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Half-yearly reports show increased turnover

Introduction
Caribbean Containers Inc, a public company in the paper recycling business has reported turnover for the first half of 2011 increasing by 9.3% over the same period last year. This follows a 10.3% reported turnover increase by the DDL Group of Companies and a 13.8% increase in the Banks DIH Group, the only one of the three with a September 30 year-end while CCI and DDL have a December 31 year end. The increases in turnover are of course considerably higher than the rates of inflation in the economy. Banks DIH in explaining its improved performance cited higher dollar sales, a term usually used in contradistinction from volume sales.

Caribbean Containers Inc.

CCI reported a gross profit increase over 2010 of 14.3% but its losses before tax increased from $21.8 million to $23.8 million. The report shows Earnings before depreciation as having declined in the first half of the year by 31.3% and that margins were severely affected by the rapid escalation in global fuel prices which resulted in the company’s fuel bill going up by some 40%.

The company’s performance in the third quarter ended September 30, 2011 improved strongly with an 18.3% growth in Earnings before depreciation compared with third quarter 2010. The result was a modest profit before tax of $2.7 million compared with a loss of $10.2 million for the third quarter of 2010. The overall result was a sharp decline in loss before tax for the nine months from $32 million in 2010 to $21million in 2011. The report explained that over the last four years, sales in the second half of the year averaged 13% more than in the first half.

CCI has had its fair share of financial problems over the years with a number of ownership changes and substantial debt restructuring. As at June 30, the company had liabilities of $365 million including trade and other payables of $116 million and loans repayable within a year amounting to $69 million. Cash resources amounted to $37 million but this had gone down to $25 million three months later.

In what can be described as Guyana’s principal LCDS private sector company, survival is still the challenge as the company’s aging technology has high running and maintenance cost, placing cash management at the centre of management focus.

Yet the company deserved commendation for being the only private sector company other than Republic Bank (Guyana) Limited to publish quarterly financial reports. The Bank of Guyana had published and recently withdrew Guideline # 10 requiring all banks to publish quarterly statements.

Banks DIH Limited

The half-yearly report is a consolidated report of the food and beverage giant and its subsidiary Citizens Bank Guyana Inc. Given the disparate nature of the operations and business of the two entities such a consolidated report does not allow any easy informed analysis of the two businesses.

The company had unaudited profit after tax in the half-year of $689.5 million compared to $594.1 million in 2010, an increase of $95.4 million or 16%. Chairman and Chief Executive of the group explained in the report that the improved results came mainly from increased dollar sales, efficiencies derived from Plant and Machinery upgrades and the benefits obtained from the installation of Capital Equipment.

The subsidiary Citizens Bank achieved an unaudited profit after taxation of $364.6 million compared to $261.0 million in 2010.

Total group profit after taxation for the half year was $1,025 million compared with $836 million, an increase of some 22% and a resulting increase in Earnings per Share from $0.71 per share to $0.85 per share.

A meaningful cash flow commentary is not possible as the cash and bank resources of the company cannot be distinguished from those of the banking subsidiary. Inventories, the bulk of which would be for the company stood at $4,367 million, increasing from $4,069 million one year earlier. For the type and nature of the operations this seems reasonable, particularly when compared with DDL to which we now turn attention.

Demerara Distillers Limited

This group comprises several local and overseas companies in the region, North America and Europe as well as a joint venture in India and associated companies in Guyana and Jamaica. In his Chairman’s Statement Dr. Yesu Persaud reported that the group’s pre-tax profit for the half-year of $769 million had increased by 6.4% over 2011, attributed to the performances of the European subsidiary, Demerara Shipping Company Limited and Distribution Services Limited.

When account is taken of increases in the fair value of investments and exchange differences on consolidation, the total comprehensive income for the year – a measure of the sum total of all operating and financial events that have changed the value of an owner’s interest in a business – is $627 million compared with $437 million in 2010. The group may have a challenge however in exceeding the full year reported profits for 2010 of $1,139 million. The profits for that year were augmented by a $151 million “share of profit of associated company.” In the first six months of 2011 this profit was only $8.4 million compared with $3.4 million in 2010 half-year, suggesting some major development in the second half of that year.

