Foreign investors riding Guyana like a donkey

Dec 15, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths….

By GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News- Wrong!  The focus today is not on Guyana’s great oil wealth.  It is on that other grand patrimony, now in the background.  Gold!  Does Guyana have gold.  And do some foreign investors know how to come here and rip the gold out of the ground, and rip the guts out of the governments of Guyana.  More than one of them, more than one time. It seems like all the time.  Look first at the Aussies who came and how well they did for themselves.  Then look a little deeper, and refresh the memory of what they did to this country.  The name Troy Resources should ring a bell.  It ended up being a billion-dollar hole in the head.

Then, there was Golden Star that become Omai.  I am in awe of this fine fellow, Mr. David Fennell.  He usually makes it his duty to be around when gold concessions are available for the taking.  He has made a killing in Guyana from being an investor, a man who has perfected the fine art of travelling from speculator to seller before one can count to three.  Rich mining lands are awarded, along with the company of some more sweeteners.  Duty-free concessions, and there is that memory that nags and would not let go.  It involves taxes.  It is a rich one.  Three million ounces of gold shipped out by Omai (nee Golden Star), and Guyana’s chief tax collector (the GRA) is left to count the lines in its hand, as though it is into reading palms.  For emphasis: 3,000,000 ounces of gold extracted and flown out of Guyana, and 0.00 cents in taxes collected.  Not one bloody cent!  Then Omai ran into some difficulties, and hustled out of Guyana.  Slack local political leadership again, for the interested.  Thus, the precedent was set for Troy Resources to disappear when its turn came.  What’s a couple of billions among friends…?

All along, some of those same foreign investors were not sleeping, but busy plotting their next steps while circling around Guyana’s piles of gold like vultures.  They came up with a beauty: Reunion Gold.  Man, do I like that christening, which was really about hiding out in the open.  Peel back the layers, and it is indeed a reunion of Golden Star and Omai luminaries.  Yes, the name David Fennell surfacing again.  The man not only knows how to profit handsomely off Guyana’s gold, he knows how to do so perpetually, it seems.  He certainly knows the right ears to whisper into, the right strings to pull.  Maybe even the right package of incentives from his side to make things happen in golden hued Guyana.  Before long, Reunion became G Mining Ventures.  Over 600 million foreign money changed hands from this last sale among investors aka speculators cum sellers.  In the real estate trade that is called flipping.  Guyana’s rich mineral resources being flipped like pancakes, and not a crumb (or stray pancake) landing in Guyanese laps.  Is this high-stakes poker, or is this the high crimes and treacheries of Guyana’s Governments?  Isn’t this Guyana being taken for a donkey, then ridden like one?

Where is President Ali amid all this? I concede that the best question is what has become of Guyana’s presidency? Even if I were to strip his many titles away, and convert Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo into a nobody, he still has those potent residues that stick: he’s a one-man lawmaker, one-man rule maker and one-man regulator.  It is obvious that Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali has either delegated all of his presidential powers to Dr. Nobody Jagdeo.  Or he has abdicated his high office.  Delegated or abdicated -pick one.  So, there is Reunion and G Mining Ventures and Omai (old and supposedly new).  And, naturally, Mr. David Fennell.  To help me manage more seamlessly, I was planning to correspond with Mr. Alistair Routledge for a consultancy with Exxon.  I scrapped that idea; too high profile.  Better to deal with the David Fennells: investor, speculator, seller and, clearly, a renowned harvester of gold.  Guyana gold, that is.  He has that magic touch.

Looking at this from the point of view of starving and stricken citizens of Guyana, a few are benefiting from the prostituting of our resources, while the many are left to ponder how and why so.  Strangers and insiders are riding Guyana like a donkey and bright leaders like Drs. Ali and Jagdeo pick fights with Guyanese who ask why?  How is that so?  What’s going on?  I shouldn’t be writing about this; the opposition should be kicking me to the corner to have its say.  A scream, a curse, works powerfully.

At four flights per week by the Canadians to carry away not what, but how much?  Are Guyana’s human resources assigned to stand duty for G Mining Ventures, to facilitate those flights?  And who knows what more.  Four flights a week to fetch gold (what else, scrap iron?) and nobody in Guyana knows whether Guyana gets 10% or 10 cents for its treasure.  This is how foreign investors ride local leaders for a song.  This is how foreign cartmen ride Guyana like a donkey.  I am applying.  Not to be the donkey.  But, the role of investor.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this newspaper.)

 

(Foreign investors riding Guyana like a donkey)

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• hard truths, high-stakes poker, Mr. David Fennell., Omai luminaries, Troy Resources

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