‘… The best way to attract UK and other developed world investment is to have the best possible business environment and the least possible corrupt environment’
The government here is not doing enough to fight corruption and faces a stark threat from organized crime which needs a far greater allocation of resources, outgoing British High Commissioner to Guyana, Andrew Ayre has said.
“The effort is not strong enough. There needs to be engagement with Trans-parency International (TI) and with partners that are interested in improving transparency in Guyana,” London’s top diplomat in Guyana told Stabroek News in an exclusive departure interview at the British High Commission on Friday.
“Let me make that absolutely clear. It’s impacting negatively on Guyana because Guyana needs the investment if it wants to develop. So in order to improve the business environment here, it needs to tackle corruption and therefore … I call on the government to do that,” he said.
Ayre referred to recent comments by Chargé d’Affaires at the US Embassy here, Bryan Hunt who had told this news paper that corruption here needs to be addressed as it hinders development.
“The headlines are essentially that Guyana should engage with the international body that is there to monitor perceptions of corruption. There is no downside in doing this. When you have a country that’s classified, as Guyana is, in the bottom one quarter or so of the global league table, it puts off business investment,” Ayre said while emphasising that it is impacting negatively on Guyana.
“There’s no downside. What’s the downside of tackling corruption? I don’t see one,” he asserted, while also saying that the effort by government in tackling this issue is not strong enough.
In its latest rankings released last December, TI listed Guyana in the very corrupt category of its Corruption Perceptions Index. Guyana remains far behind its Caricom peers placing 124th out of 175 countries. The only Caricom country that is doing worse than Guyana is Haiti which placed 161. A country or territory’s score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). Guyana’s score for 2014 was 30 compared to 27 in 2013 and 28 the year before. The Jagdeo and Ramotar administrations have been beset by concerns over rampant corruption and the country’s ranking on TI’s index has been very poor.
However, government has not made any significant move to tackle the issue and Ayre said that the UK views it as “most regrettable” that Guyana does not seem willing to engage on this matter.
The British High Commissioner pointed out that under his tenure, the Trade and Investment Office located in the British High Commission was established and advice is provided to British companies that want to invest in Guyana and also any significant Guyanese investment in the UK. He said that the UK like most developed countries has extra-territorial legislation tackling corruption “which in simple terms means that if a British company gets involved in corruption in Guyana, it can be prosecuted back in the UK for that.”
Therefore, Ayre said, the appetite to operate in environments that are deemed to be most corrupt by TI is less than it would be in a country that is deemed to be least corrupt.
“That’s quite clear because the risk is higher so when you look at the size of the market, the level of perceived corruption, companies start to get put off and of course the geographical distance…. The best way to attract UK and other developed world investment is to have the best possible business environment and the least possible corrupt environment,” he said.
“So if UK companies are asking the question, we have to point them to the facts and they make their decisions based on that,” he added. Ayre also pointed out that costs are involved as countries that have a higher than average risk of corruption or harder than average difficulty in doing business, the cost of getting export insurance is higher than for countries on the other end of these tables. Therefore in order to cut the cost of doing business in Guyana, the ease of doing business has to be improved and corruption has to be tackled, he stressed.
SOCU
The UK has been assisting with training and mentoring of staff of the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) created by the government to investigate money laundering crimes and Ayre said that there has been very good cooperation over the last six to nine months on SOCU which is now up and running. “The good news is that seizures have been made, investigations have been started,” he said while noting that not all of the activities are made public.
However, he said, there are concerns going forward about capacity. He referred to Hunt’s comments that Guyana faces a very serious narcotics threat. “Bryan’s absolutely right, Guyana faces a very stark threat and therefore the resources that are put into tackling those threats must be increased. We will need more people to be trained, more people to be vetted, more people to be skilled up in ways that can help the government tackle this threat,” he said.
“It’s very, very important. I think Guyana is finding itself in a position where the threats are increasing but the resource to tackle the threats isn’t quite keeping up. Therefore the focus over the next three to six months needs to be on finding appropriate people, getting them trained and vetted and into the jobs, and doing the job that everybody wants to see being done,” Ayre stressed.
Further, the British diplomat noted that Guyana’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) compliance in part depends upon the ability to investigate complex financial crime and therefore Guyana needs a specialist unit that can do that. One is being built and needs to be built up more, there is need for more people in it and a need to have them soon as well because there is a timeline on FATF compliance which runs out in October, he said.
Ayre also pointed out that the UK is a permanent representative on FATF and by October wants to be able to say to FATF that Guyana has done everything it can to tackle the threat in terms of having investigative capacity. That is a very important judgment the UK will need to make on Guyana, he said.
He had also noted that in terms of tackling serious organized crime, the cooperation is working very well and is going to be expanded this year. These will be several more training courses in and outside Guyana in other places in the Caribbean and further afield to train specialists to tackle complex financial crime, he disclosed. He said that the training is of the same standard done in UK and US.
According to Ayre, the UK is active in every aspect of Guyana’s fight against serious organized crime and while noting that he would not discuss the details some of which are sensitive, he said that the UK is assisting in essentially everything related to the SOCU and CANU. The cooperation is having real mutually beneficial outcomes in terms of seizures and in terms of starting investigations and this is a very important work stream that the UK will continue to promote here, he said.
