hairman of the Board of the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Ronald Alli and Head of the Guyana Energy Authority (GEA) Joseph O’Lall have been removed allegedly over the bungling of procurement arrangements for fuel supplies, this newspaper understands.
A source told this newspaper that the problems with the fuel acquisition have caused President Bharrat Jagdeo to dismiss O’Lall and Alli from their posts.
Replacing Alli in the interim until another person is appointed to the post of Chairman will be Winston Brassington, the current Vice Chairman of the GPL Board.
Berbice and Demerara have recently been plagued by constant power outages and these were said to be a result of the use of the incorrect specification of Heavy Fuel Oil, which caused systems to fail. There have also been issues of insufficient supply of fuel.
Just this week, Head of the Presidential Secretariat said, Cabinet at its sitting noted with concern the system failures at the power utility.
He said Cabinet was advised that the outages in the Demerara system were related to systems failure at the Garden of Eden complex. “Cabinet was critical of the developments and called on the management of GPL to take all necessary steps to restore normalcy in power supply to customers as soon as possible,” the HPS said. He said that in Cabinet’s exchanges with the company, it was told that the blackouts had nothing to do with fuel shortages.
A GPL press release issued on Monday said a piece of equipment at the Garden of Eden power station, East Bank Demerara had malfunctioned on Monday, resulting in a shutdown of the 50 and 60 Hertz Wartsila stations and the Sophia converters.
The power company had apologized for the intermittent power outages customers in Demerara and Berbice have been experiencing and blamed this situation on systemic and network problems. The release said power in Berbice should have been back to full capacity by Wednesday last.
When contacted for comment yesterday, Prime Minister Sam Hinds told this newspaper that because of the Cabinet outreach being conducted in Berbice he was unable to speak on the issue.
Alli could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Contacted, O’Lall would neither confirm nor deny his removal preferring to say that he would not speak until Prime Minister Hinds or the President said something on the issue.
According to O’Lall, he had promised the Prime Minister that he would not say anything public on the issue until he or the President made a statement.
Meanwhile, Stabroek News has been reliably informed that Alli was summoned before the Cabinet last Tuesday to report on the company’s finances and he under-reported the amount of money the company was owed and how much it was losing.
“It is not a case of it [under reporting] being done deliberately but more so because he did not know and the President felt that if he did not know then he was serving no purpose as Chairman of the board,” one source said yesterday.
Sources close to O’Lall indicated that President Jagdeo’s “hammer” fell on someone he wanted to get rid of for a long time and added that what he did to the former GEA head was “totally wrong.”
O’Lall has been at the forefront of the fuel smuggling fight in recent years, which started in earnest in late 2005 when a number of businessmen were taken before the court for allegedly committing such an offence. The businessmen included Omprakash ‘Buddy’s’ Shivraj who along with others still have pending matters before the court. It is not clear how the removal of O’Lall as GEA’s head will affect the current cases since he has been instrumental in testifying in all of the cases.
