Defrauding the poor in the society

Aug 28, 2016 Editorial, Features / Columnists

It would seem that there have been a lot of undocumented happenings in the past. People own properties that were never theirs. The scheme involved checking with the city council to identify abandoned properties then getting the court registry to change or forge the deeds.
There have been cases of people actually returning to the properties only to find that they belong to someone else. One man is still locked in the court trying to recover his property. He has the original transport and this has been verified by the registry. But the new owner also has the deed or transport, albeit issued later, but for the same property.
The country recently witnessed a case of a woman who lived in a property that she had occupied for years, being shot dead in the home. She was in the process of finalizing prescriptive rights and was being challenged by someone who actually produced a power of attorney and sold the very property.
Efforts to find the power of attorney proved futile. People travelled to the New Jersey address but could not find the woman who was said to live there. Her neighbours could not identify the woman whose photograph was proffered as the New Jersey woman. This was a clear case of identity theft.
After the woman was shot dead, all interest in the property by the persons unknown came to an abrupt halt. The police are still seeking the intellectual author of the murder even as the four men who were found guilty of the killing are spending enough time in jail to ensure that they never walk the streets again.
More recently, there have been other schemes that have been uncovered. The biggest one involves water. A major business place is said to have a connection to, and has been receiving water from Guyana Water Inc. The only problem is that there is no record of GWI actually providing those connections and supplying the water.
The people are waiting to see how this plays out. GWI is insisting on back billing this company for water used over the past decade but the company says that it is using water from its own well that it dug some forty years ago, even before the company owned the property.
Surely there was some collusion to provide a cheap service to a friend. One of the architects had to be high up in the administration with enough power to issue instructions to the lower level to provide this undocumented service.
These things are happening even as the lowly public servant is seeking a better pay. They are happening even as the government is trying to find money to provide even more for the senior citizens.
We were made aware of concessions to some foreign investors. These concessions proved costly to the country to the tune of billions of dollars. And to make matters worse, the returns have been nowhere close to what the country gave by way of these concessions.
The argument was that these investors would help promote national development, but commonsense would reveal that one does not giveaway more than one receives and expect development.
There have been other schemes that have proved costly. Contractors were awarded packages worth millions of dollars only to provide substandard work that sent the government issuing even other contracts for the same works.
People end up in jail once the corruption is proven. The news media regale us every day with stories of leaders who have been charged with corruption. There are no such charges in Guyana. It could be that we are cut from a different cloth.

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