Author: ChrisRam

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Mr Nandlall should provide the basis for the claim to these astounding powers

According to the Guyana Chronicle of Saturday, October 26, 2013, Mr. Anil Nandlall, Attorney General, commenting on what he referred to as a gag order by a judge in a pending legal matter in the High Court states: “In our legal system, the holder of the office of Attorney General is the protector of the public’s legal interest and the defender of the Constitution of Guyana…” These are astounding powers with which Mr. Nandlall seeks to clothe himself, apparently simply by stating so. He has no such role, functions or powers.

On the issue in which he gratuitously inserts himself, Mr. Nandlall cites principles and authorities mainly from the UK which does not have a written constitution and would therefore be of doubtful authority, and from India, which does. Yet his singular acknowledgement to Guyana is a case of dubious relevance to the substance of what he attempted to address.

Incredibly, while the post of Attorney General is a creation of the Constitution of Guyana, Mr. Nandlall omits to cite Article 112 which sets out in clear language the role of the Attorney General. That article states:

“There shall be an Attorney General of Guyana who shall be the principal legal adviser to the Government of Guyana and who shall be appointed by the President.”

Mr. Nandlall should now assist Guyanese by identifying for us those Articles of the Constitution which in his learned opinion make him the protector of the public’s legal interest and the defender of the Constitution of Guyana. And he must also explain to us his failure to defend our interest in the several violations of mandatory provisions of the Constitution including the requirements for an Ombudsman (Article 191), Public Procurement Commission (Article 121 W) and local government elections (Article 71).

Neither Mr. Nandlall nor his Chambers appeared in the matter in which the Judge made the order and unless he has apprised himself of both text and context of the order it seems completely out of place for him to describe the Judge’s ruling as a “misuse, if not an abuse” of a legal principle. Assuming that he was approached in whatever capacity by the party against whom the order was made, the proper course of action for him was to refer the party to their legal counsel to seek such redress as is available under the law.

I hope that there is one thing that Mr. Nandlall and I will agree on, and that is, the importance of restoring dignity to the office of the Attorney General to which much damage has been done over the past decade.

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As Mega-projects unravel, Guyana Dollar “junkified”

Luncheon and his ploys
Before turning to this week’s piece I will respond to a statement attributed to Dr. Roger Luncheon who at his press conference last week named Messrs. Ronald Ali, Anand Goolsarran and me in a “ploy orchestrated against Mrs. Singh [wife of Dr. Ashni Singh, the Finance Minister] of the Audit Office of Guyana.” The moniker “politician” can hardly exempt or justify careless and untruthful speech particularly when making serious allegations about others.

Dr. Luncheon should be aware that a formal complaint was lodged with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Guyana (ICAG) by Robert McRae CPA, a partner of Ram & McRae, alleging a “conflict of interest between the Ministry of Finance and the Office of the Auditor General involving members Dr. Ashni Singh and Gitanjali Singh.” That complaint, lodged since July 9, 2012, had to name the two persons since investigations are held into conduct of members of the Institute, not offices. Mr. McRae lodged on the same date not one but two complaints with the ICAG, only one in which Mrs. Singh is named along with Dr. Singh.

With regard to Mr. Ali, I am not aware of any statement being made by him at any time on the matter. If any criticism can be directed at Mr. Ali, it is that the ICAG of which he is the President, has been unforgivably slow in pronouncing in a matter of national and professional importance falling within its functions. The ICAG has a duty not only to the public but also to the Singhs to rule on the complaints since it is totally unfair to its two highly ranked members to have professional complaints hanging over their heads.

As for prejudice to the investigation, it can hardly have escaped Dr. Luncheon that he and other members of the Cabinet are interfering with the investigations and in the process compromising the Audit Office. He must realise that Cabinet is not a disinterested party and for it to attempt to pronounce on a matter involving one of its own members is committing several improper acts – undue influence on the ICAG and on the Audit Office, as well as conflict of interest. Maybe this is Luncheon’s ploy to win further loyalty from an Auditor General who owes his appointment more to the political machinations in the PAC than to any professional qualification or competence.

My advice to Dr. Luncheon is that rather than speak on a matter on which he is so poorly informed, he should devote his attention to fixing the billion dollar mess in which the NIS has found itself during his 21-year tenure as Chairman.

