The Ledger Guyana Refuses to Keep

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL

Sovereignty at the Edges — Part I. : The Register Gap

The Ledger Guyana Refuses to Keep: Why the Absence of a Public Extractives Register Is Itself the Story

There is a question the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority have never had to answer, because no institution in this country has been built with the authority to ask it: who currently holds what, and how did they come to hold it?                                                                                        Not what was signed in 2016. Not what was signed with GMIN, or with U92 Energy Corp., or with whichever shell reorganises itself out of Singapore next quarter. What is true today, on the record, checked against a register that a citizen, a parliamentarian, or a journalist can open without a Freedom of Information request that dies quietly in a ministry drawer.

Guyana has no such register. Not for petroleum. Not for mining. Not for the pipeline of Gas-to-Energy reimbursement arrangements that Trinidadian energy strategist Anthony Paul has now, in a third consecutive Kaieteur News column, all but begged this country to build before it is too late. This editorial board has spent extensive energy documenting the individual wounds — the Section 18 gap in the Mining Act that let G2 Goldfields slide GMIN’s ownership sideways without triggering statutory review; the reverse-takeover architecture that delivered U92’s Kurupung uranium project through a Singapore holding chain nobody at GGMC was resourced to interrogate; the sole-source procurement that displaced Method4 Engineering in favour of InterEnergy while Anand Goolsarran’s statutory objections sat unanswered. Each of these was treated, in turn, as a scandal of the week. None of them is. They are symptoms of one untreated condition: Guyana has never built the institutional plumbing to track what happens to extractive rights after the contract is signed.

Public Contracts Were Never the Whole Promise

Government has taken credit, repeatedly and not entirely without justification, for publishing petroleum agreements that Trinidad and Tobago kept behind closed doors for a century. That step was real. It was also, as Paul’s series has now made explicit in language this Board has been circling for two years, the easy half of transparency.

Petroleum rights, mining licences, and uranium concessions are not static instruments. They move. They are assigned, relinquished, pledged, and quietly restructured through corporate layers designed for exactly that purpose. When GMIN’s change of control moved through indirect transfer rather than a direct, reviewable transaction, it did not break the letter of the Mining Act — it exploited a gap in it that Section 18 has left untouched since long before this administration or the last one. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the kind of gap that persists because no one with the power to close it has ever been made to answer publicly for its cost.

What a Register Would Have Forced Into the Light

Consider what a statutory, searchable extractives register — covering petroleum and mining and the licences GGMC and the Ministry currently treat as administrative ephemera — would have required this country’s regulators to answer, in real time, rather than in a Kaieteur News column three years after the fact:

• Who is the current beneficial owner of GMIN, and through what chain of holding companies did that ownership travel before and after the G2 Goldfields transaction — and did GGMC ever formally assess whether that chain constituted a change of control under Section 18?
• What premium, if any, changed hands in the U92 Energy Corp. reverse takeover of the Kurupung uranium concession, and does the Guyana Revenue Authority have any record of assessing tax liability on that transfer of value?
• On what statutory basis did InterEnergy displace Method4 Engineering in a sole-source procurement that Anand Goolsarran formally objected to, and why does no public record exist showing that objection was ever substantively answered?
• What are the complete terms of the Gas-to-Energy pipeline, cost-recovery, and reimbursement arrangements — including the financing role of Banco San Juan Internacional — and why are these not published with the same posture of openness Government claims for the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement?

These are not abstract questions. Each has already surfaced, piecemeal, through the investigative labour of this outlet and others, because no institution was doing the work of surfacing them systematically. A register does not replace journalism. It replaces leaks, rumour, and scattered company announcements — Paul’s own words — as the primary mechanism by which citizens learn what has happened to resources that belong to them.

The GGMC Audit Backlog Is Not a Coincidence

It should trouble every reader of this news outlet that the Auditor General’s qualified opinion on GGMC’s accounts covers only 2013 to 2016 — a full decade behind the present moment — at precisely the time GGMC is being asked to police the ownership structures of gold, uranium, and rare earth concessions moving through Singapore holding companies and Mauritius jurisdiction fragments. An agency that cannot close its own books within a decade has no plausible capacity to police beneficial ownership in real time. The absence of a public register is not merely a transparency failure. It is the visible edge of a regulatory body operating years behind the transactions it exists to supervise.

Oko West Gold Project

This is precisely the trajectory Paul has warned Guyana against by pointing to Trinidad and Tobago’s history: a country with functioning law on the books — a petroleum register and Gazette notice requirement that existed in statute — where practice quietly diverged from law until citizens could no longer track the country’s own petroleum rights.       Guyana is not importing Trinidad’s outcome by accident. It is importing it by omission, one unregistered transfer and one unaudited institution at a time.

What This Board Demands

The 592 Guardian calls on the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority to state, on the public record and within thirty days of this editorial’s publication, whether any of the following exist in any form accessible to the public:

⇒a consolidated register of extractive licences and their beneficial owners;

⇒a documented review of the GMIN change of control under Section 18 of the Mining Act; a published tax assessment, if any was conducted, of the U92 Energy Corp. transaction;

⇒and a substantive, written response to Anand Goolsarran’s objections in the GPL-InterEnergy procurement. Silence in response to this editorial will be treated, and reported, as an answer.

Guyana still has the option Trinidad and Tobago no longer has: the chance to build this architecture before the volume of transactions makes retrofitting it politically and administratively impossible. A public, statutory extractives register — covering petroleum, mining, and the gas infrastructure now rising at Wales — would not embarrass this Government.

It would be the single strongest evidence that Government has nothing left to hide. The refusal to build one is, in itself, the clearest evidence that it does.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian