THE COUNSEL WHO WOULD BE GATEKEEPER

THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism · Guyana
EDITORIAL
 June 2026 | Georgetown, Guyana

The Counsel Who Would Be Gatekeeper: Devindra Kissoon and the Architecture of a Monopoly

When an officer of the court wields legal process not to vindicate rights but to extinguish competition, the integrity of the bar —and of Guyana’s constitutional order—demands an accounting.

The facts documented in Kaieteur News’ three-part investigation into Guyana’s commercial explosives market are not in dispute. They emerge from sworn affidavits, court filings, and correspondence on the letterhead of London House Chambers. They are, in the precise language of the law, matters of record. What remains in dispute — and what this Board now addresses directly — is whether the conduct they reveal is compatible with the duties of an attorney-at-law admitted to practice before the courts of this Republic.
The subject is Devindra Kissoon, known commercially as Dave Kissoon: a U.S. citizen, former director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guyana, and the self-described exclusive supplier of explosives to the Guyanese mining market for decades. His firm, London House Chambers, acts as commercial counsel to Orica Mining Services, the world’s largest commercial explosives provider. In that capacity, the record shows, Kissoon has systematically deployed the machinery of the High Court to accomplish what the Civil Law of Guyana Act expressly forbids: the creation and enforcement of a commercial monopoly.

The Civil Law Act states that grants or licenses for the ‘sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana… are altogether contrary to the laws of Guyana, and so are and shall be utterly void.’

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF EXCLUSION                                   
In 2015, Dominicana De Cales S.A. — Docalsa — a regional licensee of global distributor Dyno Nobel, attempted to enter the Guyanese market. This was a lawful commercial act. Dyno Nobel is a credentialed international explosives provider. Docalsa’s principals are not insurgents; they are business people pursuing trade in a jurisdiction whose laws explicitly contemplate competition.

Kissoon’s response was not to compete. It was to litigate. He filed an ex parte application — a proceeding conducted without notice to the opposing party — arguing that Docalsa’s solicitations to domestic buyers constituted tortious interference with his prospective business relations. In his sworn affidavit of 30 July 2015, Kissoon named BK Quarries Inc., AGM Inc., Guyana Goldfields Inc., Troy Resources Guyana Inc., and Pharsalus Gold Inc. as clients with whom he expected continuous and exclusive business — a claim that, stated plainly, is an assertion of monopoly rights presented to a court as though they were enforceable entitlements.

The High Court granted an interim injunction in August 2015. Docalsa was frozen out of the market. When the competitor attempted to discharge the injunction in December 2016, London House Chambers deployed procedural arguments to strike out their defense. The matter did not proceed until May 2018 — nearly three years during which a lawful competitor was excluded from a market that Guyana’s Constitution and statutory law promised would remain open.
That three-year exclusion coincided precisely with one of the most consequential periods in Guyana’s modern economic history: the confirmation of the Stabroek Block discovery in 2015 and the onset of the infrastructure surge that would require, among other inputs, commercial explosives at scale. The timing was not incidental. It was, the record suggests, the point.

THE THREAT OF ARREST: AN OFFICER OF THE COURT                 SPEAKS
This Board directs particular scrutiny to a piece of correspondence dated 14 August 2015, dispatched on London House Chambers letterhead to Docalsa. The letter, obtained by Kaieteur News, did not merely assert a legal position. It explicitly threatened a ‘warrant for your arrest and imprisonment’ should Docalsa fail to withdraw from the market. It further noted that customs authorities had been instructed to seize and destroy their products.

Let this be stated without euphemism: threatening arrest and imprisonment in a cease-and-desist letter to a lawful commercial actor is not the conduct of an officer of the court discharging professional obligations. It is the use of legal authority — real or implied — to intimidate. It weaponises the coercive power of the state, or the appearance thereof, to achieve market outcomes that the law explicitly prohibits. The Guyana Bar Association and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court bear an institutional obligation to examine whether this conduct falls within the bounds of professional propriety. This Board calls on both bodies to do so.

The November 2025 cease-and-desist letter to Eclisar Financial — a firm involved in state-sponsored audits of offshore oil operations — carries the same architecture, scaled to the present moment of petrostate expansion. Explicitly copied to the Minister of Natural Resources and the Commissioner of Police, the letter threatens ‘actual, punitive and exemplary damages… in an amount to exceed US$1,000,000.00′ and asserts that London House’s client remains the ‘only authorized explosives dealer in Guyana.’ The carbon copy to the Minister of Natural Resources is not procedural courtesy. It is a signal — to the recipient, to the market, and to any regulator who might contemplate authorizing a competitor — that institutional power stands behind the claim.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTRADICTION                                        
The irony documented in the Kaieteur News investigation is not merely rhetorical. It is legally precise and professionally damning. Devindra Kissoon was lead commercial counsel in litigation that successfully dismantled the decade-long state telecommunications monopoly held by the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, arguing before the courts that such monopolies violated the same Civil Law of Guyana Act that he now relies upon — by implication — to defend market exclusivity in explosives.
The Act’s prohibition is not ambiguous. It declares void ‘all grants or licenses for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana.’ Kissoon understands this provision. He argued it successfully. He knows, as counsel must know, that the Explosives Act’s regulatory framework — however legitimate its public safety rationale — cannot lawfully be converted into a permanent barrier to market entry for the benefit of a single commercial actor. The police commissioner’s licensing authority exists to prevent diversion of dangerous materials to criminal uses, not to guarantee a monopoly to any attorney’s client.

