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The National ATM at GuySuCo
Business and Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
For nearly three decades, save for the five-year interval between 2015 and 2020, the PPP/C has exercised political stewardship over the State-owned GuySuCo. The present Minister of Agriculture has held that portfolio since 2020. The condition of the sugar industry today is therefore not the product of temporary misfortune or inherited instability. It is the cumulative result of sustained political management. The current CEO is a member of the central committee of the party. The immediate past Chairman is now a minister in the 2025 PPP/C government. It is interesting to briefly review its record.
When the PPP/C assumed office in 1992, sugar production stood at 243,010 tonnes. By 2004, under a management contract, output exceeded 320,000 tonnes. That contract ended. Production fell. By 2015, output had declined to 212,000 tonnes. When the administration returned in 2020, production stood at 88,868 tonnes. In the years since, output has fluctuated between approximately 47,000 and 60,000 tonnes, with 47,000 tonnes repeating itself.
The financial record mirrors the operational decline. Between 2004 and 2019, GuySuCo received approximately $95.3 billion in capital allocations. From 2020 to 2025, a further $41.9 billion was committed. Cumulative exposure now stands at roughly $137.3 billion. This is not project support. It is spent capital, even as output contracted.
The explanation cannot lie solely in labour migration, adverse weather, or global sugar prices. Those are industry realities. What distinguishes GuySuCo is the repeated cycle of political misjudgment, and capital initiatives followed by interruption, reversal, or abandonment.
A Packaging Plant costing millions of US Dollars was established at Enmore at significant cost, later dismantled and stored for years. Mechanisation conversion on the Lower East Coast Demerara, costing tens of billions of dollars reportedly progressed substantially before being discontinued. Capital works were undertaken but did not mature into sustained productivity. Comparable initiatives are now proposed elsewhere. A new make of heavy-duty equipment was bought on the wing of hope only to end up in the scrap heap.
In a capital-intensive agricultural enterprise, continuity is indispensable. Capital without continuity does not become productivity. It becomes depreciation.
When major strategic initiatives do not survive their own implementation cycle, the difficulty lies not in rainfall or labour supply, but in policy- formulation, decision-making and execution. Successive chief executives have been introduced with confidence – as turnaround specialists, as industry experts, as reformers. Yet across leadership cycles, the trajectory has remained downward. Titles have changed. Output has changed – but in the wrong direction.
The Minister now projects 100,000 tonnes in 2026 and profitability by 2030. At the same time, the Corporation acknowledges yield per hectare below target, limited factory grinding hours, inefficiencies in cane transport, and recovery rates requiring improvement. To move from under 60,000 tonnes to 100,000 tonnes within two years requires simultaneous correction of every major structural weakness. The history of GuySuCo does not inspire confidence in such radical transformation.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Of the proposed $8.4 billion operational subsidy for 2026, approximately $6.8 billion is allocated to wages. With a wage bill reportedly near $20 billion, GuySuCo must generate roughly $13 billion in sales merely to complete payroll. That excludes capital replacement, factory rehabilitation, debt servicing, and statutory arrears, including significant arrears obligations to the National Insurance Scheme and other public bodies.
Even if the 100,000-tonne target were achieved, the revenue required per tonne simply to bridge wages would leave limited margin for genuine profitability.
If annual injections in the range of $10 – 15 billion continue through 2029, an additional $40 – $60 billion will be committed before the promised year of profitability arrives. Even assuming sustained net profit thereafter, recovery of those injections would take decades, disregarding the $137.3 billion already expended and ignoring the time value of money. There is no indication that the PPP/C cares that this is neither a financial nor an economic proposition.
While GuySuCo could soon cross the line of no return, the issue is only partly operational. The deeper issue is governance. When policy direction, operational management, and oversight operate within the same political structure, independent commercial scrutiny weakens. In any private enterprise, three decades of declining output accompanied by over $137 billion in capital allocations would trigger restructuring, external review, and clear accountability. Only political considerations sustain current and indefinite architecture.
Sugar is part of Guyana’s history and rural economy. It deserves serious policy, not perpetual experimentation. Support may be justified. Waste is not. Absent radical reform of governance – separating political control from commercial management, imposing independent oversight, and publishing transparent, costed transformation plans, projections of profitability by 2030 are not forecasts. They are wagers.