Earnings per share (EPS) have increased from $0.65 in half-year 2010 to $0.69 in 2011.

The balance sheet continues to be fair with current assets exceeding current liabilities by a ratio of nearly 2:1. The problem lies however in the composition of the two balance sheet components. Trade payables have climbed to $4 billion, bank overdraft is $2.8 billion and loans repayable in the next twelve months is close to half a billion dollars.

Share prices
None of the reports bother to speak of one of the most important issues for shareholders and that is the performance of the companies’ shares on the Stock Exchange. A comparison of recent prices is shown below:

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Parties’ nominations lists should satisfy eligibility criteria for election to the Guyana Parliament

I am today sending to the Chief Elections Officer of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) the following letter in connection with the list of nominations which is to be presented to him for the November 28 national elections.

Mr. Gocool Boodhoo,
Chief Elections Officer,
Guyana Elections Commission
Main Street,
Georgetown

Dear Sir,

Eligibility criteria for election to the Guyana Parliament

I am writing to remind you of the following two Articles of the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana relating to the eligibility for election to the National Assembly.

1. Article 53 – Qualifications for election as members states as follows:

‘Subject to Article 155 (which relates to allegiance, insanity, and other matters) a person shall be qualified for election as a member of the National Assembly if and shall not be so qualified unless he:

a) is a citizen of Guyana of the age of 18 or upwards; and
b) is able to speak, and unless incapacitated by blindness or other physical cause, to read the English language with a degree of proficiency sufficient to enable him to take an active part in the proceedings of the Assembly.’

2. Article 155 (1) of the Constitution states:

‘No person shall be qualified for election as a member of the National Assembly who is, by virtue of his own act, under any allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state.’

I am assuming that the Leader of each Party’s List of candidates for the national elections as well as you in your capacity as Chief Elections Officer are not unaware of the clear import and intent of these provisions and in particular Article 155 (1). It is my view that there is a serious obligation on your part to verify that the eligibility requirements are satisfied. You should be aware too that while there might have been breaches in the past, this cannot justify a continuation of an unconstitutional violation in such an important matter.

Finally, Sir, I consider it your duty to ensure that the elections are held in accordance with all laws and so thus prevent any challenge arising from the election to the National Assembly of any person who does not satisfy these eligibility criteria.

Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram

This is more than an academic matter. The constitutional provisions are intended to ensure that our legislators are loyal to Guyana and Guyana alone. A similar situation arose in Jamaica recently where politician Mr Daryl Vaz gave up his naturalized US citizenship in order to continue in Jamaican politics. That those who seek to make laws for the citizens of any country must be willing to submit themselves to those very laws at all times is almost superfluous to state.

The permissiveness that characterised previous parliaments has led us into the present state of non-governance and lawlessness. We must not allow the same mistakes again. The time to start holding our next batch of parliamentary representatives to account begins now.

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A mixture of distortions, untruths and misrepresentations

Under the theme ‘Working for a Better Tomorrow,’ the PPP/C Manifesto for the 2011 elections is a mix of distortions, untruths and misrepresentations, wishful thinking or no thinking at all. The two-page introduction, written by the presidential candidate Mr Donald Ramotar seems signally disconnected from the rest of the 43-page document.

Not content with the half-true contents of the Manifesto, Mr Jagdeo, the PPP/C’s presidential candidate for the past two elections showed that he still does not believe that truth is a virtue. His capacity for inventiveness, make-believe and contempt for the intelligence of his audience guaranteed that he authored the most astounding untruths of the Manifesto launch night when he told the audience that the PPP/C government had only just paid off a US$300 million loan for the PNC’s failed hydropower project!

Not only was it deception for the Manifesto to choose 1991 as its reference point when the PPP/C was in fact elected in the fourth quarter of 1992, but some of the selected information both then and now are fictitious and or fabricated. GPL line loss was not 50% in 1991 nor is it less than 30% now (page 13). GuySuCo does not produce 30 MW of bagasse power at Skeldon – a Wartsila diesel powered engine does – and the current external debt is not “approximately US$800 million” – unless for the economist Mr Ramotar and his economic team US$800 million and US$1,111 million are “approximately” the same!

