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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Agri minister going after suspicious land dealers

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20161115

De­ter­mined to stop un­scrupu­lous con­trac­tors from ben­e­fit­ting from sus­pi­cious land trans­ac­tions, Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat says he is for­ward­ing ev­i­dence to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi.

Speak­ing at a land-dis­tri­b­u­tion cer­e­mo­ny in Cou­va yes­ter­day for for­mer Ca­roni work­ers, Ramb­harat said an on­go­ing land au­dit of all State lands, in­clud­ing those owned by Ca­roni, has yield­ed ev­i­dence of sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions un­der­tak­en be­tween 2010 and 2015.

Say­ing the cost of de­vel­op­ing a lot of land jumped from $151,000 in 2010 to $1.2 mil­lion by 2015, Ramb­harat said a re­view showed many con­trac­tors who de­vel­oped Ca­roni lands for the Es­tate Man­age­ment Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (EM­BD) failed to ho­n­our their agree­ments.

"The EM­BD ini­ti­at­ed ear­li­er this year an au­dit of a par­tic­u­lar set of trans­ac­tions of $400 mil­lion spent to build ten roads and out of these ten roads none were com­plet­ed ac­cord­ing to spec­i­fi­ca­tions," Ramb­harat re­vealed.

He said some roads were a few kilo­me­tres short, the thick­ness of the as­phalt was not ac­cord­ing to spec­i­fi­ca­tions and the qual­i­ty of the roads' sub-base was poor.

"The ad­vice we got is that the EM­BD should move to re­cov­er a sig­nif­i­cant amount of mon­ey long be­fore the con­tracts were com­plet­ed.

"In re­la­tion to de­vel­op­ment of lands in 2010, the av­er­age cost of com­ple­tion of a lot of land was $151,000. It var­ied from site to site but by 2015, the av­er­age cost was way in ex­cess of $750,000. In some cas­es the lots were $1.2 mil­lion," Ramb­harat said.

He not­ed that once ev­i­dence was sent to the AG, rec­om­men­da­tions would be made to re­cov­er the sums or to take steps to pros­e­cute the of­fend­ers.

In or­der not to de­lay the dis­tri­b­u­tion of res­i­den­tial lots to for­mer Ca­roni work­ers, Ramb­harat said he had asked the re­cip­i­ents to take ad­van­tage of of­fers on ar­eas which were al­ready de­vel­oped.

While the EM­BD, head­ed by chair­man Ron­nie Mo­hammed had to deal with a $2 bil­lion debt to con­trac­tors, he said $5 bil­lion more was need­ed to com­plete the res­i­den­tial dis­tri­b­u­tion to 8,858 ben­e­fi­cia­ries.

Ramb­harat said he planned to be­gin dis­trib­ut­ing non-Ca­roni leas­es by April 2017, adding about 3,000 leas­es have al­ready been dis­trib­uted by the Gov­ern­ment for this year.

"As fast as we en­counter prob­lems like the il­le­gal sale of State lands or cor­rup­tion re­lat­ing to cer­tain files, they are re­ferred to the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al," Ramb­harat added.

He al­so de­nied Gov­ern­ment planned to take away Ca­roni lands from the for­mer work­ers.

"In this coun­try, farm­ers have used the cry of ac­cess roads as an ex­cuse for not putting the lands for pro­duc­tive use but even though Gov­ern­ment is putting the nec­es­sary in­fra­struc­ture, do not ex­pect high­ways or elec­tric­i­ty poles and ca­ble to be com­ing to the lands as if it is an HDC site," Ramb­harat added.

He not­ed that the of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands was be­ing giv­en the re­sources and staffing to en­sure that those who got leas­es put the lands to pro­duc­tive use.


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