The Audit Team That Audits Itself

 EDITORIAL

The Audit Team That Audits Itself

President Ali’s new Safety and Compliance Audit Team is staffed by the very officials whose oversight is now in question — and revisits a warning MARAD gave itself, and ignored, four years ago.

On July 31, 2026, President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali announced the formation of a Safety and Compliance Audit Team, tasked with reviewing “the safety and compliance standards governing marine vessels operating in Guyana” in the wake of the MV Barima disaster of July 18, which has claimed dozens of lives in the country’s worst maritime tragedy.

The Team comprises Dr Ivor English, former Director-General of the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD); Mr Volton Skeete, former Harbour Master of Guyana; and Captain Joseph Lewis, described as a Marine Officer and Surveyor of Ships.

The announcement was framed, in the President’s own words, as part of “government’s continuing response measures to strengthen maritime safety and prevent future tragedies.”

A close reading of the record — and of the men chosen to conduct it — suggests something closer to the opposite: an audit built to return the same verdict the sector has already delivered once, in 2022, and that the government did not act on.

AN INSIDER REVIEWING INSIDERS

Dr Ivor English is not an outside expert parachuted in to interrogate MARAD’s failures. His own curriculum vitae, filed with the University of Guyana, lists him as a Director on the Board of the Guyana National Shipping Corporation since 2015 and a Consultant to the Maritime Administration and Transport and Harbours Department from 2015 to the present. He never left the institutional orbit he has now been asked to audit.

Nor is his role confined to institutional membership. English has already staked out a public position defending the composition of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Barima disaster — the very body whose independence this news-outlet and Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) have separately questioned.

Appearing on the YouTube programme Caribbean Tea, English dismissed concerns that two of the CoI’s five commissioners — Trinidadian attorney Nyree Dawn Alfonso and, by professional association, newly appointed Labour Minister Keoma Griffith — carry political and prior-client ties that this publication  has documented in earlier reporting.

“We live in a world where becoming apolitical is often a very difficult conceptualisation,” English said, acknowledging on record that Alfonso served as an election agent for Trinidad and Tobago’s ruling United National Congress in 2025, and that Griffith sat on the same legal team as Alfonso representing vessel owners in a 2022 Guyana High Court matter.

A man who has publicly waved away the conflict-of-interest question surrounding one accountability body has now been installed to co-lead another.

That is not independence. That is the government recycling a trusted name to launder a second process through the same reassurance the first one required.

A CAREER INSIDE THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

Mr Volton Skeete’s record is less politically entangled but no less institutional. Public reporting places him as Harbour Master as far back as 2008 and through at least 2012, during which he managed the Ports and Harbours Division, piloted vessels on the Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara rivers, and supervised launch and dredge crews.

His entire career sits inside the same chain of command — Transport and Harbours Department, MARAD, Ministry of Public Works — that is now the subject of the disaster it is being asked to review. Nothing in the public record implicates Skeete personally in any wrongdoing.

But a lifetime in the institution is not distance from it, and distance is precisely what an audit of that institution’s failures requires.

Captain Joseph Lewis is, by contrast, the least documented of the three. No independently verifiable public record establishes his prior institutional role beyond the title given in the President’s own statement. Whatever qualifications justify his appointment have not been made available to the public he is meant to serve.

THE WARNING MARAD GAVE ITSELF IN 2022

“This is not a small matter. So, things that are overlooked before, we have to look into now.” — Minister Juan Edghill, March 2022

The most damning context for this new Audit Team is not the men who sit on it, but the fact that its mandate has already been issued once before — and ignored.

In March 2022, following a separate fatal maritime incident, MARAD disclosed at a press conference that it had only six certified marine surveyors responsible for monitoring more than 2,000 vessels operating in Guyanese waters — roughly 1,800 artisan fishing vessels and 87 trawlers, representing some 10,000 operators.

The Board of Inquiry into that incident found the vessel involved had never been examined by a certified inspector before sailing, and that its captain operated under a licence MARAD itself had not issued. Minister Edghill, at that same press conference, declared it “cannot be business as usual” for the sector’s regulatory framework. MARAD’s Director-General at the time — Mr Stephen Thomas, appointed to the post by Edghill in September 2020 — said plans were “in place to increase this capacity.”

That promise was not kept. MARAD was still publicly advertising to fill a vacant Surveyor position as recently as December 2025, with applications closing January 9, 2026 — six months before the MV Barima went down. Whatever capacity increase was promised in 2022 had, at minimum, not been completed by the time it was needed most.

SAME DIRECTOR, SAME MINISTER, SAME DESK

Captain Stephen Thomas has held the MARAD Director-General post continuously since September 2020. He is the same official who received the 2022 surveyor-shortage warning and promised to fix it, and the same official who stood before the press in July 2026 — days after the Barima capsized — to declare, “based on his knowledge,” that the vessel was not overloaded, before any official inquiry had examined the wreck.

Minister Edghill has held ministerial responsibility over MARAD and the Transport and Harbours Department across the same span, formally reaffirmed by Gazette Order in October 2025, months before the disaster.

This publication has found no public record — no Estimates debate, no Auditor General value-for-money audit, no Public Accounts Committee transcript — showing whether Thomas ever formally requested the surveyor capacity and funding he said MARAD needed, and was refused, or whether the request was simply never made.

That distinction matters, and it is a question that belongs squarely within the Commission of Inquiry’s mandate, and within the mandate of this new Audit Team, if it is to mean anything at all. Absent that record, we do not allege dereliction of duty as a legal finding. But we do say this plainly: the same Director-General and the same Minister who received this warning in 2022 are the same two men now positioned to shape how — and whether — the public learns what happened to it in the years between.

WHAT THIS AUDIT TEAM IS, AND IS NOT

A genuine audit of MARAD’s safety and compliance regime would be conducted by persons with no institutional stake in its prior findings, no professional history inside the agencies under review, and no public record of defending the very accountability mechanisms this disaster has called into question.

The Safety and Compliance Audit Team, as constituted, satisfies none of these conditions.

This news-media renews its call — made in these pages following the CoI’s own swearing-in — for the Office of the President to publish the vetting record behind these appointments, and for Dr English to clarify, on the record, whether his standing consultancy to MARAD and his board seat at the Guyana National Shipping Corporation were disclosed and weighed before his selection.

Guyanese families still burying their dead deserve an audit that investigates the system that failed them — not one conducted by the system investigating itself.

— The Board