Dindyal defends salaries paid to Board of Directors

Jun 16, 2013 News

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…says company can’t afford not to

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Power and Light (GPL), Bharat Dindyal, has said that in order to get the desired returns, market rates have to be paid to the people employed.
He declined to confirm or deny that the company pays its Chairman of the Board of Directors, Winston Brassington, some $4M per month.

Dindyal said that this is the only country in the world where people believe that there is an ‘inverse relationship’ between the amount of work to be done and the salary to be paid.
In defending the payments made to the top brass in the company namely the Board of Directors, Dindyal said that “when people come to these high stress jobs they demand market rates.”
According to the CEO, the critics inclusive of those in the political opposition are spewing exactly that, “politics.”
Dindyal said that had the naysayers been in government “and know that they have to make the company successful then they know what they got to do.”
Commenting on the critics speaking against the salaries paid to the directors of the company, Dindyal said, “Those statements come from people sitting in the opposition; they don’t have to run the company, and they are not accountable to anybody.”
Asked if the company can afford to pay such salaries to its directors, Dindyal retorted, “Could you not afford it?”
Dindyal recalled that during the 2008 debate when the parties were deliberating over a $3.7B allocation to the power company, one speaker from the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) opined, “if you pay peanuts you know what you get.”
“If you want people who are delivering the goods, then you have to pay them. You can’t say we poor so you pay Guyanese rates…if not forget about performance and employ somebody who you think you can pay.”
Dindyal said that there are performance targets for each of the people in the company’s employ relative to their salaries.
“We have targets for everybody. The only problem with GPL is that you don’t always get the resources to fix all the problems…there are so many things to fix you can’t fix all at one time.”
There have been increasing calls by the Alliance for Change (AFC) for the sacking of the Board of Directors at the power company, given its perceived failure over the years to reduce losses, but according to Dindyal it is a result of the fact that with limited resources the company would have had to prioritize its spending, first focusing on increased generation.
He recalled that in the early 90s, the then Guyana Electric Corporation (GEC) was depending on a feeder station that was over 30 years old in Georgetown, and the Inter American Development bank had undertaken a major overhaul of this facility.
“A lot of the work that was done was condemned and started to fail in the 90s…You had a generation problem, you had transmission and distribution problems, you had a metering problem, you had problems on every front,” said Dindyal.
In such a situation he said that management had to first fix the problem of its power generation.
“If you ain’t got generation nothing else works.”
According to Dindyal, in 1992, a team of experts was assembled to address the problem of generation at the power company and the following year Wartsila began constructing the first plant.
That added 11MW to the system and in 1995 another 11MW had been added to the national grid.
In 1995 also 4MW had been installed at Anna Regina, while in 1997, a further 22MW had been added to the Kingston plant.
According to Dindyal from 1993 to 1999 the entire focus of the company was on generation.
In 1999 the company was turned over to the expatriate management and nothing was done during this time until 2003 when the current management was returned.
He said, “When management came back we found that they were trying to build a 30MW plant in Garden of Eden.”
According to Dindyal, the European Investment Bank at the time, had committed €30M should the management be able to locate matching funds, but this could not be done.
“We started to pick up the same old machines, we started to do maintenance on it in 2003.”
He said that the current management, managed to hold the system together and Government was well aware of the fact that the power company required significant investment in generation but this did not materialize until 2009.
“We could not imagine that we would have gotten past 2007 without new generation but we survived until December 2009.”
He said that management wanted at the time over 35MW of new generation but government only supplied enough funds for 15MW.
Every investment prior to 2011, was “all generation.”
Dindyal said that when the price tag of ‘billions’ is associated with the investment made, to the ordinary man it sounds like a lot.

 

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