The Manifesto boasts of the growth of the economy over the past nineteen years. It does not bother with the inconvenience that a substantial portion of the growth comes from the re-basing of the economy in 2009, an exercise which even a half-decent economist knows makes long-term comparisons meaningless. Of course it would have been too honest to expect the Manifesto to tell us that the exchange rate of the US Dollar has sunk 65% since 1992; or that the domestic debt has climbed from $18 billion in 1992 to $103 billion at June 30, 2011; or that the cost of electricity was $12 compared with $54 per KW currently; or that greenheart was $85 per board metre compared with $350 now.

Mr Jagdeo and now Mr Ramotar repeat ad nauseum that 96% of revenues were consumed in servicing debt “when they took over,” and it is now 4%. They should read the 1993 Budget Speech in which the first PPP/C Finance Minister Asgar Ally referred to “scheduled debt service obligation” and not actual debt servicing. And if they look at the 2010 revised figures, they will see that debt-servicing to revenue is not 4% but 13.3%.

What is also striking is that Mr Ramotar’s ‘vision’ for the next five years does not add a single new idea to the corruption-laden projects of Mr Jagdeo’s last term. So we have:

1. the expensive and untested Chinese laptops that will run us into billions;

2. the Amaila hydropower project which will earn us the award for the most expensive hydropower in the world, guaranteeing that electricity rates will remain prohibitively high;

3. the tourism hospital which Mr Jagdeo and his friend will import from India;

4. the Low Carbon Development Strategy that is neither low in carbon nor developmental in nature; and

5. the fibre-optic cable.

Mr Ramotar shows a dangerously limited understanding of democracy and the constitution when he promises local government elections within one year and “the strengthening of the local government ministry to oversee local government bodies.” The man seems blissfully unaware that that is the purview of the constitutionally required Local Government Com-mission which his party in government has refused to establish, and that Article 79 requiring Parliament to provide criteria for allocating resources to the regions has not been given effect to.

Despite our border problems with Chavez’s Venezuela and Bouterse’s Suriname, or the imperative to resile from Jagdeo’s excursions with Kuwait, Libya and Iran, Mr Ramotar does not think that foreign policy deserves a mention in 43 pages.

But he dreams that in five years he can transform an education system – known as much for a few exceptions like Ms Dev, as for its drop-outs and the creation of a functionally illiterate population – into one that is “world class and globally competitive.”

That race and race relations for the PPP are the imagination of a few aging malcontents is evident from the failure of the Manifesto to recognise those issues or to acknowledge the International Year for People of African Descent.

One wonders whether the leaders of the private sector in attendance, including Clinton Williams, Norman McLean, Ramesh Dookhoo and others, noticed that nowhere is the private sector or the manufacturing sector mentioned in the Manifesto. Good for them.

But labour too got no mention and one is left to wonder for how much longer the Jagdeo-Nadir $800 per day minimum wage will drive the pay policy of the PPP/C. No mention of the depressed communities or efforts to stamp out corruption or to integrate the corrupt elements in the informal economy into the tax-paying formal economy.

Governance too is treated by omission. And for a man who was nurtured in the ideologically obsessed Marxist PPP, Mr Ramotar’s Manifesto does not even mention the model of economic philosophy which his administration will pursue.

Whoever wrote the section of the Manifesto on Information and Communication Technology (page 22) must have been smoking something. How in Edghill’s heaven’s name can Guyana produce 25,000 high-quality jobs over the next five years in computer engineering and software development? Perhaps we will import them from India or China as we will do for our tourism hospital.

Women who make up 51% of the population, children, the elderly and the family get one page in the Manifesto at page 36, that includes a commitment to a comprehensive review of the NIS. The PPP/C’s mismanagement of the NIS under the chairmanship of Dr Roger Luncheon for the past nineteen years has placed the NIS at grave risk with outflows far exceeding inflows – three years earlier than the 2006 Seventh Actuarial Study had feared.

