More than a week after it was revealed that state land earmarked for the Guyana Revenue Authority Headquarters was transferred to a hotel developer, the PPP/C government remains mum on the reason for the decision and the terms of the transfer.
The land in question is state property, and it is unclear if it was sold to the hotel developers, Pasha Global of Suriname or simply leased. There is also silence over the fate of the more than 900 GRA employees who continue to work from a building [on Camp Street], which authorities have publicly said was not functional and plagued with structural defects.
GRA’s Commissioner-General, Godfrey Statia, when contacted by Stabroek News, was asked about these recent developments. Statia responded, “That question is best answered by the Ministry of Finance”. This newspaper then tried numerous times to speak to Senior Minister with Responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, but as of yesterday, all calls to Singh’s phone went unanswered.
Singh also holds oversight for the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), the entity responsible for state lands and it would be under that agency that the lands were first granted to GRA through the APNU+AFC government. Attempts to contact head of that Agency, Radha Krishna Sharma, have also proven futile. A history of the land allocation reveals that GRA would have received in 2015, expressions of interest for the design of a new headquarters at Liliendaal.
The designs were submitted just short of three years after the GRA moved into its Camp Street premises in a much-criticised deal. It saw the tax agency paying a monthly rental of around $5M to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) after the then PPP/C government spent $227M to retrofit the building for the revenue agency. The arrangement had been seen as a way of helping the NIS to recover from past bad investment deals. The building was previously owned by CLICO (Guyana) Inc., which was highly indebted to the NIS at the time of its collapse.
During his August, 2015 budget presentation, then Finance Minister Winston Jordan had lamented the poor state of the then GRA’s current headquarters, saying it was not fit for occupation.