And the taxpayer is the one paying for this bet of folly.
Government Signs Secret Deal Extending 2016–2057 Agreement
Every man, woman and child must become oil-minded Part 176
On 27th October 2017, a gentleman who I had never met asked, through a third party, to see me. It was unusual but I thought why not. After exchanging brief pleasantries, he disclosed that the 2016 Petroleum Agreement signed by the APNU-led Coalition included a signature bonus that had never been made public. There had been no announcement, no disclosure to Parliament and no explanation to the people of this country. In Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil-Minded – Part 27 – December 15, 2017, I recorded that the press confirmed the existence of the bonus after a letter surfaced from the Finance Secretary to the Governor of the Bank of Guyana with the caption “Signing Bonus granted by ExxonMobil – Request to open Bank Account.”
The official response was that the signing bonus was a figment of my imagination. A couple months later, vindication came in the form of a letter from the Finance Secretary to the Governor of the Bank of Guyana to place the money in a special account. In Column # 28 of my Oil and Gas column, I referred to the “final, belated and reluctant admission” of the US$18 million signing bonus. Transparency did not produce the truth; exposure did.
That pattern has returned. Column # 175 published on 7th. February of this year addressed a statement made by ExxonMobil’s Chief Executive Officer during a shareholders’ call explicitly suggested that Exxon would benefit from force majeure conditions affecting Guyana’s operations. The column pointed out that invocation of force majeure could extend the duration of the 2016 Stabroek Production Sharing Agreement. There was no explanation, confirmation, clarification, denial, or engagement. Just silence.
We now know why.
Two nights ago, I was heading to dinner with an international attendee to the current Petroleum Conference which was opened on Tuesday by President Ali. I almost lost control of the vehicle when the individual advised – with total certainty – that the Government had granted ExxonMobil a second Force Majeure under the 2016 Agreement. There was also an extensive force majeure period under the 1999 Agreement that at best was only partly justified. Then we had COVID-19 force majeure under the 2016 Agreement and now this latest secretive case. The Agreement provides for an application and meetings to discuss the consequences of the Force Majeure and would not usually be granted by the Government lightly, since strict conditions must apply: Article 24 of the 2016 Agreement, which has six paragraphs.
Force majeure freezes obligations and extends the life of the Agreement, the amazing benefits, including Guyana paying the oil companies’ taxes and issuing certificates to confirm that those taxes were paid by the companies.
Like the APNU, the PPP/C has not announced this important development nor informed the people whose birthright – and that of generations unborn – our natural resources are. It was done secretly. And once again, Guyanese did not learn of it from their own Government. They had to learn it from foreigners.
A material decision affecting this country’s most valuable natural resource has surfaced not because the Government respected the public’s right to know, but because information emerged from outside. It is an insult to Guyanese that foreign shareholders of foreign companies are better informed than they are. Sovereignty may reside in Guyana; its alienation takes place elsewhere.
The 2016 Agreement was signed under the APNU+AFC Coalition. It was criticised immediately for its low royalty, its generous cost oil ceiling, its incredible tax provisions, locked in for six decades, “under a stabilisation clause which I previously described as ‘more explicit and iron clad preventing the government from any unilateral increase of the oil company’s obligations or the diminution of its rights’”
Not unfairly, APNU was accused of haste, poor judgement and much more. It signed what it did not fully understand. The PPP/C cannot plead these in their defence. In opposition, now President Irfaan Ali and former President Bharrat Jagdeo said Guyanese should “weep” over the contract. Mr. Jagdeo accused the Coalition of “selling out” the country, coded language for betrayal of the national interest. The PPP promised review. It promised renegotiation. It promised better contract administration. It campaigned on competence and experience.
Now, it defends, preserves and extends the very same Agreement.
Force majeure is not administrative tidying. It suspends obligations, shields against default and can extend contractual duration. Extending the Agreement beyond 2057 locks Guyana into terms once condemned, effectively until the oil is depleted and nothing remains to renegotiate. That is not correction. It is consolidation.
This Government knew the contract, condemned it, promised to fix it. , and has now extended it beyond 2057 – effectively until the oil is gone and we are left to deal with the consequences. That is no error. It is a deliberate decision to lock the country into terms once described as surrender.