And youth who make up 46% of the voters share one page with sports and culture, although culture is noticeably missing in the plans for the next five years.

One can draw analogies from Alice in Wonderland or Aesop’s Fables, but perhaps the most appropriate assessment of the PPP/C manifesto was offered by their own former minister, Dr Henry Jeffrey, who told the nation on ‘Plain Talk’ last Sunday that he could not vote for the PPP/C on the basis of this Manifesto.

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The Jagdeo Initiative – what is that?

Introduction
As President Jagdeo prepares to demit office in another few weeks there is a single issue with which his name will always be associated in CARICOM. And that is the common regional agricultural repositioning strategy which has been given the name Jagdeo Initiative. That it will remain only an initiative without any success is evident by Jagdeo’s failure to carry through his initiative even in his own country. Quite what is the Jagdeo Initiative and how did it arise?

In 2002 President Jagdeo had said to the leaders of CARICOM that agriculture had been buckling under pressures of trade reform, natural disasters and policy deficiencies; that the region had a poor implementation track record with the result that agriculture was not providing the region with food security nor covering the growing food import bill. He told his colleagues “… at this stage, we need a policy and strategy which will allow us to decide on what sort of institutions and mechanisms are needed to reposition agriculture.”

The region’s leaders were taken in by the self-confidence of the young Guyanese leader and taking him on his word rather than by his action, made him Lead Head responsible for Agriculture in CARICOM.

IICA and FAO recruited
Thereafter it was all bureaucracy and talk with nothing to show for it. Apart from the resources which he had at his disposal within Guyana’s own oversized and expensive Ministry of Agriculture, Jagdeo was also able to call on the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to assist in developing a framework towards a common regional agricultural repositioning strategy. This included:

• A situation & Outlook Report (May/03) establishing the challenges and requirements of repositioning.

• A Ministers of Agriculture Forum (June/03) which supported the renewed call for action and the Jagdeo Initiative.

• And in July 2004, the Caribbean Heads of Government endorsed the first Proposal containing the Initiative’s vision, scope, focus and process.

Vision
Under the Jagdeo Initiative, by 2015, agriculture in the region will have “made substantial progress in its contribution to sustainable growth, within a framework of transparent institutions and good governance that enables the transformation of its products and processes, encourages investment, drives entrepreneurship and assures an acceptable and consistent level of food security.”

Scope and process
The scope of the initiative is to define and implement Interventions to address Key Binding Constraints within the context of the Community Agricultural Policy; Existing and planned complementary initiatives undertaken by national, regional and international organizations; Emphasis on non-traditional products, value-added and intensification of diversification and practical programmes with achievable targets.

The process comprised regular briefing meetings; establishing the context, scope and output of consultations; National Consulta-tions redefining the challenges, opportunities and requirements, regular workshops developing consensus on Key Binding Constraints, framework of Interventions and draft of 2nd Proposal to the Heads of Governments.

The process was to have received validation by the regional private sector and endorsed by the Agriculture Ministers in Jan 2005 and agreed by the Heads of Government in February 2005. For the next several months leading into 2006 there was supposed to be an Inventory of Interventions at National and Institutional Levels.

Overall responsibility for the Initiative was vested in President Jagdeo, with the next line down being the regional Ministers of Agriculture, Ministerial Delegates, Other Stakeholders.

Early criticisms
It seems that at some point around 2005/2006 Jagdeo lost interest in his own initiative and in fact did not even attend a High Level Symposium on the CSME held in June 2006 in Barbados. At the Symposium, Director of Operations and Integration for the Caribbean Region Mr. H. Arlington Chesney in a power point presentation described the initiative, somewhat harshly, as “not a perfect instrument; not a scholarly piece of work; evolving; a kick start and a vision and framework for all”.

Then in October 2010, Mr. Sergio Garcia, the CARICOM Programme Manager for Agriculture described in less than complimentary terms the series of earlier food initiatives that have languished in the region. Those initiatives of which the Jagdeo Initiative was the most recent, were described by Mr. Garcia as having “had limited, if any, success, however, because they have been prepared and executed in isolation from other policies. Actions taken have thus been sparse, diffuse… and uncoordinated.”

