The six companies that submitted expressions of interest in building Guyana’s first solid waste recycling plant will be asked to rework their proposals to meet specified requirements of government, Head of the Presi-dential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon announc-ed yesterday.
“The recycling project, when it was presented to Cabinet… drew a strong request for the process to be redone, with a particular perspective for them to conform to what the government wants,” Luncheon said.
Yesterday’s announcement was a further setback for a project mired in controversy ever since it was first unveiled last year by the former Minister of Local Government, Ganga Persaud. Critics had said that the tendering process should not have been handled by the Ministry of Local Government.
Minister of Local Government Norman Whittaker had told Stabroek News that his ministry submitted a presentation to Cabinet on Tuesday with its recommendations for one of the six companies to build the plant.
Luncheon said that the Ministry was however directed to inform the companies of government’s requirements and when their respective expressions of interest have been tweaked to government’s expectations Cabinet will once again look at the issue.
He explained that most of the proposals dealt with converting waste to energy and while this was feasible in developed and industrialised economies, Cabinet had difficulty believing it would work here. “So they were asked to rework it to meet the realities of the waste and composition of waste in Guyana,” he explained. “A lot of the proposals dealt with conversion of waste to energy and there continues to be considerable doubts in our minds… we don’t have that kind of industrial waste because this is not an industrialised society,” he further added.
Whittaker told Stabroek News last week that he would give information about the project after Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. However, when contacted on Wednesday, he said that he was at a Neighbourhood Democra-tic Council (NDC) meeting and the reporter should call back at 4:30. Calls to his phone from 4:30 until 8pm went unanswered while yesterday calls throughout the day were also not answered.
Whittaker had stated that the names of all of the companies that submitted proposals would not be made public until after Cabinet’s Tuesday meeting. Luncheon yesterday said that there was no reason not to name the companies and informed that he would provide the information soon.
Panther
The project has already raised concerns with one company that submitted a proposal, Panther Inc., which said it did not believe that the evaluations of the proposals were thorough.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Michael Mosgrove told Stabroek News last week that two months ago his company received correspondence from the Ministry of Local Govern-ment, which indicated that it wanted a question to be answered. While he prepped for a probing interview on the details of project and the integrity of his company, he was faced with only one question. “I was preparing for some tough questioning, you know, about my company—what the project entails? How we will execute the public sensitisation aspect?—that sort of thing. But the only question asked was, ‘How much will this cost the Government of Guyana,’” he related.
“I am not kidding you. Just a single question. Yes, one. And it was cost to your government… I have that already in the proposal, so I was kinda taken aback. But it was easy for me because all I said was, ‘Absolutely nothing.’ Because that’s what I have proposed,” he added.
In the latter part of 2013, the government via the Ministry of Local Govern-ment had signed a Memo-randum of Understanding (MoU) with a Canadian company, Natural Globe Guyana Inc. However, the MoU was scrapped by the government in less than two weeks after discrepancies emerged surrounding the Canadian company’s CEO Mohammed Osman.
Reports had revealed that the company had only built a model of the US$30 million plant that was required to be established under the MoU. The CEO was also accused of misrepresenting Andriana Webster, the daughter of Human Services Minster Jennifer Webster, as one of the prime investors of the project and claims that the facility would be constructed without a cost to taxpayers also raised suspicion.
Following the withdrawal of the agreement with the company, the government had re-advertised for expressions of interest in the building the plant.
It was Musgrove who drew to government’s attention the non-credibility of Natural Globe Guyana Inc. He feels that if thorough investigations were done in that first instance, discrepancies would have been uncovered and government would not have had to face the embarrassment it did then.
Despite criticism over its evaluation and processing of the aborted agreement, the selection of the new investor still rests with the Local Government Ministry. The government had announced its preference to collaborate with firms that had previous working experience in building such facilities in other countries.
