By Janette Bulkan and John Palmer
This article seeks answers to two questions. Firstly, which Government Ministry or agency deals with persistent underpricing of public assets? Secondly, will the draft State Assets Recovery Bill 2016 address the persistent failure of Government to deal with Customs fraud?
Here is one example from log exports: Over 100,000 cubic metres (m3) of wamara logs were exported to China in 2014 alone. The FOB price for wamara logs declared in Georgetown was in the range US$200-220/m3 in 2014. Containerized log freight and insurance Georgetown to China is in the range US$ 25-36/m3 according to the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association. CIF reported by China Customs (not ITTO) was in the range US$700-1000/m3. The equation FOB+freight+insurance=CIF clearly does not work with these values, and the obvious explanation for the US$500/m3 discrepancy is transfer pricing. 100,000 m3 X US$ 500/m3 = US$ 50 million. No part of that sum