i know Raj Singh and can confidently state that he is not loyal to the PPP and that he is a  " Johnny come lately " ...Singh's only loyality is to himself and Jagdeo ! He joined the ACG - New York in the late 1980's when the political tide was turning in favour of the PPP. He was never around in the trenches but was working as an admission clerk at a NJ university which also afforded him the time to participate  in the activities of a union busting group which contracted from time to time  to break up strikes of workers trying to gain recognisation forf their respective unions.....Cheddi Jagan was made aware of this and he planned to tell Singh to  " get loss " when he returned to the USA in April of 1997 on a lecture tour of American colleges....unfortunately this was not to be....Janet Jagan who was aware of Cheddi's plans told us in 1998 that she didn't want Singh involved in planning her American visit but wanted to meet with him....Singh never showed upfor the meeting.....

The Ramouther/Jagdeo cabal is courting political suicide with Raj Singh's appointment as he does not have what it takes to re-energise the sugar industry....his interpersonal skills leave much to be desired also...the bulk of the party's political support comes from the sugar belt and if the industry continues its decline more votes will not be forthcoming....especially from region 6....

Many insightful suggestions have been made by several folks which warrant consideration and swift implemention ....I do not favour privatising the industry but advocate the reorganisation of the management structure to include a board with representatives reflecting all of our political stake holders....the chairman of the board should be a  " sugar expert " in the stature of a Yusi Persaud  and the CEO should be a trained agriculturist  .....there is no shortage of sugar harvesters but a poor turn out of workers because of low morale caused by a multitude of mismanaged issues including low or no incentive bonuses,long lines to collect pay, poor sanitation where the workers live, etc.....there is also no shortage of funds but poor management and waste of available funds including money from the European union and the GOG.....workers know that Robert Persaud is living free in a Guysuco house and that Raj Singh is receiving a huge compensation for doing nothing.....

It seems like Pres Ramotar will try to get Mr Yesu Persaud to be Chairman.

Good idea.

Yesu will begin work by firing Raj Singh.

Pres Ramotar should make Raj Singh a Permanent Secretary and if he proves himself can be made a Minister after the next Election.

This decision is not as crazy as you think. Mr Ramotar is carrying out Mr Jagdeo's policy to kill the industry and sell it off to friends. Mr Ramotar children will get 100s of acres of land. 

Gal, Your crutch getting hot again????

What an ignorant old man that Nehru is.

The GuySuCo board in which Donald Ramotar was a principal anchor supervised the dilution of the people’s wealth over the last 18 years

April 20, 2011

Dear Editor,

Based on the evidence we in the Alliance For Change (AFC) now have in our possession, the financial mess that Guyana is in, is even worse than we thought in December 2010 when we were strategizing on our Action Plan.  It is clearly evident now that the assets of the taxpayers have been significantly diluted and left very exposed by this PPP Government.

Thus the public utterances from none other than the PPP’s Presidential Candidate, Ramotar that `the Board of GuySuCo cannot be blamed for the company’s woes’ will find its place in history as one of the most deceitful statements ever made by a Guyanese politician. Let me clarify very early, this is not a personal attack on Mr Ramotar since from what I know of him, like our own Mr Ramjattan, he is a very caring father and husband.  I do not know Mr Granger but what I have heard about him, he is also a good father figure and husband.  So Guyana is fortunate to have three men with strong family values in this 2011 race.

This letter however is about Donald’s professional track record at Guysuco.  To talk of 129,000 tonnes in 1990 is nothing but massaging the truth without proper context.  Any skilled analyst will clearly advise his audience that a comparison must always be done with context in mind.  What Hoyte did was deliver a sugar industry to the PPP that was on the upswing.  What Hoyte did was produce more sugar at the end of       his term than this Ramotar Board produced in 2010.  Mr Ramotar these facts cannot be wished away.

