“There Is No Police Matter”: Singh Says He Won’t Return to Guyana

“There Is No Police Matter”: Singh Says He Won’t Return to Guyana Unless Police Call Him. His Own Record Says Otherwise About Whether They Should

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Following our report on the fraud allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and its Director of Projects and Construction, Hardeep Singh Bharya — and the company’s denial, issued through Modular Build Guyana and carried by INews — Singh has now spoken at length, twice: first in a written statement; followed by a Facebook live; categorically denying wrongdoing, and then directly to Kaieteur News, which put the allegations to him in an on-record interview published September 8.

We have reviewed both. We stand by our original reporting. Since it was published, that reporting has been overtaken by three developments Singh did not anticipate and does not fully address: a confirmed prior fraud conviction in the United Kingdom, a bounced cheque to a Guyanese supplier accompanied by word that the company is being sold, and a stalled government housing contract in Barbados that mirrors, in outline, exactly what is now alleged in Guyana.

What Singh has now said, on the record, twice

Singh’s written statement denied the allegations in categorical terms: “I categorically deny allegations that I have defrauded clients of GYD $145 million, misappropriated client funds, deliberately taken money without intending to perform contracted works, or ‘fled’ Guyana to escape responsibility.” He argued that delay and dispute on a construction contract are not proof of fraudulent intent, that the $145 million figure improperly aggregates four separate contracts, and that Modular Builds holds documentation capable of demonstrating work was actually undertaken — available, he said, for independent professional assessment.

Speaking directly to Kaieteur News days later, Singh went further, and became considerably more combative. Asked whether he intends to return to Guyana to address the police investigation, he said he would not, absent direct contact from senior GPF officials: “There is no police matter because I have spoken to my contacts in the Guyana Police Force, which are probably higher than people who you know, and there is no evidence, there is no fact.” He said he had not been contacted by police at all:

“They haven’t contacted me once, the GPF, whoever is in charge has not contacted me once. I answer all my calls. You think I am hiding from you guys? I am not hiding from you guys.”

He confirmed he relocated from Guyana last September; a year before the allegations became public — and argued that a business owner need not be physically present for operations to continue. He said he would fly back “on the next flight” if a senior police official called him, but not before, and described the four clients’ allegations as fabricated.

He also confirmed, unprompted, that he has “established a similar business in Barbados and plans to open another in Jamaica” — the first time Singh himself, rather than inference from public records, has confirmed the cross-border scope of Modular Builds’ operations

What neither statement disputes

Across both statements, Singh has not disputed that four Guyanese clients paid a combined $145 million, and that none of the four contracted projects was completed to anything close to its agreed scope. He disputes only the characterisation of that outcome as intentional fraud rather than commercial failure.

That is a narrower position than his “categorically deny” framing suggests, and it has grown narrower still against a widening set of facts that ordinary commercial delay does not comfortably explain.

A conviction Singh did not volunteer

Kaieteur News has now confirmed, and this newsroom has independently verified, that Hardeep Singh — operating under the name Hardeep Bharya — was convicted at Harrow Crown Court on 8 June 2016 and served three years and four months in prison for fraud. He admitted two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by abuse of position, one count of possessing or controlling an article for use in fraud, and one count of dishonestly making a false representation to make a gain. According to UK outlet MyLondon, the scheme was carried out with the assistance of a bank insider — a former employee of the branch involved — and the group laundered proceeds and sent them overseas to be withdrawn. Kaieteur News also reports Bharya had previously been implicated in a separate fraudulent scheme involving a driver-training company, Fast Track HGV, prior to the Lloyds conviction.

Asked in his Kaieteur News interview about his previous conviction, Singh did not dispute it. He said he had served his sentence, and objected that repeatedly raising the matter in the media had defamed him and caused problems with other business ventures in the Caribbean.

We are not suggesting a prior conviction proves the current allegations. It does not. But it materially changes how his own defence reads. Singh’s central argument — that a project running late or over budget is ordinary commercial misfortune, not evidence of intent — is harder to accept at face value from a man previously convicted of using a position of trust to move client money through a banking system and out of the country, laundered, before facing any consequence.

The pattern he now describes as fabrication bears a structural resemblance to the pattern for which he has already been convicted once.

