THE SEQUENCE REVERSED

THE SEQUENCE REVERSED

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

How Guyana’s Institutions Disclose Only Under Pressure — And What That Means for the $800M GPL Ask

When President Irfaan Ali stood at his office on Shiv Chanderpaul Drive this week and told reporters that fixing Guyana’s electricity grid “is not a short-term fix” and requires “major investments,” he was asking the public to accept a figure — reportedly in the range of US$800 million — without the one thing that would make it verifiable: an itemized accounting of what the money is for, and evidence that the demand crisis it answers was not, in part, manufactured by the absence of the very oversight now being invoked to justify it.

This newsroom  does not allege that it was. We do not yet have the evidence to make that claim, and we are not in the business of asserting what we cannot document. But we have, over recent months, documented something adjacent and arguably more damning: a governing pattern, repeated across at least three unconnected sectors, in which Guyanese regulatory and state institutions act first and disclose later — if they disclose at all — and only when forced to by outside pressure.

That pattern is now the relevant context for evaluating GPL’s numbers, whether or not this specific expenditure fits it.

THE PATTERN, DOCUMENTED

Start with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Kurupung uranium project, a case this newsroom has tracked in detail since earlier this year.

The EPA Act requires, under Part IV, that where a project’s environmental effects are unclear, the agency must publish a reasoned decision on whether a full Environmental Impact Assessment is needed; before other approvals proceed and must give affected persons an opportunity to appeal that decision. In the case of U92 Energy Corp.‘s uranium exploration license at Kurupung, the EPA did not follow that sequence. It issued an Environmental Management Plan to the project’s local subsidiary before conducting the Section 11(2) screening that was supposed to determine whether an EIA was required in the first place. Dr. Vincent Adams, the EPA’s own former Executive Director, has called this what it is: the agency had the process backwards, and having already issued the EMP out of sequence, it is now unclear whether; or how — the agency can unwind it.

The Section 11(2) notice was eventually published. But by the company’s own account, only after sustained pressure from the Amerindian Peoples Association, from Dr. Adams, and from this newsroom’s reporting. And when the notice finally came, it made no mention of a hazard the project’s own consultants had already put in writing two months earlier: 88,000 meters of historic drill core containing radioactive material — stored on-site “several times” moved, and, in the words of the company’s own qualified-person report, in need of relocation to “a safer, adequate facility” because the current storage is not adequate. The EPA exempted the project from a full EIA anyway, reasoning that containment would be “secure” under an approved plan — a conclusion contradicted, on the record, by the applicant’s own admission.

Disclosure came late. It came incomplete. And it came only under pressure.

The same shape appears, in starker and now precisely dated form, at the Wales Gas-to-Energy project. On April 7, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Phillips was asked whether secret payments had been made to the project’s contractor, Lindsayca-CH4, arising from a Dispute Avoidance and Adjudication Board ruling. His answer, on the record, was unambiguous — and wrong on every count . “There are no secret payments made to the contractor,” he said. “The parties have not advanced the arbitration process and as such there is no arbitration ruling… It is therefore incorrect to suggest that the GoG has lost the arbitration.”

Four distinct claims, in a single statement: no payments, no advanced arbitration, no ruling, no loss.

Five weeks later, on May 18, the Prime Minister admitted the opposite of all four. The Government and Lindsayca Guyana Inc. had, he confirmed, reached a settlement on two matters the DAAB had decided in January 2025 — soil stabilisation works at the Wales site, and delay-related provisions. The settlement, he said, represented “a 12.8 per cent increase over the original contract sum of US$759M.” Twelve-point-eight per cent of a project this large is a figure calculated to sound modest. It is, in plain terms, US$97 million.

This was not a case of facts emerging gradually, or a government catching up to a fast-moving story. This was a Prime Minister denying, specifically and repeatedly, that an adjudication had occurred — for over a month, until the position became impossible to sustain. Even in reversing himself, he chose a percentage over a dollar figure, a framing this news-media agrees made a nine-figure liability to Guyanese taxpayers sound, in his own words, like something less than it was.

That the arbitration existed at all should not have been a surprise inside government. This newsroom’s own April Watchdog series had already documented that the project’s consortium registered a UK limited liability partnership, Lindsayca Development LLP, fourteen days before the contract was signed in Georgetown — a structure that allowed the contractor to invoke the 1989 UK-Guyana Bilateral Investment Treaty and route disputes to the DAAB rather than Guyana’s own courts. The pathway to arbitration was built into the contract’s architecture from the start.

The Prime Minister’s April 7 denial that any ruling existed was not a matter of him lacking information the public also lacked — it was a denial of a process his own government’s contract had made available from day one.

Kaieteur News’s editorial board did not let the episode pass quietly, writing that the Prime Minister “collapsed miserably,” and asking of his choice to frame US$97 million as “12.8 per cent”: “What was so hard about saying that from the inception?”

And it appears again, structurally, in the very contract now central to this week’s story: GPL’s sole-source arrangement with InterEnergy, the consultancy whose report is being used to justify the $800 million ask. A sole-source contract is, by definition, one that bypasses the competitive disclosure a tender process would otherwise force.

This newsroom is not asking GPL and InterEnergy to answer us privately. We are asking them to publish — as a matter of public record, not correspondence — the underlying findings the President has invoked. Guyanese citizens who will carry this cost are entitled to read the same report the President is summarizing for them.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE $800 MILLION

None of this proves that GPL’s transmission and distribution networks are not genuinely strained, or that new investment is not needed — the strain described by GPL’s Kesh Nandlall, with feeders overloading and transformers under stress, may well be real. Nor does it prove that InterEnergy’s recommendations are wrong on their engineering merits.

What it does establish is this: in each of the three cases above, the public was asked to trust a process it could not see, and was given the facts; if it was given them at all; only after the point at which they could have changed the outcome, or after the money was already moving. The EPA’s screening notice came after the EMP was already issued. The US$97 million Wales settlement was denied outright by the Prime Minister, in specific and repeated terms, for five weeks — even though the arbitration pathway had been built into the contract’s structure from the start. And GPL’s own numbers — a peak demand of 257 megawatts against 265.6 megawatts of installed capacity, a margin of roughly 3 percent — were offered by GPL itself as evidence of “enough generating capacity,” in the same breath used to justify a request for hundreds of millions of dollars because the distribution network cannot carry that capacity to consumers.

The public has not been shown the demand-growth data behind InterEnergy’s projections. It has not been shown an itemized breakdown of what portion of $800 million goes to generation, what portion to transmission, what portion to the “smart metering and digitising” line item, and what portion to the “independent grid reliability taskforce” InterEnergy itself recommended — a taskforce that does not yet appear to exist.

This publication calls on GPL and InterEnergy to publish, in full, the report underlying President Ali’s remarks this week — not a summary, not a press briefing, but the document itself, including the demand-growth data and the itemized investment breakdown it contains. The President told reporters this is “not a short-term fix” and that “we have to hold people accountable in this process.”

Accountability requires a record the public can read. We are asking for nothing more than that.

Guyana has now seen what happens when a government denies first and admits later: a US$97 million liability the Prime Minister flatly denied existed, for five weeks, before confirming it in a phrasing designed to minimize it. The $800 million ask does not have to follow the same sequence. It can be published first.

 — The Board