The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said that Agrément has been received for diplomatic appointments to the UK and Canada and that current Ambassador to the United States Bayney Karran will be the new envoy to China.
The Ministry, in a statement, also confirmed the appointments of businessman Hamley Case as Guyana’s new High Commissioner to the UK and attorney and former Deputy Speaker Clarissa Riehl as new High Commissioner to Canada.
Stabroek News had reported the nominations of Case and Riehl since last November.
The Ministry also announced the appointments of David T. A. Hales as new Ambassador to Belgium and Halim Majeed as new Ambassador to Cuba.
In addition, the ministry’s Chief of Protocol Esther Griffith has been named as the new Consul General in Nickerie. The ministry said Ambassador Ivan Evelyn, former Ambassador to Brazil, will replace Griffith as the Chief of Protocol. It added that arrangements are currently being made for the appointees to take up their respective appointments.
In face of criticism by the opposition PPP/C over the delay in the naming and appointing of foreign mission heads since the government took office last May, Foreign Affairs Minister Carl Greenidge told the National Assembly last month that stringent security checks were the reasons for the long delays in accreditation. “For the most part, the request for Agrément has been submitted to host countries and for reasons I think have more to do with the preoccupation of our bilateral partners—terrorism and checking everybody’s background—this process has taken an unpresented amount of time,” he had said.
Karran has served as Ambassador to the US since 2003 as well as Ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.
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 American 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 Broadcas-ting Cor-poration.
Case, meanwhile, 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. Attorney Riehl, who had been a longstanding executive and parliamentarian for the PNCR, is a former member of the Guyana Defence Force.
Meanwhile, Majeed is a veteran political advisor and had served as the Deputy Chief Political Advisor to President LFS Burnham; Chief Political Adviser to President Desmond Hoyte and Head of the Political & Press Division, at the Office of the President of Guyana.