The Explosives Act creates a safety regime. Kissoon appears to have converted it into a property right. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.

THE U.S. CITIZEN AND THE SHERMAN STANDARD                       
Devindra Kissoon is a United States citizen. That fact carries weight beyond biography. The Sherman Antitrust Act — the foundational statute of U.S. competition law — criminalises monopolistic conduct and attempts to monopolise any part of trade or commerce. American courts have held that the Sherman Act applies to conduct abroad that has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on U.S. commerce. Guyana’s extractive sector, in which Kissoon claims exclusive explosives supply rights, is substantially capitalised by U.S.-registered entities and subject to extensive cross-border commercial flows.
This Board does not assert that U.S. antitrust jurisdiction attaches to the specific conduct documented here. That is a legal question for competent counsel. We assert, however, that a U.S. citizen operating in a market where American firms do business — and using legal threats to exclude competitors — operates in a landscape where extraterritorial regulatory scrutiny is not merely theoretical. The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have both demonstrated willingness to examine conduct affecting U.S. commercial interests in foreign jurisdictions. Kissoon’s AmCham directorship further embeds him in a network of U.S.-Guyana commercial relationships in which his market conduct becomes visible to exactly the regulatory audience most capable of acting on it.

THE FDI CALCULUS                                                                                  
Guyana is, by IMF measurement, the world’s fastest-growing economy. Its 2024 GDP growth exceeded thirty percent. The country requires foreign direct investment at scale to build the highways, sea defences, energy infrastructure, and industrial capacity that its oil revenues are meant to fund. That investment requires quarrying. Quarrying requires explosives. When the explosives supply chain operates through a single gatekeeper who has demonstrated willingness to use legal threats to suppress competition, every investor in every extraction-adjacent sector inherits that risk.

Foreign capital does not enter markets where legal process is weaponised as a market control mechanism. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and institutional equity investors conducting due diligence on Guyanese infrastructure projects will encounter this record. When they do, they will price it. Guyana’s investment climate absorbs the cost of Kissoon’s conduct whether or not any single project is visibly deterred.

DEMANDS                                                                                                    
This Board directs the following demands to the named institutional actors:
→To the Guyana Bar Association: Initiate a formal professional conduct inquiry into whether the August 2015 and November 2025 cease-and-desist letters issued by London House Chambers, and the ex parte litigation strategy deployed against Docalsa, constitute a breach of the professional duties owed by an officer of the court to the legal system and to commercial counterparties. The threat of arrest and imprisonment deployed as a market-exclusion instrument is not advocacy. It requires examination.
→To the Chief Justice: Direct the court’s registry to review the procedural history of the Docalsa litigation — specifically, the use of strike-out applications to delay proceedings from 2015 to 2018 — for consistency with the duty of candour and the prohibition on using procedural mechanisms to oppress opposing parties.
→To the Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission: Open a formal market inquiry into the commercial explosives sector under the Competition and Fair Trading Act. The concentration of supply in a single commercial channel, maintained through preemptive litigation and cease-and-desist correspondence copied to government ministers, constitutes a prima facie matter for regulatory examination. The Commission’s enabling legislation provides the authority. What has been lacking is the will.
→To the Minister of Natural Resources: Explain publicly why your ministry received a copy of the November 2025 cease-and-desist letter threatening a competitor in the explosives market. Your acceptance of that notification — without documented objection or referral to the Competition Commission — implies a degree of ministerial endorsement of the incumbent’s market position that is incompatible with your statutory obligations under the Competition and Fair Trading Act and your constitutional duty to act in the public interest.
→To the Commissioner of Police: Clarify under what statutory authority the August 2015 cease-and-desist letter could credibly assert that customs had been ‘instructed’ to seize and destroy a competitor’s products, and whether any such instruction was in fact given. If it was, on whose authority and under which provision of the Explosives Act or Customs Act did it issue.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD FOR OFFICERS OF THE COURT                                                                                                          
This Board closes with a principle that is neither partisan nor speculative. Officers of the court in every common law jurisdiction are held to a standard of conduct that transcends their client’s commercial interests. An attorney may zealously represent a client. An attorney may litigate aggressively. An attorney may seek injunctions, file strike-out applications, and write cease-and-desist letters — all within the bounds of professional duty.
What an attorney may not do is deploy the language and implied authority of the legal system to threaten competitors with arrest and imprisonment as a market control strategy.

What an attorney who successfully argued against telecommunications monopoly may not do is build a commercial monopoly in another sector using the same legal instruments he once condemned. And what an attorney who holds U.S. citizenship and leads a chamber of commerce bridging American and Guyanese commercial interests may not do is cultivate, in his professional conduct, the kind of market-distorting behaviour that the legal systems of both his countries prohibit.

Devindra Kissoon is not beyond accountability. He is, precisely because of his prominence, his dual citizenship, and his institutional affiliations, subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian will continue to document his conduct and the conduct of every institutional actor whose silence enables it.
The gatekeepers of Guyana’s explosives market will answer to Guyana’s law, or they will answer to the investors, institutions, and international partners who are watching what kind of legal culture this Republic is building on the foundation of its oil wealth.
                                           The Editorial Board
                                            The 592 Guardian