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Thursday, May 22, 2025

'Guyana is open for business'

by

Joel Julien
819 days ago
20230223
Prime Minister of Guyana Mark Phillips, Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn, President of Guyana Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Former President of Colombia Ivan Duque, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, President, ExxonMobil Upstream Liam Mallon and Energy Minister Stuart Young during the ribbon cutting of the energy conference in Guyana.

Prime Minister of Guyana Mark Phillips, Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn, President of Guyana Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Former President of Colombia Ivan Duque, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, President, ExxonMobil Upstream Liam Mallon and Energy Minister Stuart Young during the ribbon cutting of the energy conference in Guyana.

Guyana is open for busi­ness, the coun­try’s Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dr Ash­ni Singh says.

And that def­i­nite­ly in­cludes T&T busi­ness­es, Singh has as­sured.

Singh made the state­ment to Guardian Me­dia last week in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view held on the bal­cony of the Guyana Mar­riott Ho­tel in George­town dur­ing the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Con­fer­ence held there.

“Guyana con­tin­ues to pride it­self as a mem­ber of Cari­com and we have a long and good re­la­tion­ship with T&T that goes back many, many years,” Singh said.

Singh said this re­la­tion­ship has now been fur­ther bol­stered as a re­sult of Guyana’s en­try in­to the en­er­gy sec­tor of which T&T has been a part for some time.

“We wel­come T&T com­pa­nies com­ing to Guyana to do busi­ness, we wel­come com­pa­nies com­ing from every­where in the world in­to Guyana to do busi­ness but we al­so want to en­sure that we don’t miss this op­por­tu­ni­ty for do­mes­tic ca­pac­i­ty to be built up and for the Guyanese and Guyanese com­pa­nies to par­tic­i­pate ful­ly and ben­e­fit ful­ly from what’s hap­pen­ing in Guyana,” Singh said.

“And so even as we say Guyana is open to busi­ness for every­body from all over the world in­clud­ing, cer­tain­ly not ex­clud­ing but def­i­nite­ly in­clud­ing com­pa­nies from T&T many of who al­ready have this ca­pac­i­ty, al­ready have nav­i­gat­ed, have tra­versed this path, they al­ready have ca­pa­bil­i­ty etcetera we wel­come them com­ing to do busi­ness in Guyana there is no short­age of busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ty in Guyana,” he said.

“But we al­so en­cour­age part­ner­ship with Guyanese com­pa­nies and Guyanese na­tion­als and that is the rea­son we have lo­cal con­tent leg­is­la­tion to en­cour­age in­stru­ments like the lo­cal con­tent frame­work that en­cour­ages part­ner­ship with Guyana so that lo­cal ca­pac­i­ty can al­so be built up and lo­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion can be max­imised,” Singh said.

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of To­tal­tec Lars Man­gal urged Guyanese cit­i­zens not to be over­ly con­cerned by Tri­nis en­ter­ing the coun­try to work in the thriv­ing en­er­gy in­dus­try.

“There has been a long his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with­in the Cari­com, it just so hap­pens that for ex­am­ple with Trinidad they have had a long his­to­ry in the oil and gas busi­ness so they had ca­pac­i­ty built up they were work­ing for the prime con­trac­tors out of Trinidad so it was on­ly nat­ur­al that they mi­grate or ex­pand that ser­vice of­fer­ing in­to Guyana that does not nec­es­sar­i­ly pre­clude the Guyanese from par­tic­i­pat­ing,” Man­gal said.

In­stead, Man­gal ad­vised the Guyanese to be in­spired to learn and be­come ex­perts in their own rights.

To­tal­tec is the in­dige­nous en­er­gy sec­tor part­ner op­er­at­ing in Guyana and Suri­name.

Guyana fer­tile for in­vest­ment

Singh said any­one con­sid­er­ing in­vest­ing or do­ing busi­ness in Guyana is do­ing so with a ju­ris­dic­tion that is pro­ject­ed to con­tin­ue to grow at very ro­bust rates.

“Not on­ly are we grow­ing rapid­ly but we are grow­ing rapid­ly in an en­vi­ron­ment where in­fla­tion is still be­ing con­tained. Nat­u­ral­ly, an econ­o­my grow­ing as rapid­ly as ours will face some amount of in­fla­tion­ary pres­sures com­pound­ed of course by what is hap­pen­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly,” Singh said.