Jagdeo and his lead Minister
Mr. Garcia might not know it but that is characteristic of several of the initiatives undertaken by the Jagdeo Administration. Jagdeo also did not help his own cause by having a Minister of Agriculture who was no more focused that he was.

To address the problems of agriculture and food security both regionally and nationally required not only a realistic vision but focus, commitment and sustained work. Instead of these, Jagdeo and his current Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud MBA seem to prefer politics and propaganda with the latter thinking it was all about pepper, papaw, pumpkin and pineapple! Are these guys for real?

That knowing the problem is half the solution did not apply to Jagdeo and his Initiative and consequently it barely advanced beyond the identification of “binding constraints” which any desk exercise could have produced. Paradoxically the Jagdeo Initiative farmed out many of the responsibilities for addressing these constraints to the other CARCOM territories with only a single task assigned to Guyana and even then only jointly with the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).

Trinidad
While Guyana’s food bill has trebled since the President came up with his initiative, other countries in the Caribbean have long since dispensed with the initiative. In 2008, then Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Patrick Manning said that his country could not “wait for others to lead the way” and that Trinidadians must produce more and consume less; and above all else “we must move towards the highest possible level of food production…”

While Jagdeo speaks disparagingly of the closure of sugar estates in the Caribbean, Manning saw it as “liberating thousands of acres of arable land for food production.” Contrary to what Jagdeo has said about Trinidad, that country has announced the availability of two-acre plots of land to six thousand new farmers and the creation of seventeen new large farms, all of no less than one hundred acres each. That in a country that could fit many, many times into Guyana.

This past week, CARDI hosted in Trinidad Dr S. Ayyappan, Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) a public lecture on how agricultural research and development in India helped to reduce hunger in that country. It would have been very useful for Guyana to have invited Dr. Ayyappan to visit Guyana to do a similar talk here and meet with officials but perhaps the campaign agenda did not allow for distractions by such developmental issues.

Jamaica
In Jamaica both the Government and the private sector have demonstrated what could be achieved with national initiatives. While in Guyana the agricultural bank was shut down and NIS money was allowed out for Mr. Duprey’s CLICO, Jamaica was more sensible. There the Export/Import (Ex-Im) Bank of Jamaica is teaming up with the Scientific Research Council (SRC) to collaborate on ideas, and with the National Insurance Scheme for the establishment of special financial facilities aimed at boosting agro-industrial production.

Such financing has been used in SRC-produced technologies in activities that include drying and the preservation of foods, particularly spices and teas; those for smoking, in the case of meats; and canning and concentrate applications, in the case of fruit and vegetable processing. And the Jamaican regional giant GraceKennedy Limited has only just launched the Grace Fresh n’ Ready brand of processed vegetables and official handing over ceremony of a J$43 million post-harvest processing plant in that country. The plant was leased from the Ministry of Agriculture. The facility was the result of a multi-lateral partnership known as the Improving Jamaica’s Agricultural Productivity Project (IJAP) – which received funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) – the Ministry of Agriculture and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and GraceKennedy Ltd.

Conclusion
There must be some realistic doubt whether at some stage Mr. Jagdeo will prepare a status report on his Initiative on which CARICOM was led into spending lots of scarce money.

The silent and dormant agro-processing/packaging plants at Parika and Sophia testify to Guyana’s failure to address its mounting food bill and exploit its huge potential in agricultural products. There must be a sense of both relief and sadness among Guyanese that other Caribbean countries long ago realised that under Jagdeo the region’s agricultural initiative was going nowhere.

Sadness that Guyana blew a wonderful and historic opportunity to stamp its valuable contribution on CARICOM: relief that the other countries did not rely on our President to help them solve their food problems. They would still be waiting.

Meanwhile when I asked a couple of friends about what they know about the Jagdeo Initiative, the most polite response was what is that? One said the LCDS, while another said Amaila. Oh, well.

