Introduction
Amidst the din and controversy of ‘to cut or not to cut’, Guyana Power and Light Inc, the country’s number one, state-owned electricity supplier was voted the sum of five billion dollars in the 2012 Budget. This is $1 billion less than requested by the Finance Minister as a 2012 budget measure. It is a topsy-turvy world for GPL. In 2009 the company reported profits after tax of $1.8 billion and at December 31, 2010 the company was sitting on cash resources of $2.8 billion, perhaps the highest ever cash balance reported by any Guyana company outside of the commercial banks.
As this column surveys the operations of the company over the four years 2007-2010, a scenario emerges of a yo-yo performance with losses of $1.6 billion in 2007 and $1.9 billion in 2008 and profits of $1.8 billion in 2009 and $553 million in 2010. And nine months after reporting the cash hoard, taxpayers in 2011 were forking out $1.5 billion from the increasingly abused Contingencies Fund in subsidies.
Chairman Winston Brassington explained, or rather excused the significant 69.4% fall in 2010 profits from 2009 as largely on account of an increase in fuel costs of $3.5 billion above 2009 costs of
