Even as government announces that it is finally ready to appoint a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to run the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest), a former chairman of the Private Sector Commission has told the Stabroek Business that given its critical role in attracting foreign investment into the country, GO-Invest should be removed from beneath the jurisdiction of a government ministry and accorded “a measure of autonomy” to function as an entity driven by an influence of its own.
“Given what we understand to be the role of GO-Invest, the agency should not be answerable to any individual ministry. It should be able to relate directly to the Ministry of the Presidency and should have a CEO whose influence carries as much weight as a minister,” CEO of Roraima Airways Inc Captain Gerry Gouveia said in an interview earlier this week.
“Because of the importance of foreign investment to the country’s economy we cannot afford to have GO-Invest tied up in the bureaucracy and procedures of any individual ministry. The last thing we need is to place the agency in a position where it has to cut through the bureaucracy of a ministry or to become caught up in intra-ministry turf wars when confirmation of a major investment is at stake,” Gouveia said.
This is not the first occasion on which the prominent aviation and tourism industry businessman has spoken publicly about the need to raise the profile of GO-Invest. He has, in the past, told this newspaper that properly positioning the entity in the forefront of the push to attract meaningful foreign investment into the country requires a deliberate raising of its profile.
Gouveia’s most recent remarks on how GO-Invest should function amongst the constellation of state agencies comes just weeks after the disclosure that government has finally settled on a CEO to run the agency though, for the moment at least, the administration has provided no indication that it intends to remove the entity from under the administrative control of the Ministry of Business.
Last week, Minister of Business Dominic Gaskin sought to put an end to what had become a rising tide of speculation regarding the future of GO-Invest when he disclosed that the administration had finally agreed on a candidate to fill the key CEO position. Up until now, however, the administration is still to disclose a time frame for the overseas-based Guyanese nominee to take up the position, with Gaskin telling Stabroek Business last week that no “formal offer or acceptance” had as yet been concluded, though he added that government was keen to have the new CEO in place in the shortest possible time.
Touted as the state agency responsible for “promoting and facilitating local and foreign private-sector investment and exports in accordance with the country’s approved investment and export strategies,” GO-Invest has been criticized by the local private sector for underperforming. The entity, its critics say, has sent mixed signals as to whether or not it is indeed the one-stop agency for investors that it was once billed to be. Some visiting businessmen and business delegations have been known to bypass the agency and directly engage ministries including the Ministry of the Presidency in the previous administration on the grounds that it appears to lack the clout to cut through the thicket of bureaucracy the prevails in executing state agencies.
Earlier this week Gouveia told Stabroek Business that a “more efficient, more influential GO-Invest can actually help to raise Guyana’s doing-business profile,” a reference to the World Bank’s Doing Business index. This year, the country fell five places to 137 in the most recent listing of 189 countries. The Doing Business index monitors regulations and procedures in eleven areas in the lifecycle of a business embracing construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labour market regulation. Some visiting businessmen have said that GO-Invest has at times appeared unable to work effectively with executing agencies to expedite critical initiatives in the process of setting up a business in Guyana.
In recent years, controversy has also arisen over what, critics say, has been GO-Invest’s underperformance as a chaperone and facilitator for trade delegations travelling abroad to display a seek markets for locally produced goods.
“It is obvious that GO-Invest has lacked the clout to get things done as smoothly and as efficiently as the situation demands in the context of expediting matters associated with investment in Guyana. It is quite obvious that its profile needs to be upgraded to grant it the recognition and authority that it needs to have. That cannot be accomplished if it finds itself having to always await the say so of another ministry which might well be indifferent to the particular matter that is being expedited,” Gouveia said.
