With the war of words over aspects of the operations of the Ogle International Airport (OIA) having sharpened markedly over the past week, Roraima Airways Chief Executive Officer Captain Gerry Gouveia has said that the “untenable situation” can easily be addressed by an official enquiry.
The enquiry, he said, would be conducted into claims that from his vantage point as Chairman of Ogle Airport Inc (OAI), the private company responsible for the day-to-day management of the airport, Head of the Correia Group of Companies and Chief Executive Officer of Trans Guy-ana Airways Michael Correia is ideally positioned to assume an unfair and dominant competitive advantage over the other operators at Ogle.
“Whatever claims Mr Correia may make the facts are what they are,” Gouveia said. “He sits in a position of privilege that allows him as Chair of the OAI not only to secure critical information on the operations of his competitors at Ogle but also to determine the pace and extent of the growth of their operations. If an operator needs land at Ogle for growth and expansion it is to the OAI, the controlling entity which has been chaired by Mr Correia for 19 years, that they must go. Mr Correia, we must remind ourselves, is also running Trans Guyana Airways, a competitor in the sector. We must ask ourselves whether that is not an unfair advantage and a conflict of interest.”
Gouviea also referred to the “undue influence and control” arising out of what he said was the Correia Group’s control of “other critical operating areas” at Ogle including fuel supplies and aircraft maintenance. “These strategic advantages put the Correia Group in a position to secure operating information of a business nature on the other aviators at Ogle including how much fuel they use over any period, where they fly, when they fly and the condition of their aircraft.”
The Roraima Airways boss said that while such information was important to the efficient running of the airport it amounted to “downright unfair competition” that all of that information was actually at the disposal of one of the competing aviation operations at Ogle, namely, Trans Guyana Airways.
In his comments, made after Correia had convened a press briefing on the Ogle saga last Friday, Gouveia said he was disappointed that Correia had use last Friday’s media encounter to make it seem as though “a situation that did not exist had been invented by Gouviea.” He said he had noted the various “unkind references” to him in the media statement read by Correia at Ogle last Friday. “The reason why I believe that an impartial enquiry into our claims of operating anomalies at Ogle is [the right thing to do, is] because it will, among other things, set the records straight on the various claims that are being made and get to the truth about the unhealthy operating environment at Ogle,” Gouveia declared.
In his media release last Friday, Correia had charged that Gouveia was “a master of half-truths and deliberate deception,” a pronouncement which Gouveia had said was “untrue.” Gouveia restated his view that the truth of the situation “can easily be borne out by an investigation into the claims that are being made not just by myself but by the eight other operators comprising the newly-formed National Air Transport Association (NATA).
In his media release on Friday Correia had also dismissed as lacking in “evidence” a statement attributed to Gouveia that “one competitor is regulating his competitors.” However, Gouveia says that the “evidence” which Correia seeks “lies in his own media release in which he talks about granting other domestic operators space through CAMS, a Correia Group-owned company, about his involvement in discourse with other operators over the high price of land at Ogle and about his door being “always open” to the smaller operators at Ogle. Why should Correia, competitor that he is, have to be at the centre of discourses with other operators over space at Ogle and land prices? Why should his door have to be open or closed – as the case may be – to his competitors? If this is not unfair competition, what is?”
However, at his press conference last Friday, Correia repeated an assertion made in an earlier interview with the Stabroek Business that “the large operators have prospered appreciably” since the creation of OAI, though Gouveia said that what has in fact taken place at Ogle over the years is the “continued growth of the influence and authority of the Correia Group on account of the sensitive position which its CEO has held within the management structure of the airport itself for almost two decades.”
At Ogle last Friday Correia conceded that a situation currently existed at Ogle with “one Group owning the majority of shares” but said that this had come about since “early in the life of OAI when there was need for critical cash injection to satisfy the mandatory safety and development obligations of the Lease Agreement, the Correia Group was left alone to meet the demand or the OAI face the collapse of the Airport Development Project. All the shareholders, at the time, had an opportunity to contribute equally. They chose not to. There was no objection then on the part of any of the shareholders to the Correia Group meeting the financial demand for the survival of the airport,” Correia declared.
Stabroek Business, however, has seen correspondence between Ogle Airport Inc and A Mazarally & Sons, the parent company of Air Services Ltd (ASL) dating back to 2005 on the matter of funding for the development of the Ogle Airport. There was an exchange of letters between the two entities over whether or not A Mazarally & Sons could meet an “equity contribution” in its capacity as ASL’s parent company. In its response to the offer from A. Mazarally & Sons Ltd, Ogle Airport Inc, in a letter signed by Anthony Mekdeci in his capacity as Secretary of the OAI Board had told Mazarally & Sons Ltd of the existence of an OAI “Board decision that Phase 1 of the OAI Development Project is to (be) funded only by existing shareholders and that any call on funds for equity contributions to Phase 1 of OAI’s Development can only be made to the existing shareholders.”
