The MOAP Conduit: Ghost Payroll at the Gas-to-Energy Site

THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL   |   June 2026

The MOAP Conduit: Ghost Payroll at the Gas-to-Energy Site

A leaked digital payment trail at Wales reveals an undocumented foreign workforce paid outside Guyana’s tax and labour laws — and exposes a pattern this newspaper has now documented twice in two months.

The Wales, West Bank Demerara campsite is presented by the Irfaan Ali administration as the flagship achievement of Guyana’s energy transition. Reporting built on leaked digital payment records and worker testimony now establishes that it is also the site of a payroll structure engineered to keep hundreds of foreign labourers outside the reach of Guyana’s labour and tax regime. The workers building the Gas-to-Energy plant for Lindsayca are not paid by Lindsayca or by any of its named partners. They are paid by an intermediary identified as MOAP Inc., a company whose paper directors sit atop a structure tightly bound to Lindsayca’s supply chain.

The mechanics are not subtle. Disbursements move in bulk into digital wallets rather than through the banking system, and the payment confirmations reviewed by reporters show no NIS contribution and no income tax withheld on any of them. Of the roughly 1,500 people working the site, only 50 are Guyanese. The remainder are, on the available evidence, substantially undocumented — holding no valid work permit, and dependent for both income and protection on a company most could not properly identify if asked to.

One worker, speaking only on condition of anonymity, put it plainly: workers paid through MOAP have “little recourse and are afraid for our job and income.” He asked why Minister of Labour Keoma Griffith has never visited or inspected the site. It is a modest demand — an inspection — and it is one the Ministry has, by every account available to this newspaper, failed even once to meet. No labour inspection. No work-permit verification. No site visit, on a project of this scale and public cost. That is not oversight. It is abdication.

Readers of this publication will recognize the architecture, because we have already documented its near-identical twin this year. Our reporting on the EKAA HRIM labour case at the Batavia quarry — built on an ILO submission dossier — set out a dual-contract structure and cross-border wage-splitting arrangement bearing several recognized indicators of forced labour. The Wales/MOAP arrangement, on the facts now public, shares the same load-bearing features: an opaque intermediary standing between principal contractor and worker, payment routed to defeat statutory deduction, and a workforce rendered too vulnerable by its own undocumented status to report what is being done to it.

That two of Guyana’s highest-profile, foreign-financed projects — one in quarrying, one in energy infrastructure — have independently converged on the same payroll concealment model in the same calendar year is the detail that should alarm Georgetown more than either case in isolation. It is no longer credible to treat either as an isolated contractor’s misconduct. It is now evidence of a structural gap: Guyana has no functioning inspection regime for the manpower and intermediary-payment companies operating inside its largest capital projects, and contractors on both sides of the economy appear to know it.

That gap persists because no one with the authority to close it has chosen to. The GTE Taskforce, chaired by Winston Brassington, has spent much of the past two years defending Lindsayca’s position on the project through cost overruns and contentious proceedings before the Dispute Adjudication and Amicable Settlement Board. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, by every indication available to this newspaper, continues to favour Lindsayca as the frontrunner for Phase Two. A payroll structure that appears designed to defeat NIS and tax law has done nothing, so far, to disturb that confidence.

This is not an allegation of personal wrongdoing against Mr. Brassington or the Vice President individually. It is an indictment of pattern: a procurement and oversight architecture, spanning extractive industry and infrastructure alike, that treats statutory compliance as negotiable so long as the contractor remains politically favoured and the project remains politically convenient to defend.

This newspaper is not interested in waiting for an internal review that will not be conducted. We are calling, on the record, for four concrete actions: an immediate and unannounced inspection of the Wales campsite by the Ministry of Labour and the Guyana Revenue Authority; full public disclosure of MOAP Inc.’s beneficial ownership and its contractual relationship to Lindsayca; a National Insurance Scheme audit of every wage disbursement processed through MOAP since the project’s start; and a joint inquiry by the Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Foreign Relations into how an unaudited intermediary payroll company gained access to the country’s largest infrastructure project in the first place.

Failing that, this is a matter for the International Labour Organization, which is already reviewing a comparable dossier arising from Batavia. Guyana’s energy transition cannot be built, literally, on the unpaid statutory obligations of an undocumented workforce too frightened to come forward under its own name. A worker has already asked the Minister of Labour to visit his own jobsite. He should not have had to.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board