“But in­fla­tion has been con­tained to sin­gle dig­its and it will con­tin­ue to be con­tained to sin­gle dig­its, we have a sta­ble ex­change rate we have a favourable and at­trac­tive in­ter­est rate so you are com­ing to Guyana at a time when not on­ly are we grow­ing rapid­ly but we are grow­ing in a man­ner that con­tin­ues to re­flect all of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a sta­ble, rapid­ly grow­ing but nev­er­the­less sta­ble macro­eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment a place that in­deed we be­lieve makes Guyana and con­tin­ues to see Guyana re­main one of the most at­trac­tive in­vest­ment and one of the most at­trac­tive des­ti­na­tions for in­vest­ing and for do­ing busi­ness,” he said.

But even as Singh hailed Guyana’s op­por­tu­ni­ties, he lament­ed the bug­bears that some­times pre­vent in­ter­est­ed par­ties from vis­it­ing their shores.

Singh said that just to at­tend the four-day con­fer­ence some at­ten­dees had to book their ho­tel rooms months in ad­vance.

“Many of you are stay­ing far away from the con­fer­ence and have to en­dure, I see a lot of peo­ple nod­ding sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly, with the agony you would have gone through just to get a ho­tel room and there are times in Guyana, this con­fer­ence is one, this is a big con­fer­ence but it is by no means a mega event,” Singh said dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion to the con­fer­ence.

“ We have one big crick­et event and you don’t have enough rooms even for the busi­ness trav­ellers and so there is right now I think there are eight ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al­ly brand­ed ho­tels that are be­ing built out, names that you would recog­nise,” he said.

Singh said Guyana in­tends to use its cur­rent eco­nom­ic favour to help ad­dress these con­cerns and oth­ers re­lat­ed to ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty.

In 2019 Guyana’s to­tal in­vest­ment in roads and bridges through the bud­get was 11.8 bil­lion Guyana dol­lars.

In 2023 Guyana has bud­get­ed spend­ing 131.5 bil­lion Guyana dol­lars on roads and bridges.

“We see this in­vest­ment in in­fra­struc­ture as ab­solute­ly crit­i­cal for lay­ing the foun­da­tion for long-term eco­nom­ic growth be­cause this in­fra­struc­ture im­proves our con­nec­tiv­i­ty with our neigh­bours to in­crease the eco­nom­ic space in which we are op­er­at­ing,” Singh said.

Singh said the first phase of a road to Brazil has al­ready be­gun along with a bridge to Suri­name.

“Ul­ti­mate­ly our ex­pec­ta­tion, our plan is that peo­ple and goods must be able to move by road from French Guiana, in­to Suri­name, in­to north­ern Brazil and back,” he said.

Guyana rules out na­tion­al car­ri­er

Singh said Guyana was at this time not con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of es­tab­lish­ing a na­tion­al car­ri­er of its own but rather en­sur­ing that more in­ter­na­tion­al car­ri­ers were com­ing to its shores.

“Right now the at­ten­tion is re­al­ly on get­ting more in­ter­na­tion­al car­ri­ers to come to Guyana as you know British Air­ways will be in­tro­duc­ing a ser­vice at the end of March,” Singh said.

“We are en­cour­ag­ing and work­ing with oth­er big in­ter­na­tion­al air­lines for them to come to Guyana to in­tro­duce ser­vices whether di­rect­ly or through an in­ter­me­di­ary des­ti­na­tion like T&T. In the case of British Air­ways they are stop­ping in St Lu­cia on the way to Guyana which is good, it makes the des­ti­na­tion im­me­di­ate­ly vi­able and at­trac­tive and we want to en­cour­age more of the same, more in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies do­ing the same,” he said.

Guyana Air­ways had am­bi­tions to be­come the flag car­ri­er but failed to start op­er­a­tions since 2016.

It was grant­ed per­mis­sion in 2018 to use the name de­rived from the state-owned Guyana Air­ways (1963) de­clared bank­rupt in 2001.

The com­pa­ny had planned to start op­er­a­tions by 2019 from George­town Ched­di Ja­gan with two B737s to des­ti­na­tions such as Ha­vana In­ter­na­tion­al, Port of Spain, Bridgetown, and the Unit­ed States.


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