Three Spines, One Bill: Making Sense of the Congress Place Tax Fight

 Three Spines, One Bill: Making Sense of the Congress Place Tax Fight

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Georgetown’s City Council has cleared the way for the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) to settle a rates and taxes bill on Congress Place, its Sophia headquarters, for roughly $30 million — against a debt that Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo says had climbed past $6.7 billion. Attorney General Anil Nandlall has called the decision “absolutely illegal” and invited any taxpayer to sue. A reader pushed back on us directly: the council has non-PNCR members too, nothing happens there without other parties in the room, and if bias is the standard, then every tax authority that ever cut anyone a break; the GRA included — should be just as exposed.

That challenge deserves a straight answer rather than a reflexive defense of the Attorney General. Having read the record closely, our view is that the reader is right about one thing and wrong about a bigger one  and that Nandlall’s own framing overreaches in a way worth naming plainly. There are three separate legal questions tangled together in this story, and they don’t all stand or fall together. Separating them is the only way to see which parts of the argument survive contact with the facts.

SPINE ONE: DID THE COUNCIL ACTUALLY HAVE THE POWER TO DO THIS?

This is the most basic question, and it is Nandlall’s strongest ground. A city council is not a private business free to strike whatever deal it likes with a debtor. It is a creature of statute — its power to set, collect, and adjust rates and taxes comes entirely from the Municipal and District Councils Act. It can only do what that Act allows.

The trouble is that Georgetown’s own mayor, Alfred Mentore, could not say with confidence which legal instrument actually authorizes this specific write-down. In comments to the Guyana Chronicle, he pointed to two different, competing possibilities: a 2024 “institutional rates” policy the PNCR-led council passed for political party properties, or a separate 2021 High Court ruling that found it “unconscionable” for the council to charge compound interest instead of simple interest on old debts.

That distinction is not a technicality. If the true basis is the 2021 compound-interest ruling, the council would be applying a general principle of fairness that any debtor — PNCR-linked or not— could equally claim, and Nandlall’s illegality argument gets much weaker. If the true basis is the 2024 institutional rates policy, the question becomes whether that policy was validly made in the first place.

Either way, a mayor unable to name the operative authority for a decision of this size is not a small detail. It is the story.

SPINE TWO: WAS THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS TAINTED BY CONFLICT OF INTEREST?

The reader’s strongest point is procedural: the council is not made up solely of the PNCR. Other parties sit there too, and nothing passes without going through the room. That is true, and it matters — but the record shows it does not do the work the reader wants it to do.

The only clear vote on record is the 2024 institutional rates policy, and it was not a consensus decision. It was laid before the council at a statutory meeting and immediately opposed by the PPP-C’s 11 councillors, who said they had not been consulted and were blindsided by how quickly it moved. It passed anyway, because the PNCR held the numbers where it counted — including on the council’s Finance Committee, where PPP-C held a single seat against a PNCR majority. Three councillors — Alfonso De Armas, Patricia Chase-Greene and Steven Jacobs  publicly rejected the idea of waiving taxes for political parties at all, with Chase-Greene, a former mayor, arguing every party should pay exactly as ordinary citizens do.

This is why “other parties were in the room” does not neutralise a bias claim. The legal principle at stake — nemo judex in causa sua, no one may be a judge in their own cause — is not about whether dissent existed. It is about whether the body that controls the outcome is the same body that benefits from it. Losing a vote you were blindsided by is not participation in a fair process; on this record, it is evidence the process wasn’t one.

SPINE THREE: WHO ACTUALLY GOT TREATED UNEQUALLY?

This is where the reader’s underlying instinct — that selective tax relief is normal and everyone does it deserves to be taken seriously, because it identifies the one comparison that is genuinely apples-to-apples. Nandlall’s line that “any taxpayer can file legal proceedings tomorrow” overstates this. Guyanese law generally requires a claimant to show sufficient personal interest in a decision, not just general public concern, so a random ratepayer with no connection to the debt is not obviously best placed to sue.

But the council’s own paperwork hands a much stronger comparator to a specific class of person. When the council implemented the 2021 compound-interest ruling retroactively to 1997 this past July, it built in a carve-out: anyone who had already paid off their debt calculated under the old, harsher compound-interest method would not benefit from the correction. In plain terms — pay on time under the old rules, and you get nothing; owe a fortune and stay unpaid long enough, and the council will eventually adjust the rules in your favour. That is not a hypothetical the reader raised for effect. It is the council’s own written policy, and it is the one place in this whole dispute where a specific, identifiable group of taxpayers can point to differential treatment by the same authority, under the same policy, without needing to prove anyone’s state of mind.

WHERE THAT LEAVES THE ARGUMENT

None of this makes Nandlall’s “absolutely illegal” a settled legal fact  that is for a court to decide, and his “any taxpayer” framing reaches further than the law on standing likely allows. But it also does not make the reader’s comparison to routine GRA concessions hold. A revenue officer using statutory discretion Parliament gave them is not the same thing as a governing majority relieving a debt owed by the organisation that majority answers to, then writing a rule that specifically excludes the citizens who paid on time. The GRA analogy fails not because concessions are always suspect, but because it erases the one fact that makes this case different: who was sitting in judgment, and who they were judging.

— The Board