Executives of the Guyana Sugar Corporation are questioning the sale by NICIL of two of its transmission towers to Bobby Vieira’s Multicultural Communications Inc. for a mere $2.1M when the items were not even vested to NICIL.
“We recently saw a draft Agreement of sale whereby Mr. (Colvin) Heath-London through NICIL is in the process of or perhaps have sold GuySuCo’s Transmission Tower located at Drill, Mahaicony to a company named Multicultural Communications Inc. (Please see attached). Again, that property was not vested to NICIL and would be another unlawful act by NICIL,” a letter yesterday from GuySuCo to Minister of Agriculture Noel Holder stated.
Stabroek News tried reaching out to NICIL’s Acting Chairman Heath-London for details about the purchase but calls to his phone went unanswered.
When Vieira was contacted, he said “That is something you need to get from those folks. There is an agreement on the purchase and so forth but anything else on pricing and anything else, they have the information.”
The sale agreement, dated February 1st 2019, between NICIL and Multicultural Communications Inc. states that Vieira’s company agreed to purchase two transmission towers, located at 199 Camp Street South Cummingsburg and Drill, Mahaicony, for $2.1M. It said that the purchaser agreed to remove the items 14 days after the passing of ownership of the properties.
According to the agreement, NICIL would receive payment by way of bank draft and ownership of the properties will be vested in the name of the purchaser “on publication of the vesting order in the Official Gazette”. This newspaper did not see such a vesting order in Official Gazette publications from the month of February to current.
Vieira’s close relationship with the APNU+AFC government would immediately raise questions about the transparency of this deal. NICIL and GuySuCo have been engaged in a tussle over some properties of the company and there is also a raging dispute over how monies from a $30b bond is being spent. GuySuCo has also raised questions about what NICIL is doing with the scrap metal from the four shuttered estates: Wales, East Demerara, Rose Hall and Skeldon. There are reports that a lot of scrap metal is available and that arrangements have been made for their sale in breach of procurement rules.
