The government through its holding company NICIL is now seeking expressions of interest for the sale of its shares in the Marriott Hotel. That unprepossessing building in its coat of unappealing blue first opened its doors in 2015. It had been birthed six years earlier amid a swirl of controversy at a time when hotel occupancy in this country was only 50 per cent. It may be that its progenitors now believe that their decision to build was a prescient one given the advent subsequently of the oil and gas industry, but if so the relevant authorities have still not deigned to supply the public with any details of the hotel’s financial status. The last that was heard about it was somewhere around 2017, when it was said to be breaking even.
If the matter of the Marriott Hotel isn’t a subject which normally rivets the attention of the average hard-pressed Guyanese, it is something which should attract their notice for the reason that it was taxpayer money which built it, and taxpayer money which has been servicing the debt associated with it for years. So what is the reason for selling now? Will the government be selling the shares at a loss or a profit? That would all depend on what the financial state of the hotel currently is and the amount of money the government has made from it in recent times.
The Marriott Hotel falls into the same category as the Skeldon Sugar Factory, the Enmore Packaging Plant and the infamous Fip Motilall Road, to name but three of former President Jagdeo’s costly flights of fancy. As such there was no authorisation from Parliament to pursue the project, no feasibility study and no clarification about the terms under which the land was leased from Guyana Lands and Surveys for the building of the structure.
Finance Minister Ashni Singh was at pains to emphasise that the Marriott enterprise was a “public-private partnership”, and the state’s investment was consequently justified because it was cultivating what was described as a transformational project.
This was a great deal less than the truth – on all counts. There were references to investors in Hong Kong and even at one point Grenada, but these were fleeting and came to naught. The bottom line of this story is that in the end the Marriott Hotel was entirely state-owned.
At the time, then President Jagdeo’s defence of the project had altogether more caustic elements than Mr Singh’s, as is his style. He berated Mr Robert Badal, who had bought the Pegasus in 2009, saying it had sub-standard service and that the roofs leaked, among other things. This, he said, was the reason a five-star hotel was needed. Mr Badal’s view was that Mr Jagdeo was only using the Pegasus as a means to promote the business of the Princess Hotel, but if he thought so he was premature, since that too became a target of the former President. Its inadequacies, he claimed, also justified the investment in the ‘five-star’ Marriott.
Despite the name emblazoned on the edifice, Marriott had nothing to do with its financing and building, although it presumably laid down some conditions for its construction. Its part in the story relates to the hotel’s management. The details of the financing of the building are complex and certainly not transparent, and were heavily criticised by financially qualified observers such as Messrs Anand Goolsarran, Christopher Ram and Rawle Lucas, among others.
It was NICIL which created the vehicle of the Atlantic Hotel Inc, or AHI for the purpose of the Marriott project, and which therefore technically became the owner of the hotel. It was CEO of NICIL Winston Brassington and Deputy CEO Marcia Nadir-Sharma who were the officers on record for AHI. In an SN editorial earlier this year Mr Goolsarran was reported as stating that in an audit commissioned by the previous administration as at July 7th 2015, NICIL’s advances for building the hotel totalled $8.637 billion. In addition, for the period 2007 to 2012 a total of $7.320 billion had been transferred from various government agencies for works which included the Marriott.
Among those agencies which Mr Goolsarran’s audit revealed had transferred funds to NICIL for the purposes of the hotel were the Guyana Forestry Commission, the Guyana National Cooperative Bank and Guyana Water Inc. In the absence of private investors AHI took out a large loan of US$15.25 million from Republic Bank, which the Granger government had to take over because AHI had no funds. That government had wanted to sell the hotel, but for financial reasons it proved impossible.
The controversy did not stop at the financing of the Marriott. Mr Brassington and Ms Nadir-Sharma advertised for contractors to construct a hotel and entertainment complex and the contract went to a Chinese company registered in Trinidad. The Chinese contractor had a clause in the contract which allowed him to “import any personnel who are necessary for the execution of the works.” That eventuated in an exclusively Chinese workforce performing tasks which Guyanese were eminently qualified to undertake. To add absurdity to inequity, following an opposition protest at the site, PPP Executive Gail Teixeira accused them of racism. In yet another absurd response they then moved their protest to the President’s office.
After all the controversy and obscurity, and, it might be added, irrational obstinacy surrounding the building of the Marriott Hotel, we have now reached a position where the government wants to sell it. In the advertisement for the sale last week, it was said:
“Applications for pre-qualification must include the following: financial capability in terms of net worth, audited financial statements for the last three financial years, net worth of a minimum of US$250m and a letter of financial capability from a recognised financial institution to acquire NICIL’s shares in AHI for the Guyana Marriott Hotel.”
What can be said is that any company applying will be supplied with data and will be rather better informed on the financial situation in relation to the Marriott Hotel than the people of Guyana, the ultimate owners, have been over the last seven years. It is high time that NICIL levelled with the populace and made public the relevant financial information since the inauguration of the hotel in 2015. What the government was doing entering as a competitor in the hospitality sector in the first place has always been a question which has never answered satisfactorily. So how, citizens will want to know, has the situation changed? The public needs to know the details in order to come to a conclusion about what did and did not go wrong.
After all, as was pointed out in the editorial earlier this year, Vice President Jagdeo and, it might be added, Mr Brassington, are still in place handling huge projects like the Demerara Bridge and the gas to shore project. What is at issue is a question of judgement.
