Dear Editor,
Few of us alive would have been aware of the opening scene of the drama recently reported to have climaxed between the Government of Guyana and Toolsie Persaud Ltd, with the former being burdened with a billion dollar legal bill payable to the latter.
The East Coast property would have been in dispute, possibly for generations. Initially, it belonged to Booker Sugar Estates – a western extension of Ogle Estate, and adjoining Bel Air, also sugar property.
Booker Sugar Estates had offered the area as house lots for purchase to its senior managerial staff, mostly of the Head Office – then located at 22 Church Street – exactly where stands Guyana Stores Ltd. But the proposed transactions had to be rescinded when President Forbes Burnham, in his visionary stance, dictated that he wished that area from east of Bel Air through to Turkeyen to remain green.
The prospective ‘stakeholders’ had to be refunded. One is, however, not privy as to how and when TPL acquired that property. Presumably, the records of the Deeds Registry will provide the information, as it would so do about how it was overtaken by the last administration.
So that what now obtains is a sort of conundrum which reaches back from the late 1970s to the second decade of the 21st century, wherein we have come round in a sort of circle, with a declared ‘green’ administration having to pay a hefty price for its predecessor’s contamination of an earlier shade of green.
Yours faithfully
E B John
