Govt must make Sanata lease deal public - Murray

Govt must make Sanata lease deal public - Murray
Stabroek News news article, Sunday 4 May 2008
http://www.stabroeknews.com/?p=2821

Member of Parliament Winston Murray is asking the government through the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL) to make public the details of the agreement reached for the lease of the old Sanata Textile Mill complex.
Speaking with this newspaper last week, Murray, former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly, said the people of Guyana needed to know who the investors behind Queens Atlantic Investments Inc (QAII) are. To date, the only person speaking with this newspaper from QAII is CEO of New GPC Inc Dr Ranjisinghi Ramroop.
“The government is on record as embracing transparency and accountability,” Murray said, adding that it should therefore not have a problem with making the full terms of the agreement available to the public.
According to Murray, an agreement of that magnitude which will see investments of US$30M in a number of industrial and manufacturing ventures, including pharmaceuticals, medical/hospital paraphernalia, labels and textiles, should have the blessing of Parliament.
“I am willing to accept that NICIL sought expressions of interest in the old Sanata Textile Mill facilities, and that they have not had that many expressions of interest. They thought of getting the best possible deal [hence the lease to QAII],” said Murray.
“In order for the government to demonstrate transparency and accountability, the terms of the investment should have been fully ventilated in the National Assembly. My information is that this deal was entered into by the government over a year ago and government has failed to put it before the National Assembly,” he said.
He said that the agreement should have been laid and debated, and approved in the National Assembly “before signature.”
“That is the kind of sequence the government should be bound by,” he said. Murray said he did not see the need for a 99-year lease unless the agreement had a clause written into it that allows for termination with adequate notice given if performance yardsticks are not met.
The senior parliamentarian said that in addition to disclosure on the agreement, the people of Guyana deserve to know who the investors behind QAII are. He said the public would feel more comfortable knowing the source of financing and this would quell fears of dirty money being laundered through large projects.
He said Guyana needed to guard against the country becoming a haven for people and their ill-gotten gains. “I am saying this in the context of another large investment for which disclosure hasn’t been forthcoming,” Murray said, referring to the Kingston hotel project.
Murray said he was minded to take such positions since another state entity, Guyana Stores Limited, was sold and, according to him, an amount of US$2 million might still be outstanding on that sale. “This is another agreement for which there was no public disclosure,” Murray said.
On the lease amount of $50 million per annum for the Sanata complex, Murray asked whether government had seen the total project proposal and was satisfied that there would be a reasonable return to Guyana.
“We have no information whether the company will be export-oriented or geared for the local market. If the company is inward-looking, what guarantees are there with the government to ensure the prices for drugs, medical supplies and other manufactured items will be competitive in terms of price and quality,” he said, expressing the hope that markets in Guyana were not subjected to unfairly high prices for the products made by QAII.
The new printing press that is to be set up in the Sanata compound is capable of a number of applications and people are to be brought in from Canada to train local workers in its complex usage. It is believed that workers for the new press are being recruited among local enterprises and that the ultimate product will be a newspaper or publication of some kind.
In explaining the terms of the rental, Head of NICIL Winston Brassington said that the $50 million per year fee is pegged to the US dollar and is has an index to allow for adjustments to be made to reflect inflation.
According to Brassington, Sanata is 50 times more expensive to lease per square foot than the Eccles Industrial Site. He said that comments made recently in the Kaieteur News were not encouraging to the investment. “We [work so hard] to bring the investors and when they come they have to battle the press,” Brassington said.