The following graph is a snapshot of GuySuCo production under the PPP Govern-ment but includes the last year of the Hoyte production cycle -1992.  It clearly shows that Hoyte handed over to Dr. Jagan an industry that was producing 247,010 tonnes of sugar.  Donald Ramotar’s Board in 2010 produced 217,869 tonnes, 12% less than what Hoyte produced when he handed GuySuCo over to Dr. Jagan.  That is the fact, not the manipulated version of the truth that Ramotar is attempting to propagate.

What is interesting from the graph is that in times of increasing sugar prices, the Donald Ramotar Board supervised a rapid decline in sugar production.  Clearly his economics is muddled since in times of increasing prices, one increases production to expand one’s wealth.

Any willing mind, whether trained or untrained, will observe that the PPP Board, in which Donald Ramotar was a principal anchor and participant, supervised the dilution of the people’s wealth in Guysuco over the last 18 years.  This chart shows from one angle how the Jagdeo Government/Ramotar Board clearly abdicated their responsibility to the people of Guyana in managing Guysuco.

I would like to remind Mr Ramotar that the primary responsibility of the board of directors is to protect the shareholders’ assets and to ensure they receive a decent return on their investment. Where is the return for the taxpayers of Guyana when billions of dollars are taken from them on a yearly basis by way of the land deals to buttress Guysuco’s cash flows? Where are their returns Mr. Ramotar?

In business jargon, he should have been demonstrating to the Guyanese people how much he and his colleagues on the board have planned for the taxpayers, monitored the performance of the management team and taken corrective actions along the way so that the return on their investment is maximized.  The board of Guysuco failed to offer quality leadership at sweating the assets to produce cash inflows for the owners (the people of Guyana).  Thus, Mr. Ramotar cannot be absolved of this responsibility.

He is one of the principal architects that “mucked up” the sugar belt, Guyana’s largest source of employment and thus his track record reveals he is not the most eligible to lead Guyana.  If what he did at Guysuco, which is smaller than Guyana, is expanded to the Guyana scale at the presidential level, can you imagine where Guyana will be in 2016?  Would the voters want to take more risk with this bunch of intellectually ruined that now control the PPP?

But Mr Ramotar in addition to being on the Board was a former union man at GAWU and thus to witness how he supervised the uncaring treatment meted out to sugar workers is unforgivable.  His entire political existence is because of sugar workers and yet he let them down again and again when he was put into a position to help them.  Thus, there is a major trust deficit here.

But what was the most insensitive statement of them all was that the Skeldon fiasco is a “temporary thing”.  How can he as a former union man tell the workers that their economic stagnation is a temporary thing?  I trust he understands that the PPP tied the economic well-being of the sugar workers to the malfunctioning Skeldon factory and he is most guilty of strategizing in this sub-optimal fashion.

He is one of the most powerful members of the board with a constituency and thus he sanctioned and approved the Jagdeo hare-brained scheme in the sugar belt.  So why is he in true Jagdeo style trying to pass the buck today?  What will prevent him from passing the buck as the people’s economic well-being deteriorates further if he is elected President of Guyana?

The Alliance For Change under our astute presidential candidate, Mr. Ramjattan is a man of ultimate integrity who will not pass the buck, who will not lie to you and who has assembled a world class team of technicians to help him face the challenges that this bunch of PPP=Jagdeo=Ramotar political marauders will bequeath to us after the elections.

As one of our strategies to supplement the cash inflow into the sugar industry, we are already engaging some Brazilian investors in developing the bio-fuel (including ethanol) industry in the sugar belt.  To save the Demerara estates we will produce ethanol for local consumption under our E-10 proposal and in the Canje Basin we will produce ethanol for the US market by way of the Caribbean Basin Initiative.

I trust that sugar workers are reading Mr Ramotar’s statements and reconciling them with his history of poor delivery.

For the first time in the history of Guyana, there is a real political alternative to the PPP and it is the AFC.  I ask all our people who have not snapped out of the racist bubble that the PPP and PNC has blown around you over the last 45 years, pop it and vote on issues.

Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh

Hope the Honorable Granger and the Honorable Ramjhatan demand to see the perks and payout list for Guysico before approving the budget.

