Mr. Anil Nandlall, former Attorney General, has raised on his Facebook page the issue of the Environmental Tax paid by the Surinamese company Rudisa and its Guyana subsidiary Caribbean International Distributors Inc. (Rudisa/CIDI). He suggested that the current Attorney General “either did not study the [CCJ] case or having done so is still unappreciative of its gravamen.” The decision in that case was handed down on May 8, 2014 but the PPP/C Government did not comply with an order of the Court that the Government repay with interest the sum of US$6,047,244.77, and further amounts collected up to the date of the judgment. The matter was resolved only after the APNU+AFC Government gave an undertaking to cease collecting the tax and to repay the full amount collected from Rudisa/CIDI.
Mr. Nandlall was not the AG when the PPP/C introduced the tax in 1995 but it would have been gracious of him to acknowledge that the PPP/C Government erred when it introduced a tax that clearly violated WTO Rules, and compounded its error by continuing to collect the tax from CARICOM companies after the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was incorporated in Guyana domestic law in 2006.
The matter has assumed important currency following the commencement of a similar action in the CCJ by the Trinidadian-owned Guyana Beverages Inc. which has paid more than two billion dollars in Environmental Tax. That money, like the Rudisa money, was spent by the past administration, and the current Finance Minister is faced with the serious risk of having to pay back this huge sum. In an ironic twist of fate, proposed legislation to address the problem introduced in 2013 by the PPP/C administration was rejected by the APNU and the AFC MP’s! Continue reading “Guyana could have successfully defended the action by Rudisa/CIDI”