And this is unfolding while President Ali tells an energy conference which opened Tuesday last about Guyana’s role as a global model of sustainable development, high tech infrastructure and economic diversification. Alas, model development is not stage lights and speeches. It will be determined by what the Government does with the Agreement. Allowing Exxon to get everything it wants – incomplete audits, variation of associated gas provisions, and even implied unilateral variation through its Head Office practices – is not governance
These however, pale in relation to the secretive extension of the Agreement while the country is asked to applaud fancy speeches, panel discussions and photo-ops. This is not leadership. It is theatre – and Guyanese are treated with open disregard.
The Berbice River Bridge: Subsidy, reversion and the politics of arithmetic
Business & Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
During the Committee of Supply stage of the 2026 Budget, Bishop Juan Edghill, Minister of Public Works, announced that Government is finalising negotiations to purchase the Berbice River Bridge and suggested that the acquisition will cost less than the projected toll subsidies between now and next year. That comparison may sound fiscally attractive. It is not the comparison that determines legality or prudence.
The more perplexing question is this: why is the State proposing to buy an asset that it is already scheduled to own? The concession granted to Berbice Bridge Company Inc. under the Berbice River Bridge Act expires in June 2027. It does not create a permanent private ownership that ends only with a buyout. Section 7(1)(a) provides that upon expiry of the Concession period, all of the Concessionaire’s right, title and interest in and to the Bridge revert to the Minister. The statutory architecture is clear – concession for a defined term, followed by mandatory reversion.
The Minister responsible for Public Works is the authority named in the Act to enter into and regulate the Concession. The legal position is therefore fixed by statute and administered by the very office now asserting a negotiated acquisition. Frankly, there is no apparent justification or benefit.
There are certain basic propositions which, I trust, are not in dispute. The Concession Agreement remains in force. It has not been terminated or abrogated. While the Coalition subsidised certain tolls, the PPP/C removed tolls in August 2025, compensating the Bridge Company with full payment for vehicles crossing the Bridge. The only change was the source of payment: motorists ceased paying tolls; taxpayers replaced that revenue stream.
Under the concession arrangement, the company is not entitled to keep every dollar generated by traffic. Toll revenue must first meet operating and maintenance costs and service the project debt. Only the agreed return constitutes its entitlement. In addition, the Concession requires the Bridge to be handed back in good condition at expiry. The obligation to maintain the asset until 2027 rests with the Concessionaire. It is not a deferred cost to the State.
Between now and 2027, therefore, the company’s entitlement is limited to its operating costs, debt servicing and its contractually defined return, net of its continuing maintenance obligations. When the Concession ends, no private right survives beyond that date.
The first analytical question is unavoidable: has the subsidy exceeded that net surplus? If it has not, taxpayers have merely replaced motorists as the payer. If it has, then public funds are enlarging the company’s economic position beyond what the Concession permits before expiry.
The second question concerns the proposed acquisition. The State will receive the Bridge in 2027. The only economic value to the Company remaining in 2026 is the limited net entitlement between now and expiry. Any purchase price must therefore correspond to that residual value. Payment beyond it is not payment for a continuing right; it is compensation for rights that terminate by law.
It is difficult to reconcile the Minister’s public explanation with this statutory framework. The explanation offered is inconsistent with both the Act and the Concession Agreement. If the Minister’s position is otherwise, he must now state it by reference to those documents.
Further concerns arise because oversight from the Ministry of Finance and the Audit Office has been conspicuously muted in relation to this project, despite the magnitude of the public funds involved. The subsidy has been significant. The proposed acquisition will also be significant. Yet there has been no public reconciliation of those payments against the Concessionaire’s remaining lawful entitlement before reversion.
Adding to public concerns is the company’s apparent discomfort with scrutiny. Over the years, efforts to examine its corporate filings were met with resistance and, at times, prohibitive charges, including a demand in the region of $50,000 for access to a single page of a corporate document. Engagements at the Registry of Companies did not always reflect the transparency contemplated under company law. These matters form part of the governance history against which the present proposal must be assessed.