Sugar beyond the point of no return – Clive Thomas
January 8, 2014 · By Stabroek editor ·

Economist Dr Clive Thomas says he is now more than ever convinced that the crisis in the sugar industry has gone beyond the point of no return. In the first of a new series on the sugar industry in the last Sunday Stabroek, Thomas said “At this point of time (the beginning of 2014), I am now more than ever convinced that the crisis in the sugar industry has passed its tipping-point or point of no return. This means that all hopes for a rational, considered and ordered reform and reconstruction of the industry are lost.”

His prognosis comes in the wake of continuing bad news for the industry and the seeming lack of a clear way forward. This year’s sugar production ended at 186,807 tonnes, the lowest recorded in 22 years. In a year rife with industrial relations issues, mechanical problems and inadequate grinding capacity, the industry’s performance slid beneath GuySuCo’s minimum production rate of 232,000 tonnes of sugar for its international and local quotas, leaving the corporation severely indebted to banks and suppliers. Up to the end of August last year, sugar production was a miserable 81,000 tonnes. The flagship Skeldon factory which was hyped as having the capability to grind 350 tonnes of cane an hour was grinding just 185 tonnes per hour and management has reduced the future projected rate to 250 tonnes, calling this a far more realistic grinding rate.

In coming columns, Thomas will review issues he raised in a series of columns in 2011 and 2012. In last Sunday’s column, he said all industries and businesses go through life cycle changes and that GuySuCo and the wider sugar industry are at the industrial life cycle stage of post maturity and long-term secular decline. “As presently configured the country’s sugar business can no longer go forward as a viable commercial endeavor”, the economist asserted. He said that the present structure of the industry was leading it to produce less and less sugar at a higher and higher cost. Noting the inevitable losses, he said this is clearly an unsustainable situation for the sugar company.

“In light of this both the EU’s continuing sugar assistance and government’s bailouts of GuySuCo can be viewed as seeking to rescue the industry from total collapse. Such a situation however represents, in essence, a classic case of throwing good money after bad. As worldwide experience has shown, while it is hard politically for governments to stop providing unwarranted subsidies to state industries, it is far worse for them to yield to those interests that are driving the need for the subsidies. The misallocation of national resources implicit in this posture is inevitably bad for everyone economically, but it will eventually also carry a devastating political cost, given the size and configuration of the sugar industry in Guyana’s political economy”, Thomas argued.

Annual subventions to GuySuCo despite continuing poor results have sparked concerns in the opposition parties and they are expected to look carefully at allocations in this year’s budget.

The issues that Thomas will revisit in coming columns include the vast expansion of the global sugar industry and particularly  the tropical cane sugar industry under a ‘transitional’ WTO-led international trading regime. He will also address the fact that even though there has been rapid growth of the global sugar industry “stagnation and decline have been the hallmarks of Guyana’s sugar industry”. Also to be covered are the key performance indicators  human resources utilization (labour and management); savings utilization (investment capital and financing); productivity (technical and technological); national resources utilization (geography and environment); as well as cultural (social and political) and what these say about the problems being experienced.

Thomas will also focus on the strategies designed by the authorities to turn around the sugar industry and how they have fared. These strategies are mainly the Sugar Modernization Project (SMP) and the later Turnaround Plan (Blueprint) initiated by GuySuCo’s Interim Board in 2009. The SMP includes the construction of the Skeldon Factory along with its related Berbice agricultural fields restructuring.

The SMP has been seen as an enormous and costly failure under the Jagdeo administration. The Skeldon factory which was built by a Chinese company has not operated anywhere to its rated capacity and a large sum has had to be spent on rectification works.

Whattack!!!

Deep deep Bro JB!!!

Chief, Bro?? Is JB Lesbo???

But you were enjoying the spoils from the snakeoil salesman.

Honestly I do forget that JB is a lady, sorry JB.

So the PPP impose Guysuco manager pun the people, why don't they impose money laundering law pun the people, is the same dictatorship.