APNU questions Brassington’s competence

Aug 14, 2013 News

– wants special authority to oversee any new Amaila arrangements

“I don’t even know what background he (Winston Brassington) has to qualify him to sit there, let alone to handle the volume of money he has handled, and yet the government seems comfortable.” – Carl Greenidge

Any new arrangements of the Amaila Falls hydro project will have to include a special management authority to oversee the myriad of challenges that will arise, the main Opposition has said.

Winston Brassington

On Monday, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) also questioned the competence of Winston Brassington, a senior official involved in the sale of state assets, to handle what would easily be Guyana’s most expensive project ever.
According to APNU’s Leader, Brigadier (Ret’d) David Granger, during a press conference geared to defend the coalition’s non-support of two pieces of legislation said to be critical to the financing of the project, there remains significant concerns about the measures in place to manage the hydro facility.
With a massive amount, over US$850M, to be spent in constructing the 165 megawatts, Granger is convinced that the project is not something that could be handled as a mere extension of the Government. Rather, it must involve intense planning.
Brassington sits as key figure in the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), a state-owned agency that is charged with the privatization of government assets. There has been controversy over a number of the deals done there, with Brassington coming under fire for his role. He also is the Chairman of the Guyana Power and Light Inc., another semi-autonomous state agency.
Brassington is a senior official in Amaila Falls Hydro Inc., the local company that is partly owned by Government, and was the entity to handle the construction and management of the hydro facility. He is also central in the negotiations of a number of large scale projects between Guyana and Brazil, including a deep water harbour and the paving of Linden/Lethem Road.
With the Amaila Falls project involving road construction, financing, the environment, the actual dam and transmission lines construction and issues involving Amerindians, the need for a special authority capable of handling the intricacies takes on even more significance, the Opposition Leader insisted.

APNU’s Carl Greenidge

“This is not something where you could be handling NICIL, handling GPL, handling hydro project… It is a massive expenditure,” Granger said.
He pointed to the aborted Upper Mazaruni hydro project in the 1970s, in which a special body, the Upper Mazaruni Development Authority, was established to oversee the process. To build roads there, another body called the Upper Mazaruni Road Project was also set up.
“They have not assured us that they have created the institution which could handle everything that is going to take place…What we saw was this was not being seriously tackled by government…(it was) almost whimsical.”
APNU was worried in also not seeing similar measures for the Amaila project.
“If you could look back to what the government of the day in 1970 was doing, it required a massive amount of planning, and that has been absent here (Amaila). And APNU has taken the position that we have not seen the infrastructure…. we did not see the administration… we did not see the management.”
Granger emphasised that the current configuration was a recipe for disaster and one of the key reasons for APNU feeling that project was bound for trouble or even “failure”.
Former Finance Minister and senior APNU Member of Parliament, Carl Greenidge, also expressed reservations about the capacity of the Government and measures in place to deal with the hydro’s construction.
Regarding Brassington, he had this to say: “I don’t even know what background he has to qualify him to sit there, let alone to handle the volume of money he has handled, and yet the government seems comfortable.”
APNU stressed that Guyana has the talents to make the project a reality, with even officials of the coalition who have knowledge of the workings of hydro.

Opposition Leader David Granger

The developer of the project announced it was pulling out over the weekend saying that a failure by the Opposition to lend unanimous support to two critical bills in the National Assembly has placed the financing in jeopardy. The Alliance For Change (AFC) backed the legislation, but APNU voted against, saying it had concerns over the financing and other aspects of the project.
The project, touted by Government as the answer to the country’s growing energy demands, has been under heavy scrutiny from day one, because of costs and other issues. Several contractors have been fired from the access roads leading to the project site in Region Eight.