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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GuySuCo’s operational law is the Companies Act and by virtue of its 1976 registration, it straddles two such Acts, the repealed Companies Act Cap. 89:01 and the Companies Act 1991.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.

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Forty-four years of the NIS

Introduction
September marked forty-four years since the National Insurance Scheme was launched by Prime Minister Forbes Burnham’s Government. It also marked twenty-one years of the control of the NIS by the PPP/C Government and the Chairmanship of another Forbes, this time bearing the surname Luncheon. The latter and a hard core of directors have led the NIS into a state where the Pension Reserves are now being used up by about two billion dollars per year. The saving grace for the reserves is that short-term and industrial benefits paid out annually are generating surpluses that help to compensate for the reductions in the Pension reserves.

The NIS was established as an actuarial scheme, i.e. one that seeks to balance out its long-term liabilities against its assets and revenues. The way this is achieved is by way of periodic – usually five yearly – evaluations carried out by external independent actuaries. The process is very scientific and involves a review all the data on active and past contributors, past and projected future income and expenses – of which pension benefits are always the more significant item – leading to recommendations generally designed to maintain/restore the actuarial balance of the Scheme.
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