Introduction
We may not have noticed it but a quiet revolution has been taking place in Guyana: a revolution that places wealth accumulation as the national ethos. This revolution is not being led by a right-wing party like the TUF but by some leading members of the PPP/C whose founder was a committed Socialist and champion of the small farmer, the worker and the artisan. So ingrained is the new philosophy that a former President could refer disparagingly to a bicycle shop operator and the Minister of Agriculture could carelessly describe the country’s farmers, telling them they have to leave their subsistence mindset and aim to become wealthy.

Even if the Minister did not intend to write-off the thousands of farmers his choice of words reflected a paradigm that was a world different from that of Cheddi Jagan. That shift becomes apparent from a review of the manifestos of the PPP/C with each succeeding one reflecting reduced emphasis for farming and agriculture and an ascendant concept of megaprojects. Farming is not only about mindset but also about landholdings, access to capital, a national policy on imports and markets for their products. If farmers cannot sell five bags of Bora how will they sell ten, or fifteen or twenty?

The rationale for the shift in national policy – for which we should read party policy – has never been too clear. Maybe it is a local version of the Reagan-Thatcher philosophy, or the economic counterpart to top-down politics. Or the strange logic that if the government cannot manage or supervise smaller projects it is because it is really cut-out to deal only with mega-projects. But the architects of these grand projects must know that the scale of the failure becomes correspondingly greater as the size of the project increases. Of course, if the scale of the project is in any way related to the culture of corruption, then some kind of logic begins to emerge.
Continue reading “As Mega-projects unravel, Guyana Dollar “junkified””

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News about GuySuCo’s board is troubling

The news that the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) is without a Board of Directors is troubling, its credibility further diminished. Unlike an entity established under the Public Corporations Act, GuySuCo’s operational law is the Companies Act and by virtue of its 1976 registration, it straddles two such Acts, the repealed Companies Act Cap. 89:01 and the Companies Act 1991.

Under the former, the appointment and terms of office of the directors are made and set by the Minister of Agriculture acting on behalf of the Government. And by virtue of the 1991 Act, the possibility that GuySuCo can have no director is virtually ruled out since the Act makes the directors the sole authority for exercising the powers and functions of the company. That Act states:

The directors of a company must—

(a) exercise the powers of the company directly or indirectly through the employees and agents of the company; and

(b) direct the management of the business and affairs of the company.

There is some indication that while there is no board there is a chairman of the board suggesting that like Atlantic Hotel Inc., GuySuCo is now a single director company. That model has proved bad enough in the case of Atlantic Hotel Inc. But even temporarily, it can be disastrous in the case of GuySuCo whose financial condition is at best precarious and which requires annual injection of public funds to stay in business.

Unfortunately, GuySuCo is not the only entity which has seen provisions of the Companies Act stretched this week. Another government company, Property Holdings Inc. held an AGM chaired by Mr. Winston Brassington, executive head of NICIL. When the legality of the presentation of financial statements for five years was questioned, Ms. Marcia Nadir-Sharma – Brassington’s deputy at NICIL – who attended the meeting as Legal Advisor to PHI, is reported to have said that the Minister of Finance had given approval for late tabling of audited financial statements.

The problem is that the Act grants such power not to a Minister but to the Registrar of Companies acting on an application by the company supported by a resolution of the directors.

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This post on Ms Manickchand’s Facebook page is frightening

“I am happy they [the three suspected bandits killed by the Police on South Road] are dead and I don’t care about the details of a post-mortem. In fact why is the state even wasting money on them? My sentiment would be the same for ALL murderers and thieves.”

These are not the words of some uneducated idiot uttered in some heated exchange in some out-of-the-way ghetto. No, it is a direct quote from the Facebook page of Ms. Jaya Manickchand, an attorney-at-law and Member of the Guyana Elections Commission. Ms. Manickchand clearly does not believe that the constitutional guarantee of presumption of innocence applies to a certain class.

Ms. Manickchand’s post also reveals her perception and bias of crime. She cannot bring herself to even consider as crime, corruption a la Pradoville 2 or the appropriation of state resources by the political class. I doubt that she even thinks that a minister of government using a gun to inflict terror on another person as a crime, or the heist of Guyana for a few. For her, no doubt, crime is exclusive to a certain class and its perpetrators without rights.

It is frightening that a member of the ruling political class could be callous enough to have such a sentiment, and worse, arrogant enough to express it to the world. But it is a measure of the depth to which Guyana has sunk that she can remain a member of the Guyana Elections Commission.