A bounced cheque, and a company reportedly for sale

Kaieteur News has also reported, and published an image of, a cheque issued by Modular Builds Guyana Inc. to a concrete supplier that subsequently bounced. When the supplier queried the outstanding payment, the company’s reported response was that it was being sold, and that the buyer would assume responsibility for its liabilities. Asked directly about the bounced cheque, Singh told Kaieteur News: “I am not sure who you are talking about, but I can look into it and, if there is an issue, then I can obviously sort it out.”

A company citing an impending sale as the reason a trade creditor will not be paid, while its director simultaneously promises new contractors will arrive on September 15 to resume stalled residential projects, is a combination worth stating plainly rather than interpreting for the reader: those two claims sit uneasily together.

A buyer assuming liabilities on a sale, and a director promising fresh personnel to complete outstanding client work, describe two different futures for the same company. Only one of them can be true, and Singh’s statements to Kaieteur News do not reconcile which.

The Barbados contract neither statement mentions

Neither of Singh’s statements addresses Modular Builds’ operations outside Guyana — an omission that reads differently now that he has confirmed those operations exist in his own words. In November 2025, Modular Builds Guyana; then barely two months old on Barbados’s corporate register — was awarded a contract by that country’s state housing agency, HOPE Inc., to build 86 steel-framed homes at Fustic Gardens, St Lucy. The award drew scrutiny at the time: Opposition Senator Ryan Walters publicly questioned how a company almost nobody in Barbados had heard of, including some state officials, had secured a large government contract within weeks of registration. HOPE’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Williamson, defended the award as the result of “a rigorous tendering process” and told Barbados Today the first phase — ten houses; would be complete by April 2026.

That deadline has now passed by five months. As of this newsroom’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own promotional website this month, the company’s published Barbados project photographs show no completed or handed-over home — only a single structure at steel-frame stage, with roof sheeting recently begun, and an aerial image of the wider site showing multiple foundation slabs laid but no further structures raised. This is the company’s own chosen evidence of its progress, on a platform it controls. For an operation whose commercial pitch across three countries rests on speed — a seven-day first home in Guyana, “14-day turnkey” builds advertised repeatedly in its own marketing — the absence of a single finished unit to show, five months past a publicly stated deadline, is not a detail.

It is the same story unfolding a second time, in a second country, under a company Singh has now confirmed is his.

Barbados’s state housing agency has, separately, an audited history of exactly this kind of failure with a different Guyanese contractor — a 2023 arrangement in which HOPE Inc. advanced $3.5 million to a hardwood-house supplier with no contract or bond in place, delivered only 60 of 350 contracted units, and saw its own board’s termination recommendation go seemingly unactioned by the responsible ministry. This newsroom has not established a corporate link between that supplier and Modular Builds Guyana Inc.

What is established is that the institutional conditions that allowed one Guyanese contractor to fail a Barbadian state housing programme with minimal consequence were still in place when Modular Builds arrived two years later.

Where this leaves Singh’s position

Singh has said, in his own words, that he takes “any legitimate police enquiry extremely seriously,” that he answers all his calls, and that he will fly to Guyana the moment police contact him. He has not explained why, if that is true, he has not proactively offered the documentation he says exists to the four affected clients, to this newsroom, or to Kaieteur News, rather than waiting to be summoned. He has not reconciled the reported sale of his company with his promise of new contractors arriving September 15. He has not addressed the state of his Barbados contract at all, despite confirming its existence himself.

And he has not explained why a pattern he characterizes as ordinary commercial difficulty in Guyana is, on the public record his own company has published, repeating itself in a second country under the same brand.

We renew the invitation extended in our previous coverage: a direct, specific response from Singh, from Modular Builds, or from HOPE Inc., addressing the true status of every outstanding project in every jurisdiction, and a firm account of what happened to the money paid against each.

Until that response comes, in evidence rather than in interview, Singh’s own standard — that a complaint is not proof of the allegations within it — cuts both ways. Neither is a denial.

This is a follow-up to The 592 Guardian’s original report on the allegations against Modular Builds Guyana Inc. and Hardeep Singh. Kaieteur News’s September 8, 2026 interview with Singh and its reporting on his prior UK conviction and the bounced supplier cheque; the Barbados Audit Office’s special audit of HOPE Inc.‘s building programmes; Barbados Today’s reporting on the Fustic Gardens contract award; UK court reporting via MyLondon on Singh/Bharya’s 2016 conviction; and this newspaper’s direct review of Modular Builds’ own published project materials. The 592 Guardian sought comment from Modular Builds, Singh, and HOPE Inc. on the matters raised in this piece prior to publication.Should we receive a response to our request , it would be published in its entirety.