Saturday morning, and Friday left a heavy news day to wake up to. The headlines mostly point in the same direction.
ECLAC: Guyana collects the smallest share of its own economy in the region
A new ECLAC report puts Guyana’s tax-to-GDP ratio at 9.2 percent for 2024 — against a regional average of 21.7 percent and Brazil at 33.7 percent. Even countries with stagnant economies and fewer natural resources are pulling more revenue from their economies than Guyana is from its booming oil sector.
The contradiction writes itself. Cranes everywhere. Pipelines everywhere. Billion-dollar announcements every other week. Meanwhile food prices, drainage, blackouts, and healthcare sit roughly where they were before first oil. Wealth is being generated, but a disproportionate amount escapes through profit repatriation, generous concessions, tax waivers, and contractual limitations.
ECLAC also notes that countries that ran deliberate tax reforms — Barbados, Brazil, Cuba, Antigua — moved their numbers. Guyana hasn’t. The question for the diaspora reading this in Brooklyn or Toronto or London is the one any homeowner asks when the roof leaks: who exactly is benefitting from the rain?
ICJ: Sands says Venezuela showed up empty-handed
At The Hague Friday, lead counsel Professor Philippe Sands KC told the court Venezuela’s case to overturn the 1899 Arbitral Award rests on no evidence. He pointed to Caracas’s overreliance on the 1949 Mallet-Prevost memorandum and noted Venezuela accepted the award for 63 years — signing the 1905 implementing treaty and adhering to it for decades — before reversing course in 1962.
On Venezuela’s “political blackmail” framing, Sands was direct: “The striving for consensus is an act of decency and wisdom.”
APNU chairman Aubrey Norton added a sober note from Georgetown: U.S. control of Venezuela won’t end the claim. Worth holding onto as the case grinds on.
Energy: PowerChina lands another contract, Amaila bids skew Chinese
Two procurement stories on the same day, both pointing the same direction.
GPL signed a US$27.3M contract with PowerChina International for a 60 MWh / 30 MW Battery Energy Storage System with substation expansions and SCADA integration — eight-month build, black-start capability, renewables integration. The right kind of infrastructure on paper.
Separately, the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project opened bids Friday at NPTAB. Five bids in. Three Chinese, one American, one Indian. The project will run via a Special Purpose Company under a BOOT arrangement, with selection on lowest PPA price.
The pattern is becoming hard to ignore: when Guyana goes to market for the big infrastructure pieces, the bid box is increasingly filling up with one country’s contractors. That isn’t a scandal. It is a procurement environment worth talking about openly.
PM Phillips: efficiency, not just supply
At the National Seminar on Energy Efficiency Friday, PM Mark Phillips made a point that doesn’t get said often enough in oil economies: building more plants and importing more fuel won’t be enough. He flagged the zero excise tax on fuel held since March 2022, 186 MW of new generating capacity since August 2020, and 37,000-plus solar home systems — but said the demand side is half the equation. Building codes, appliance standards, CARICOM-aligned efficiency rules.
The kind of speech that ages well or badly depending entirely on whether the regulators actually write the codes.
Quick hits
- Berbice fire: Two homes destroyed after a child reportedly sparked the blaze.
- Tuschen Secondary: A 14-year-old has been arrested after stabbing two classmates.
- OPR investigation: A senior officer, a corporal, and a constable are under investigation after a video circulated showing a woman who said she is a police officer being stopped by an anti-crime unit corporal. Deputy Commissioner Fizal KarimBaksh, who heads SOCU, was named in the call that followed.
- JES winding down: The Canadian-funded Justice Education Society programme — four years of work with the DPP’s office on Amerindian community outreach in Regions 1 and 9 — concludes in September.
Tradewinds Brief Newsroom. Sources: Kaieteur News.