The Maritime Administra-tion Department (MARAD) says that the owner of the 17 Taiwanese vessels that were registered under Bejorie Limited in Guyana and abandoned in Trinidadian waters have two weeks to remove them.
MARAD’s Director General, Claudette Rogers, told Stabroek News yesterday that the Trinidadian authorities had notified Guyana that the vessels were posing a threat to Trinidadian navigation.
She said that MARAD will continue to solicit Bejorie Ltd to make contact with the department. Rogers noted that MARAD had previously tried to make contact with Bejorie but those attempts had proved unsuccessful. The current effort to get in touch with a Bejorie representative began on November 8.
The abandonment of the vessels has raised questions as to how well authorities here monitor registrations. Bejorie Ltd has no contact office located in Guyana and for one of the vessels the contact address provided was in Trinidad. Rogers told Stabroek News that MARAD needed to follow protocol and that advertising in the local media such as