Rice miller allegedly paid female relative of former GRDB boss over $40M
Investigators working on the spending of the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) prior to the
Former GRDB’s head, Jagnarine Singh
May 11 general elections have stumbled on some strange payments.
Some of those payments, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, include to Essequibo rice miller, Wazeer Hussein, and others in the industry.
It was unclear what those payments to a number of millers were for and whether it was required that GRDB be reimbursed.
Of special interest to investigators of the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) were payments amounting to tens of millions of dollars by Hussein’s milling company, to a close relative of Jagnarine Singh, former General Manager of GRDB.
The payments were said to be made prior to the 2015 elections. It is unclear why a rice miller would be paying the female relative of the GRDB head.
Jagnarine, the female relative and Hussein were pulled in on Saturday for questioning at SOCU headquarters, Eve Leary. They were reportedly picked up at their respective homes, on the East Coast of Demerara and on the Essequibo Coast, Region Two, early Saturday.
SOCU has been tasked to investigate the spending after Government handed over a number of forensic audit reports to the police. The GRDB report was one of them.
The audits were commissioned by the administration after the Coalition Government took office in May 2015. The audits were supposed to gauge the health of a number of state agencies.
However, the audits raised several alarm bells especially over procedures and questionable payments.
The administration said it decided to hand over those reports to the police for further investigations. SOCU is an arm of the police.
GRDB would be of especial interest as it handled more the US$500M over a five-year period when the entity overlooked the Venezuela oil-for-rice deal with Guyana.
Under that arrangement, Guyana would ship rice to Venezuela and take oil as payments.
Hussein, who has taken over the Essequibo and Berbice facilities of former rice magnate, Kayman Sankar, was said to have been granted a significant quota of rice to Venezuela while the arrangements lasted.
GRDB was given monies, from oil sales locally, by the then government to pay the millers and other farmers who participated as suppliers in the deal.
E’bo rice miller: Wazeer Hussein
Venezuela ended the deal in May 2015 when the David Granger government took office and oil was discovered in Guyana’s waters. Venezuela laid claims to the waters where the oil was found and ended the rice-for-deal in the border controversy that heated up as a result.
During this time, from 2010-2015, the payments to millers were in the billions of dollars for the rice and paddy supplied.
Investigators are also looking into a fertilizer deal with Venezuela. The fertilizer was supposed to be sold at a cheaper rate to farmers prior to 2015.
A significant amount of the fertilizers cannot be accounted for. Farmers had been complaining of the distribution process.
Investigators have also reportedly stumbled on instances of conflict of interest.
A number of companies that belonged to a former senior GRDB official were reportedly granted contracts.
SOCU’s chief, Assistant Commissioner, Sydney James, has largely been mum on the investigations, only confirming that investigations into GRDB have been ongoing.
In early February, SOCU raided the Kingston headquarters of GRDB and reportedly removed some documents.
Government had expressed concerns in the findings of the GRDB’s forensic audit report.
Natural Resources Minister, Raphael Trotman, during a post-Cabinet press conference earlier this year, had noted that over a three to four-year period, more than US$500M from the PetroCaribe proceeds (Venezuela rice-for-oil deal) would have passed through the accounts of the entity.
Among some of the “anomalies” found were loans without proper paperwork or promissory notes.
There were other instances of persons in the agency using GRDB’s money to trade in foreign currency.
The losses for the Government would have been significant, especially if the money was traded for less than it should have been.
The Auditor General and the forensic audit reports have all pointed to severe deficiencies in the manner the monies of the state have been handled by the entities.
Rice is among the top three biggest earners of foreign currencies for the country.
