Jagdeo tight-lipped on investigations into falling gold declarations

Aug 26, 2023 News

Kaieteur News – Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday assured that an investigation, into the falling gold declarations, is ongoing but refused to release any further details.

Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo

During his press conference at Freedom House, the Vice President was asked for an update on the probe which he announced was ongoing since last month.

In response, the VP noted, “The investigations are going on. I’m not part of the investigation. I have been assured that it’s going on. I’m not part of it but I’m hoping soon it would yield results.”

Jagdeo said the government does not want to disclose who is conducting the investigation, but continued, “I know that the Ministry has already notified people and they are assessing now, even currently while the investigation is going on, looking back at the years too because there’s several years we have to go back into.”

The former President pointed out that there were major variances in the gold declared versus declarations made locally to the Guyana Gold Board (GGB). He said, “The Ministry has already notified a lot of the people that the concessions and everything else would be linked to declaration.”

In announcing the probe last month, Jagdeo said government was formerly of the view that gold from Venezuela was coming into Guyana to bypass the sanctions, then head North through a legal route. However, it has now realized that it is Guyana’s gold that is being smuggled into Brazil.

The VP said he believes that miners are engaged in this activity to avoid paying the five percent royalty owed to the State, along with the two percent final tax attached to the mining activities.

According to him, “That might be one of the reasons, so we, there is an ongoing investigation into that and we are gonna take tough measures against people because we are gonna track also those who are benefitting from concessions.”

An analysis of available statistics, done by this newspaper, found that even with foreign gold companies announcing mega gold finds, declarations have been declining since 2017.

According to the Bank of Guyana (BoG) Annual Report for 2022, the total gold declarations last year declined by 2.5 percent to 486,415 troy ounces (oz).

Meanwhile, in 2021 and 2020, declarations were 499,054 oz and 585,433 oz respectively.

In 2019, the gold sector had performed better with declarations amounting to 641,828 oz.

Further, for the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, notable decreases were recorded; a total of 712,706 oz, 653,753 oz, and 613,073 oz were recorded respectively.

Notably, in the first quarter of this year, the trend continued with the Bank of Guyana reporting a contraction of 5.3 percent in declarations when compared with same period last year. This publication understands that the declarations were approximately 110,000 ounces.

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