Corporate governance is not cosmetic. When private interest and public resources meet, when public infrastructure is financed under a private concession, governance is not a choice: it is a precondition. The Concessionaire includes significant private shareholders. Given the well-known proximity between senior political actors and a principal financier of the Bridge, the absence of transparent arithmetic only heightens the need for full disclosure, and triggers suspicion. In such circumstances, precision is not optional; it is essential.
The Minister in this matter is not merely a political negotiator. He is the statutory custodian of the Concession. His authority derives from the Act. His powers are bound by it. His duty is fiduciary and it runs to the people of Guyana – not to political relationships, not to commercial familiarity and not to past allegiance.
Section 38 of the Agreement requires that certain steps should already have begun. It binds the Minister, the Government and importantly, the company. Any attempt to circumvent those will be unlawful, an abuse of public office and a breach of the minister’s duty.
He needs to change direction and do the right thing. Legally, he has no choice.
The law allows publication of the helicopter crash report subject only to such limited and necessary redaction to protect legitimate national security interests
Dear Editor,
During the 2026 Budget debate in the National Assembly last week, Minister Deodat Indar stated that the report into the December 2023 Guyana Defence Force helicopter crash would not be released to the public, on the basis that the aircraft was engaged in a military operation. That assertion raises a discrete legal question: whether, as a matter of international aviation law or Guyana’s domestic law, the Minister’s position is legally justified.
The analysis therefore turns on the legal consequences of that characterisation. It requires consideration of the international framework governing state aircraft, particularly the Chicago Convention, and of the domestic legal regime governing access to official information, including the Constitution of Guyana and the Access to Information Act 2011. The central issue is whether either body of law supports the Minister’s conclusion that the report may not be disclosed.
Internationally, the Chicago Convention distinguishes between civilian aircraft and aircraft engaged in military service. Aircraft in military service are excluded from the Convention’s mandatory civil aviation accident-reporting regime. That exclusion, however, goes to obligation only. It does not prohibit disclosure, nor does it regulate access to information under domestic law.
The constitutional position is governed by Article 146 of the Constitution of Guyana, which protects freedom of expression and includes the freedom to receive information without interference. While that right may be limited in the interests of defence or public safety, any restriction must be reasonably required and capable of justification.
The Access to Information Act 2011 gives effect to that constitutional right. It recognises national security and military operations as grounds for exemption, but it does so on a qualified basis. The Act contemplates redaction and partial disclosure where necessary, not the blanket suppression of an entire report.
Five servicemen lost their lives in the December 2023 crash. Their families continue to seek closure. The helicopter bore civil aviation registration and was not engaged in combat. These factors engage a strong public interest in disclosure of the non-operational findings of the investigation.
A previous Senior Minister publicly committed to the release of the report. If the present position is that disclosure is now unlawful, that proposition must be established in law. Ministerial succession does not alter the legal obligations of the State.
The question is not whether sensitive military information may be protected, but whether the law permits the suppression of an entire investigation report; neither the Chicago Convention nor the Access to Information Act appears to support the Minister’s conclusion.
In my considered opinion, the law allows publication of the report, subject only to such limited and strictly necessary redaction as is required to protect legitimate national security interests. The public interest overwhelmingly favours disclosure.
Sincerely,
Christopher Ram
Business & Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
Mr. Deodat Sharma, Auditor General, is reported to have applied for a two-year extension of his tenure. It will be recalled that Mr. Sharma was confirmed many years ago in circumstances best described as accidental, following the absence of an AFC member from the Public Accounts Committee on the day of confirmation. It should also be recalled that the office of Auditor General carries the same constitutional status and security of tenure as the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice.
Approval and any extensions rest with the Executive President. At the same time, President Irfaan Ali has retained the portfolio of Finance and is therefore constitutionally the Minister of Finance, with Dr. Ashni Singh serving as Senior Minister with responsibility for finance within the Office of the President. It is difficult to find a word that adequately captures this anomaly without offending editorial modesty.
The appointment of the Auditor General is made formally on the advice of the Public Service Commission. That safeguard is illusory. The Commission itself is appointed by, and remains effectively controlled by, the President and is chaired by a close associate of the governing party. This executive-centred circularity, embedded in the 1980 Constitution, is not treated by the ruling party as a flaw but exploited as a feature.
