly low” set against BBCI’s own former position — pointing to an $8 billion asking price the company placed on the bridge between 2015 and 2020, and to documents showing BBCI reported debts exceeding $6 billion in October 2018 while seeking steep toll increases from the then government. Those increases were rejected. Patterson has since said he suspects “there is something else in the arrangement” beyond the straightforward sale of ordinary shares.

None of that gap has been reconciled by anything Cheong has said. A $6 billion 2018 debt position and an $8 billion self-assessed asking price sit, unexplained, alongside a $400 million transaction described only as the nominal value of one class of equity. If BBCI’s finances genuinely improved enough after 2020 — through higher traffic, cost controls, and a more constructive relationship with government, as the company itself has claimed — to make a sub-par sale plausible, that improvement should be demonstrable on a balance sheet. No such balance sheet has been produced, to Kiskadee Watch or to this newsroom.

THE QUESTION A PUBLISHED PIECE SHOULD ASK

It is not productive to ask Cheong, or BBCI, for the Cabinet documents a second time. That door has already been closed, and there is no reason to expect it opens on request from a different outlet. The more productive question is not addressed to BBCI at all. It is addressed to the institutions accountable for how public money was spent and what the public now owns as a result:

♦ What did the people, by way of the government, receive for $400 million?

That is the only question this transaction was ever really about, and it remains entirely open. It requires answers on at least four fronts:

♦Asset valuation. Was any independent valuation of BBCI’s shares, assets, or the bridge itself conducted before the acquisition — by the Finance Ministry, NICIL, or the Auditor General? NICIL was itself a BBCI shareholder and is the state’s designated asset-holding vehicle; it is positioned to answer this directly.

♦Assumed liabilities. What obligations, if any, did the state assume beyond the $400 million ordinary-share payment? Cheong’s claim that other obligations were “settled from the company’s own funds” asserts BBCI had sufficient reserves to clear a debt position Patterson placed above $6 billion in 2018 — a claim that itself warrants scrutiny rather than acceptance.

♦The preference shares and other instruments. The National Insurance Scheme alone has been reported to hold $950 million in BBCI preference shares — more than double the entire ordinary-share transaction — separate from the $80 million in ordinary shares addressed in Cheong’s disclosure. What became of that holding, and of any bonds or subordinated debt, has not been stated.

♦The cost of the arrangement since. Crossings have been free to the public since August 2025, with government covering tolls directly. What is the annual cost of that commitment, and was it weighed against the $400 million figure in any account of whether this was value for public money? 

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is not an allegation of wrongdoing in the transaction itself. Nothing in the public record establishes that the price paid was improper, only that it has not been explained. The government is entitled to acquire the bridge on whatever terms it negotiated. The public is equally entitled to know what those terms actually secured — in assets, in liabilities retired, and in the total cost of the state’s new ownership of a bridge it says it will now replace with a four-lane, high-span successor, on a timeline it has not connected to this transaction in any public statement.

A par-value share count is not that account. Until the Finance Ministry, NICIL, or the Auditor General produce one, the $400 million figure remains what it has been from the outset: a number without a balance sheet behind it.

— The Board