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Berbice Bridge Company Inc. – Not really a profit

Introduction
At long last, the Berbice Bridge Company Inc. (BBCI) has decided to file annual returns and financial statements with the Registrar of Companies. The law requires that such returns and accounts be filed no later than around mid-August of each year for companies with a December 31 year-end. Why BBCI chose to file some years and not others is for speculation but one thing is certain: the return and the financial statements for 2010 make for very interesting reading or indeed for some serious concerns.

On the face of it the company did very well in 2010. Its revenue for 2010 is $1,115 million, up 17% over 2009, the company’s first full year of operations. Total non-interest expenditure was $287 million, up 16% over the previous year. Included in non-interest expenditure is a depreciation charge of $140 million, a small increase over the preceding year. And that is where the questions begin to arise. But before that important digression, let us continue the brief income statement analysis. Interest expense has risen from $694 million to $715 million, thus accounting for 64% of the company’s revenue. Because of its tax-exempt status the company was able to record a net profit of $137 million compared with $5 million in 2009.

More borrowings
The Balance sheet shows the company as having $8,865 million of fixed assets compared with $8,965 million in 2009, the entire reduction being attributable to depreciation charge in 2010. The more easily realisable current assets have declined in value from $161 million in 2009 to $24 million in 2010, with cash resources reducing from $152 million in 2009 to $24 million in 2010! Current liabilities which are amounts that are payable at the balance sheet date or within twelve months thereof amounted to $205 million, a significant decrease in such liabilities over 2009 as the company paid out $450 million in subordinated loan stock interest and returned some $130 million in corporate bonds.

This reduction in short term liabilities came at the expense of increases in long-term loans. The Beharry Group added to their investment in the company some $325 million through the Guyana Bank of Trade and Industry ($250 million) and North American Life and Fire companies ($75 million). Hand-in-Hand Life increased its investment in the Bridge Company by $70 million while its Trust Company reduced its investment by $25 million. Meanwhile the New GPC Inc. a member of a group that has earned some investing notoriety in Guyana took out its entire $35 million in loan stock in the company.

Capital Structure and concealment
The company has an interesting capital structure. Its share capital is $400 million shared between six shareholders with four of them – NIS, New GPC, CLICO and Secure International Finance Company – having $80 million each, and two – Hand-in-Hand and Demerara Contractors – sharing the remaining $80 million. But then the ubiquitous NICIL has a special $1 share which gives it a veto power over any major decision of the company.

If the financial statements are taken at face value it may seem that that is the extent of NICIL’s investment in the company. A closer look indicates that a single investor has some $950 million in preference shares in the company earning a rate of dividend of 11% per annum or $104.5 million per annum. It is a requirement of the law that the persons holding shares in the company be listed in the Annual Return. This has not been done and to that extent the annual return signed by Mr. Winston Brassington, the CEO of NICIL should have been rejected. But then again, the Registrar was probably thankful that the company filed any return after six years.

The concealment gets worse. Note 10 to the financial statements tells the reader that the dividends paid on the preference shares are cumulative, i.e. if they are not paid in one year they are carried forward to the next period for payment at an increased rate of 12%! Forget for a moment that unhelpful use of language. What is striking is that the company owed the preference shareholder at December 31, 2010 more than $600 million but that shareholder is reported in the 2010 financial statements as waiving “dividend and interest on dividend due up to December 31, 2010”.

It does not take a genius to realise that that investor is NICIL or one of its many satellites through which it can funnel money that should otherwise have passed through the Consolidated Fund and voted on by the National Assembly. In fact NICIL’s satellite for the billion dollar investment and which waived the hundreds of millions of dollars was a company called Aroaima Mining Company Inc. which is no longer in operation. Even if there is a real company called Aroaima Mining Company Inc. its controlling parent is NICIL headed by Dr. Ashni Singh among several Cabinet members who are also NICIL’s directors. That such a stellar collection of responsible men could make such as decision and then try to conceal it from the taxpayers is reprehensible.

It would seem as well that under the Financial Management and Accountability Act NICIL has no authority to waive any such sums and that its Board including the Minister of Finance and the Cabinet Secretary are guilty of misfeasance in public office.