Such a framework is structurally incapable of producing independence. What-ever autonomy exists must come entirely from the personal courage, professional standing and institutional assertiveness of the individual appointed. When those qualities are absent – or discouraged – the office becomes an extension of executive convenience rather than a check upon it. It is in that context that the present request for an extension must be understood: not as a question of continuity, but as a measure of how thoroughly independence has been eroded.
Mr. Sharma is not a professionally qualified accountant and does not meet the statutory requirements ordinarily associated with the office. More troubling than qualification, however, is performance. During a period marked by explosive growth in public expenditure running into tens of billions of dollars, the proliferation of discretionary funds and persistently weak financial systems, the Auditor General has shown zero appetite to challenge, interrogate or even issue timely and meaningful warnings.
A review of the 2020 – 2025 Estimates under the Ali Administration shows an annual expansion of discretionary payments. In addition to the 40-hour part-time employment programme, cost-of-living buffers, community policing stipends and contract employment arrangements, Budget 2026 introduces yet another discretionary initiative, the house repairs programme.
Each of these programmes demands extensive systems audits, rigorous beneficiary verification, reconciliation testing and post-payment forensic review. None has received that level of scrutiny. Taken together, they signal a decisive shift away from rules-based public finance contemplated by the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act toward political control of public funds, with the Auditor General content to observe rather than object.
At the same time, Dr. Singh, as de facto Minister of Finance, has failed to modernise or implement systems capable of tracking, controlling and reporting such spending. This is precisely the environment in which an Auditor General should be demanding additional resources, specialist staff and forensic capacity. Instead, the response has been institutional quiet. Reports are produced on schedule, photographs are taken and deadlines are met – but audit quality, thematic analysis and systemic challenge are absent.
The handling of the Auditor General’s Report for 2024 illustrates the point. It was presented around 30 September 2025 with ceremony. Less than two months later, an “updated” report was delivered on a flash drive, without errata, reconciliation or explanation. This is unprofessional and grave. At best, it signals form over substance; at worst, it raises questions too serious to ignore.
More serious still is what has not been done. Despite clear statutory requirements, the Auditor General has failed year after year to conduct and present annual audits of tax concessions granted under the Income Tax (In Aid of Industry) Act. Billions of dollars in foregone revenue remain effectively unaudited. This is not a marginal omission; it goes to the heart of fiscal accountability and ministerial responsibility.
Parliamentary oversight has fared no better. The Government has made a mockery of the work of the Public Accounts Committee by cynically adjusting quorum requirements and repeatedly failing to attend scheduled meetings. Meetings were cancelled not occasionally but serially – some three, four, even five times in succession, including the 54th Meeting in 2023 and the 68th Meeting in 2024. The result is unprecedented: none of the audit years from 2020 to 2024 has been examined. The Committee’s last Chairman left office publicly regretting that the PAC was unable to discharge its constitutional function for a single year of the Ali Administration. An Auditor General serious about accountability would have raised alarm. Mr. Sharma did not.
What makes the present situation especially corrosive is that fiscal power and audit influence now sit within the same household. The de facto Minister of Finance presides over unprecedented discretionary spending, while his spouse exercises effective authority within the Audit Office as the de facto Auditor General. That arrangement is incompatible with any serious conception of independence. It would be unacceptable if formalised; it is scarcely less objectionable because it is informal.
The Constitution does not contemplate that the power to spend and the power to audit would be consolidated so intimately, nor that the country would be asked to pretend that this is normal.
It now appears that Mr. Sharma’s request for an extension will be granted by default, not on merit, because of a total absence of succession planning. The alternative would be the formal appointment of the current de facto Auditor General, who is also the spouse of the de facto Minister of Finance.
That situation is only marginally better than formal appointment. Whether the conflict is acknowledged or merely tolerated makes little difference in substance. In either case, audit authority would be exercised by a person whose proximity to the centre of fiscal power fatally compromises independence. The distinction between de facto and de jure becomes one of optics rather than principle.
This is not a justification for extension. It is an admission of deliberate, inexcusable and unacceptable governance failure. Succession planning in a constitutional office is not optional; it is a duty. Its neglect has produced a false and manufactured choice: retain an Auditor General who has failed to assert the office in the public interest, or formalise an arrangement that would extinguish even the appearance of audit independence.
Neither option is acceptable.