The dirty money trail, dirty people

Nov 10, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – It is good that Guyanese get to hear from the local Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).  A $2 billion ‘dirty money’ trail compiled for 2024, and published for citizens to digest.  A dirty money trail means that there are dirty people behind that kind of money, dirty people using that shadowy trail.  Let Guyanese have some names, Mr. Matthew Langevine.

I appreciate that the FIU head can’t do so, due to rules governing him.  But the people above him-regulatory people, political people, law enforcement people-all know the names.  They know who they were before.  Because some of those same dirty money people, likely most of them, were their own people, their donors, even their friends.  Since, FIU director Langevine is restrained from speaking publicly, then the burden falls on me.  When a citizen has nothing to fear, he can speak and write anything anywhere and before anyone, even get in the bad books of any power, and with one guiding condition: hold fast to truth.

The $2 billion in dirty money is from 2024.  Who was in charge in 2024?  In 2024, $2 billion dirty dollars made it to the FIU radar, via Suspicious Transaction Reports, which I submit could be just the shadow of the iceberg.  How many more dirty dollars and how many other perps fell outside the sweep of the FIU’s radar?  How many reporting agencies of this Republic looked the other way, ducked a development, when there was a transaction that met the criteria for FIU reporting?  The bulk of the suspects is the same.  Gold smuggling.  Bribery.  Tax evasion.  Money laundering.  Who is the PPP Government and its agents going to try to pawn off that on, which objectionable citizen?

The spinners in the attorney general chambers will get to run before their microphones and holler: see! The government is on the job.  Vigilant and casting a wide net; and there are neither friends nor sacred cows.  Ha!  Ha!  If Guyanese only have a clue about the whole story, the whole rackets, and the whole cabal of people involved.  It is not just the dirty money Guyanese, but the Guyanese who deal with them, who protect them, because deh tek de peeple monee.  Stink and dutty money, I remind the citizens who care about these things.  The system cannot hold much longer, and little by little there are these ‘seepages’ into the public domain.  The two big ones represent one such seepage.  Recall how the big, smart man was setting the stage with ‘more indictments expected soon.’  What a tangled web is weaved when first we practice to deceive.  What is this business about ‘we?’  That has its own people, and guess who isn’t part of that dirty, nasty, sickly crowd?  PPP-controlled State media can try its hand to obfuscate.  PPP-friendly media can vacillate.  PPP-instigated social media can prevaricate.  To little avail would be all the deflecting, distancing, and daubing on others.  The Yanks are watching, absorbing, taking notes.

The U.S. government must be breathing hard down the neck of the Guyana Government, for it to belatedly see God.  Two billion Guyana is small fish; in Guyanese patois, ‘fine change’ or minibus money.  What about the years before?  How many more dirty dollars before?  Who from the clique of friends, family, and favorites (fiends, too) were fingered, but got a pass?  Who in the PPP Govt turned a blind eye to such developments before?  And going deeper into the past, who in the PNC-AFC Govt had a part of the dirty money and dirty people bribes?  It is why they are all-PPP, PNC, AFC-scrambling to separate themselves from their past and present godfatherism, paid-for patronage and protection.  It is why there are such desperate efforts, such frenzied energies in PPP quarters to pin the tail of the jackass on some scapegoat that they manufactured.  One that consents to being intimated into silence.  Few are the Guyanese who have a small idea of the magnitude of the crimes that were and are committed in their names by their own heroes, their false gods.  The sawdust has started to flake.  And the more they protest and pretend, the more they play games, the more they plant themselves deeper into the pit they dug.  Last week, it was FIU director Langevine and his disclosures.  Tomorrow, the U.S govt will name names.

Do Guyana’s business right, and there’s no need for anxiety.  Deflections don’t work.  Defamations transform into a red badge of courage, puts Guyana on trial.  Deal with crime-inclined people in the right manner, and the people at the FIU would have to go job hunting, for they would have so little to do.  But that’s how politicians get rich, collecting from and protecting lawbreakers.  Hence, dirty money trails.

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

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• dirty money, dirty people, Financial Intelligence Unit, GHK Lall

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