Wrong treatment
Then there is the question of the fudging of the depreciation versus amortization. Depreciation is the annual charge to write off the cost of a long-term tangible asset over its useful life. Amortization is the systematic allocation of the depreciable amount of an intangible asset over its useful life. I am aware that someone closely connected with the company had been calling around asking whether or not there was a need to charge any depreciation on the Bridge. Clearly fudging was being considered at some level. On being told of the query, I thought it was some junior not familiar with even basic bookkeeping. I should not have been so dismissive.

In fact it is clear to me that the entire treatment of the cost of the Bridge is wrong. The company does not own the Bridge as confirmed by the special share and its own note to the financial statements. Under a Concession Agreement that the law setting up the statutory framework for the Bridge has made so secret, the company has the right to operate the Bridge for a period of twenty-one years. Indeed note 1 to the financial statements described the principal business activities of the company as the construction and operation of a floating bridge. This is the classical Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement and gives the company not ownership of the public asset but a right to operate the Bridge. Such a right is an intangible asset subject to amortisation over the period of the right.

Arbitrary and self-serving
I would think that the treatment as a tangible fixed asset is more than simple unfamiliarity with the relevant International Financial Reporting Interpretations Committee (IFRIC) guidance on the matter. So what did the Board featuring Ms. Gita Singh-Knight and Mr. Winston Brassington choose to do? They chose a write-off period of thirty-eight years under the reducing balance basis. If this is converted to the more common straight-line basis the Board is assuming a useful life of the Bridge of more than one hundred years! And to compound the grey areas they estimate that at the end of its so-called estimated useful life the Bridge would have a residual value of more than four billion dollars.

But the absurdity of it all comes from the company’s own financial statements. As the system implies, under the reducing balance method the depreciation charge declines each year so that if there is a $100 investment in an asset with a useful life of 10 years the depreciation in the first year will be $10 ($100/10), the second year would be $9 ([$100-10]/10) etc. The magicians at the Bridge Company claim to be using the reducing balance but end with straight-line depreciation charges!

Responsibility
Just who are responsible for the type of fudging that is taking place with the Annual Report’s omission, the mistaken application of tangible versus intangible asset and the fiddling of depreciation? To start with the Board is headed by Ms. Gita Singh-Knight of CLICO infamy. Ms. Singh-Knight was the CEO responsible for shipping billions of dollars of NIS and other funds for her boss Duprey who then squandered it abroad. Ms. Singh-Knight is an accountant by training and indeed is the only professional accountant on board.

Other members of the Board include Hand-in-Hand executive Keith Evelyn, Beharry Group executive Paul Cheong, engineer Edward Carter, Attorney-at-law Paul Fredericks and former jurist Cecil Kennard. The annual return should state the business occupation and particulars of other directorships. None is stated. The only other person with any claim to some amount of accounting knowledge is Mr. Winston Brassington whose role in prevailing upon entities like the National Insurance Scheme and the New Building Society for investments in the Bridge has been addressed before in this Page.

The political dimension
While the Government stoutly resists claims that its decision to bypass and in the process practically kill New Amsterdam as a commercial centre in favour of the Corentyne Coast, it was forced to have a skewed consultant report to justify its decision. But economics has a way of trumping race and politics. Having sited the bridge at D’Edward Village instead of Everton it must now contrive all forms of financial and other shenanigans to make the Bridge seem viable. Competition has been frustrated if not ruled out while the company, its investors, sub-contractors and everyone else connected with it enjoy a range of tax concessions that would make even the Ramroop Group green with envy.

Conclusion
Had it not been for some admirable creative financing and accounting the Berbice Bridge Company would not only have recorded continuing and significant losses but it would have been unable to meet the generous interest and dividend obligations to its investors. The public needs to be reminded that the President Jagdeo–Singh-Knight combination has placed a six billion dollars hole in the balance sheet of the NIS. And as a result of the Brassington– Luncheon work on the NIS, the Scheme had at December 31 2010 over $1.5B invested in the Berbice Bridge. Let us hope that the group combination will not cause the company to sink.