Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

Singh Denies Defrauding Clients. He Does Not Explain Why His Barbados Project Is Five Months Late — With Nothing to Show For It.

OPINION BY: – Staff Writer – September 2026

Following our report on the fraud allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and its Director of Projects and Construction, Hardeep Singh — and the company’s earlier denial, issued through Modular Build Guyana and carried by INews — Singh has now issued a personal statement responding directly to the allegations. We have reviewed that statement in full. We stand by our original reporting. And in the course of examining Singh’s response, we have uncovered a second, independent body of evidence he did not address, and which we do not believe he anticipated would surface: a parallel, contracted, government-backed housing project in Barbados that is, as of this writing, five months past its own stated deadline; with no completed home to show for it.

What Singh actually said

In a formal statement issued on social media, Singh rejected the allegations reported in our original piece in categorical terms:

“I categorically deny allegations that I have defrauded clients of GYD $145 million, misappropriated client funds, deliberately taken money without intending to perform contracted works, or ‘fled’ Guyana to escape responsibility.”

He specifically rejected the characterization of his absence from Guyana as evidence of flight: “I am a British national involved in international business activities and travel internationally. My presence outside Guyana should not be misrepresented as evidence of guilt or an attempt to evade legitimate obligations.” He said he would cooperate with any formal police inquiry, stating he takes “any legitimate police enquiry extremely seriously,” and objected to the allegations being treated as established fact merely because complaints had been filed:

“What I will not accept is the existence of a complaint being portrayed publicly as proof that the allegations contained within that complaint are true.”,

On the substance of the four Guyanese clients’ claims, Singh did not dispute that the projects were delayed or incomplete. He disputed only the characterization of that outcome as fraud: “I will not claim that every Modular Builds project has proceeded without difficulty. There have been delays, commercial pressures and disputes… But accepting that projects have experienced difficulties is fundamentally different from accepting an allegation that I entered those contracts intending to steal clients’ money. I reject that allegation.” He said the $145 million figure improperly aggregates four separate contracts into a single sum, and that Modular Builds holds documentation — expenditure records, procurement records, construction activity — capable of demonstrating work was actually undertaken on each project, which he says is available for independent professional assessment. He gave an undertaking that works would be resume in it’s  entirety from Sept 15. We await confirmation of the resumption and will publish same . 

What the statement does not say

Read closely, Singh’s statement is narrower than its categorical language suggests. He denies intent to defraud. He does not dispute the underlying facts our original reporting relied on: that four clients paid a combined $145 million, and that none of the four projects was completed to anything close to its contracted scope. A statement that concedes delay and dispute while denying only the characterization of that delay as deliberate is not a rebuttal of what was reported — it is an argument about how to interpret it.

Nor does Singh say where he currently is, when he last had direct contact with the four affected clients, or why — if the documentation he describes exists and demonstrates good-faith performance — it has not yet been produced to the clients themselves, to Kaieteur News, or to this newsroom. “Documentation capable of demonstrating expenditure” is a claim that evidence exists. It is not evidence.

Most notably, Singh’s statement addresses only the Guyana allegations. It says nothing about Modular Builds’ operations outside Guyana. We do not believe that omission was strategic. We believe it is because, until now, the Barbados side of Modular Builds’ record has not been examined publicly. It is being examined now.

The Barbados contract Singh’s statement does not mention

In November 2025, Modular Builds Guyana; at the time barely two months old on Barbados’s corporate register; was awarded a contract by that country’s state housing agency, HOPE Inc., to build 86 steel-framed homes at Fustic Gardens, St Lucy. The award drew immediate scrutiny: Opposition Senator Ryan Walters publicly questioned how a company almost nobody in Barbados had heard of, including some state officials, had secured a large government housing contract within weeks of its registration. HOPE’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Williamson, defended the process as “a rigorous tendering process” fully compliant with Chief Procurement Office regulations, and told Barbados Today the first phase — ten houses — would be complete by April 2026.

That deadline has now passed by five months. As of this newsroom’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own promotional website this month, the company’s published Barbados project photographs show no completed or handed-over home. What they show is a single structure at steel-frame stage — roof sheeting only recently begun — and an aerial image of the wider Fustic Gardens site showing multiple foundation slabs laid but no additional structures raised beyond that single frame. This is the company’s own chosen evidence of its progress, published on a platform it controls and updates at will.

For an operation whose entire public pitch rests on speed — homes built in seven days in Guyana, “14-day turnkey” builds advertised repeatedly across its own marketing — the absence of a single finished unit to showcase, months past a public deadline its own CEO’s counterpart announced, is not a detail. It is the story.

A pattern Barbados’s own auditors have already documented — with a different company

Modular Builds’ difficulties in Barbados do not exist in isolation from that country’s institutional history. A 2025 Barbados Audit Office special report into HOPE Inc.‘s building programmes documents an earlier, separate arrangement with an unnamed Guyanese supplier of prefabricated hardwood houses, contracted under a different HOPE programme in May 2023. The findings are stark: a $3.5 million advance paid to the Guyanese company with no contract, performance bond, or advance-payment bond in place at the time of payment; HOPE’s own due diligence flagging that the company had no prior contracts exceeding US$100,000 and liabilities exceeding its assets — a company HOPE’s own investigators considered a credit risk before a dollar changed hands; a performance bond that lapsed after the company failed to secure a replacement from any Barbadian financial institution; and, of 350 contracted housing units, only 60 ever delivered, several incomplete. HOPE’s own board voted to terminate the arrangement in November 2023. The audit found no evidence the responsible ministry ever acted on that recommendation.

We want to be precise about what we are, and are not, asserting. We have not established that the unnamed Guyanese hardwood-house supplier in the 2023 audit and Modular Builds Guyana Inc. are the same company. The two arrangements involve different HOPE programmes, different construction methods, and were struck roughly two years apart. What the audit establishes independently of that question is this: Barbados’s state housing agency has an official, audited record of advancing significant public money to Guyanese contractors without the bonding or verified capacity to justify it — and the Fustic Gardens contract, on the evidence of Modular Builds’ own published record, now appears to be following a strikingly similar trajectory, whoever ultimately built each.

Why this matters to the Guyana allegations

Singh’s defense, distilled, is that delay and dispute are not proof of fraud, and that a company can fall behind on a contract without intending to defraud anyone. That is true as a general proposition. It is harder to sustain when the same company, operating under the same brand, marketing the same speed-built promise, is simultaneously running months behind on a second, entirely separate, government-backed contract in a second country — with nothing publicly shown for it. One late project might be commercial misfortune. A company with two major contracts in two countries, both stalled, both past their stated deadlines, invites a different question than the one Singh’s statement answers: not whether any single failure proves intent, but whether Modular Builds currently has the operational capacity to deliver on its contracts anywhere at all.

Singh has said he welcomes scrutiny and stands ready to cooperate with any formal inquiry. We take him at his word, and we extend the same invitation his statement extends to others: we welcome a direct, specific response — from Singh, from Modular Builds, or from HOPE Inc. — addressing the current status of the Fustic Gardens contract, the reason for its delay, and a firm date by which the outstanding homes, in Guyana and in Barbados, will actually be completed.

Until that response comes, the documentation he says exists remains, as he himself put it of the allegations against him, a claim rather than a proof.

—The Board