The Minister in the Commissioner’s Firm

EDITORIAL  ·  COMMISSION OF INQUIRY  ·  MV BARIMA

The Minister in the Commissioner’s Firm

How a sitting Cabinet minister’s own law chambers became the Guyana address of a COI commissioner’s firm — and how that record was quietly edited in the days around the swearing-in

By Hem Kumar, Editor  ·  The 592 Guardian  ·  July, 2026

Thursday’s swearing-in of the five-member Commission of Inquiry into the sinking of the MV Barima was held behind closed doors. The media were barred. President Irfaan Ali stood before the commissioners he alone had appointed and declared that the panel “meets the highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality, and objectivity.”

No journalist was present to ask him what, precisely, he meant.

The 592 Guardian can now report that in the days immediately surrounding that ceremony, a Trinidad-based law firm quietly stripped a sitting Guyanese Cabinet minister’s name from three separate pages of its public website — pages that had tied him, directly, to the professional home of one of the President’s own appointees.

THE FIRM AND THE COMMISSIONER

Among the five commissioners named by President Ali is Nyree Dawn Alfonso of Trinidad and Tobago, an attorney with expertise in admiralty and maritime law. Ms. Alfonso is the Managing Partner of N.D. Alfonso & Co., a Port-of-Spain firm operating in Guyana as well as Trinidad.

Junior Minister of Labour Keoma Griffith is a Guyanese attorney admitted to practice in both jurisdictions since 2016.

This news- media  has independently confirmed, through the firm’s own published record, that Mr. Griffith has appeared as counsel for N.D. Alfonso & Co. clients in Guyana’s Supreme Court. In a March 2025 case update still live on the firm’s website, N.D. Alfonso & Co. states that the owners of a tug and barge released from judicial arrest in Guyana “were represented by Nyree Alfonso, Asif Hosein-Shah and Keoma Griffith,” naming the future Junior Minister in the same breath as the firm’s Managing Partner — the same Managing Partner President Ali has now placed on the Commission of Inquiry into the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Guyana’s history.

A sitting Cabinet minister does not casually share a byline with a COI commissioner in a Supreme Court filing. The question is not whether the connection exists. It is why the government did not disclose it.

WHAT WE FOUND, AND WHAT WAS REMOVED

The 592 Guardian independently examined N.D. Alfonso & Co.’s website, ttattorneys.com, on July 30 — the day of the swearing-in — and traced a pattern of edits made in the days before it.

The firm’s dedicated professional biography page for Mr. Griffith, previously indexed at ttattorneys.com/keoma-d-griffith, returns a “page not found” error as of this writing. Google’s cached index of that page, reviewed by this news- media shows it described him as admitted to practice law in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago in 2016, with appearances before the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Guyana Court of Appeal, the High Court and the Magistrates’ Court.

The firm’s “Our Team” page, still live, was last modified on July 25, 2026 — one day before Mr. Griffith’s appointment record was scrubbed and five days before the commissioners were sworn in. That page today lists only Ms. Alfonso, one partner, and three consultants. It no longer mentions Mr. Griffith. Google’s cached version of the same page, reviewed by this news outlet , previously listed him as “Correspondent (Guyana), Consultants.”

The firm’s “Contact Us” page, also still live, was last modified on July 26, 2026. It currently lists only a “Guyana Satellite Office” at 225 South Street, Lacytown, Georgetown — with no name attached. An earlier indexed version of that identical page, reviewed by this newspaper, listed the Guyana office as “C/O Mr. Keoma D. Griffith, 225 South Street, Lacytown, Georgetown, Guyana.”

Three pages. Three edits. All in the narrow window between the government naming its commissioners and the public swearing-in it chose to conduct without the press present.

THE QUESTIONS GUYANA DESERVES ANSWERED

This publication  draws no conclusion here that has not already been drawn by the firm’s own website, in its own words, at a time of its own choosing. What the record shows is this:

⇒ A Cabinet minister’s chambers address served as the Guyana contact point for a COI commissioner’s firm.

⇒A Cabinet minister appeared as named counsel alongside that commissioner in Guyana’s courts.

⇒ And in the days around his own government’s swearing-in of that commissioner, the public-facing record of that relationship was edited down to nothing.

President Ali, Minister Griffith, and Commissioner Alfonso each owe the country a direct answer to a direct question: did the President know of this relationship when he named Ms. Alfonso to a Commission investigating a tragedy that killed more than a hundred Guyanese, and if he did not know, why not?

The opposition parties warned, before a single commissioner was named, that public confidence in this inquiry would depend not only on the credentials of its members but on a transparent process free of “actual or perceived conflict of interest.”

TIGI has separately raised concern over the integrity of several commissioners.  APNU’s

Ganesh Mahipaul has objected specifically to the Chairman’s political background.

Chartered accountant Christopher Ram has pressed, unanswered, on why the Commission’s terms of reference stop at the night of July 18 rather than the decade of decisions that put an 87-year-old vessel on that river.

Each of those warnings was dismissed, in effect, by a government that proceeded to swear in its commissioners behind closed doors. Now a fourth thread joins them — one written not by an opposition politician or a critic, but by the commissioner’s own law firm, in its own case files, before anyone thought to ask.

UNCOVERING WHAT THEY COVER

Seventy-two Guyanese families have buried their dead. Thirty more wait for bodies that may never surface.

The government has promised them a Commission that meets “the highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality, and objectivity.”

It has not yet explained why the public record supporting that claim needed editing in the week the claim was made.

The 592 Guardian has sought comment from Minister Griffith, Commissioner Alfonso, and the Office of the President. This is a developing story. We will publish any response in full.

— The Board