Businessman Hamley Case has been nominated to be Guyana’s new High Commissioner to the UK while attorney and former Deputy Speaker Clarissa Riehl has been proposed as new High Commissioner to Canada.
The nominations are being finalized just over six months into the life of the APNU+AFC administration.
Source told Stabroek News that Bayney Karran will remain in his post as Ambassador to the United States. Sources also tell Stabroek News that former PNC government official Halim Majeed has been selected as Ambassador to Cuba and economist, Dr Kenrick Hunte will serve in the mission to South Africa.
Karran is no stranger to foreign policy and diplomacy as he not only served as Ambassador to the US since 2003 but also to the Organization of American States, Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.
This year he competed for the post of Assistant Secretary General of the OAS but lost to Belize’s Nestor Mendez. Then, he had explained that he was passionate about capacity building as he wanted the regional grouping to head off potential threats to constitutional order in member states.
According to online resources, since 1997 he has also been a delegate to ministerial meetings and summits of multilateral organisations such as, among others, the Rio Group, the OAS, the Association of Caribbean States and the Latin Ameri-can Economic System.
Karran’s professional experience also includes serving as a partner in the law firm of de Caires, Fitzpatrick and Karran (1992-97), director of the nonprofit Georgetown Legal Aid Clinic (1993-96) and secretary of the Guyana Bar Association (1994-95).
In addition to his legal work, he also once worked in the field of broadcasting, including stints as an announcer, operator, programme producer and chairman of the board of directors for the then Guyana Broadcasting Corporation.
Businessman and former executive of the PNCR, Case will be replacing Laleshwar K. N. Singh in the United Kingdom. This would mean that the 23-year tenure held by Singh, in London, will end. Singh was residing in London at the time of his appointment to the Court of St James in 1992.
Case is well known not only in politics but in the lumber industry as he had one of the largest dealerships here in the 1980s, Case Timbers Limited. However he complained that when the government changed in 1992 to the People’s Progressive Party/Civic, a big investment with a Malaysian company was stifled.
He had said that he had a project planned that would manufacture plywood but it never got off the ground even after millions in investment capital. In the end, he
reported that the partnership had to sell its ply mill that it had purchased for US$30 million in the mid-1990s to Barama Company Limited for US$180,000 to be used primarily for spare parts.
Former Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister of the PNCR and Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, attorney at law Riehl has been tipped to replace former PPP/C minister Harry Narine Nawbatt. Her predecessor, who was appointed ambassador by then president Bharrat Jagdeo and who had been campaigning for the PPP/C in Amerindian villages in Region Nine prior to the last elections, had come in for much criticism for his actions. In keeping with protocol, all of the heads of missions were expected to tender their resignations on the change of government. Following the May 11 general elections.
Like Case, Riehl was also an executive of the PNC Reform and had been a long serving Parliamen-tarian.
The PNCR’s website states that Riehl, a former member of the GDF, acquired her legal education from the University of Guyana and University of the West Indies where she obtained an LLB Degree in 1977. Subsequently she obtained her Legal Educa-tion Certificate (LEC) from the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago in 1979.
Cuba will see veteran political advisor Majeed taking up the post of Ambassador for Guyana there.
Majeed was the Deputy Chief Political Advisor to President LFS Burnham; Chief Political Adviser to President Desmond Hoyte and Head of the Political & Press Division, Office of the President of Guyana.
He currently resides in the United States and is listed as the President & Chief Executive Officer of TITAN International Deve-lopment Group, New York.
Sources also told this newspaper that former Howard University Profes-sor and former General Manager at GAIBANK, Hunte is tipped to be Guyana’s top diplomat in South Africa.
With a crisis in relations with Venezuela, the APNU+AFC administration earlier this year nominated career diplomat Cheryl Miles to the post in Caracas and she has now taken up her appointment.
