THE PRICE OF NOT LOOKING

 THE PRICE OF NOT LOOKING

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar —August 2026

How a company convicted of bribery in Ecuador became the lowest bidder on Guyana’s largest hydropower project — and why no one at NPTAB appears to have asked why

On Thursday August 27 , an Ecuadorean tribunal sentenced former President Lenin Moreno to five years in prison and barred him permanently from public office. His crime: presiding, as vice president and later president, over a bribery network built around the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant — a network that, according to Ecuador’s Attorney General, moved roughly US$76.1 million from Sinohydro Corporation Limited into the pockets of Moreno’s family and business associates between 2009 and 2018. China’s former ambassador to Quito, Cai Runguo, was jailed alongside him. Nineteen other defendants were convicted.

Sixteen  weeks earlier, on May 8, 2026, that same company — Sinohydro Corporation Limited — submitted the lowest bid on file for Guyana’s Amaila Falls Hydropower Project: US$416,866,949.21, for a 165-megawatt facility that this government has called the cornerstone of its renewable energy strategy. Five companies bid. Sinohydro’s proposal is the cheapest. As of this writing, it remains under evaluation by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, with no award announced. 

This newsroom  does not allege that anyone in Guyana’s procurement apparatus has been bribed. We make a narrower and, in some ways, more damning claim: that it should not have taken a foreign courtroom to make Sinohydro’s history relevant to this government’s evaluation of its bid — because that history was never a secret.

It was published. It was public record before the RFP was even reissued. And nothing in the public account of this procurement suggests anyone asked about it.

A RECORD IN PLAIN SIGHT

Sinohydro’s presence in Guyana is not new. In 2020, Zijin Mining Group contracted the company to perform stripping works at the Aurora Gold Mine after acquiring the site from Guyana Goldfields. That arrangement itself drew scrutiny — the Ministry of Labour publicly stated that Zijin’s transfer of roughly 141 AGM employees to Sinohydro’s payroll did not comply with Guyana’s labour laws.

So the company was already known to regulators here, under circumstances already flagged as irregular.

Its international record runs considerably longer and darker. Investigators for the African Development Bank’s Office of Integrity and Anti-Corruption found that Sinohydro misrepresented its prior project experience while bidding for a Uganda road contract in 2013, using references to projects that had not been substantially completed. The World Bank’s Sanctions Board separately reprimanded the company over violations tied to the construction of a hydroelectric plant in Mali. Botswana terminated a Sinohydro airport-expansion contract outright for non-fulfilment of its terms. A Nigerian energy company has pursued an international arbitration claim against Sinohydro. None of this required Ecuador’s verdict to surface — Kaieteur News itself reported in November 2021, on the record, that Sinohydro was among three Chinese firms bidding for the Amaila Falls project that carried prior World Bank blacklisting.

The question is not whether Guyana’s government read Ecuador’s verdict. The question is why it apparently never read its own newspapers.

THE REGULATIONS ALREADY EXIST

Guyana is not without the legal architecture to act on precisely this kind of history. The Procurement Act 2003 and the regulations governing the Public Procurement Commission establish a debarment regime: Regulation 3(1) empowers the Commission to debar or suspend a supplier or contractor found to have engaged in prohibited conduct; Regulations 13 and 14 prohibit any procuring entity from soliciting or considering bids from a debarred or suspended contractor or its affiliates; Regulation 16 requires the Commission to publicise debarments and maintain a public register.

What the Act does not do — so far as this newsroom has been able to establish — is compel Guyana’s evaluators to cross-reference the debarment registers of the multilateral institutions whose own investigators have already done this work. A firm barred by the World Bank or the African Development Bank is not automatically barred in Georgetown. That gap is not a technicality. It is the precise seam through which a company with Sinohydro’s documented history can walk, unremarked, into a $417 million tender for a national infrastructure asset.

This is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is, on the available record, the one we are in. President Ali has recently and publicly proposed a digital procurement system that would track “beneficial ownership, tax and social-security compliance, contractor classification, past performance, debarments and suspensions” for every bidder — a system he has described as necessary precisely because none of that information currently follows a contractor through the process. The Amaila Falls tender is the argument for that system, made in real time, using this government’s own pending decision as the exhibit.

NOT AN ISOLATED SEAM

Sinohydro is not the only name in this government’s contractor pool that should trouble anyone charged with due diligence. This publication’s  ongoing examination of Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. — a Bangladesh-linked contractor holding water-infrastructure and recruitment contracts with Guyana Water Inc. — has documented an open anti-corruption charge against the company in Bangladesh, and an address listed on a Guyana government document that resolves, on inspection, to a private residence in Toronto.

Different company, different sector, same structural failure: a government relying on a bidder’s own paperwork rather than independently verifying who it is dealing with.

Two cases do not yet prove a pattern is policy. They are, at minimum, sufficient to demand one. A procurement system that cannot distinguish a company convicted of bribery abroad, or blacklisted by the world’s principal development lenders, from any other bidder is not a neutral process awaiting the lowest price. It is an open door.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION  IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to determine, from public documents alone, whether Sinohydro’s bid was flagged internally and set aside for other reasons, or whether it was evaluated as though its record did not exist. That distinction matters, and only the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board and the Office of the Prime Minister can resolve it. We are asking them to.

Specifically:

♦Did NPTAB’s evaluation committee for the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project review Sinohydro Corporation Limited’s debarment or sanctions history with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, or any other multilateral lender prior to or during bid evaluation?     

♦Does Guyana’s procurement framework require such a check as a matter of standard practice, for this tender or any other above the high financial threshold?                                                                            ♦And if no such check occurred here, will the government now conduct one before any award is made — rather than after?

Guyana did not create Sinohydro’s record. Ecuador’s courts did not create Guyana’s obligation to examine it. But a government that has spent the better part of this year promising a procurement system capable of catching exactly this kind of history has, in the Amaila Falls tender, a bid sitting in front of it right now that tests whether that promise is real.

The lowest price on the table is not the only number that matters. The public should not have to wait for a verdict in Quito to learn what its own tender board already had reason to ask in Georgetown.

— The Board