Dear Editor,
I would like to commend former President Donald Ramotar on the sudden recovering of his faculty of memory with regard to necessary imprimatur on the Red House ‘lease’. I suppose we can be forgiven for thinking that no such imprimatur was originally given considering the strenuous protestation of his then Attorney-General, now Cheddi Jagan Research Centre Inc’s legal representative in this case, that none was necessary. Mr Ramotar himself curiously declined to offer this critical bit of information in his own letter on the issue a month ago.
Of course, there are outstanding issues such as documents in support of said imprimatur, and the conflict of interest situation of Mr Ramotar as President giving his supposed approval of a lease to a company of which he was not only management but a lease he had originally attempted to file in a management capacity for the entity to which the ‘lease’ was issued.
All that is of course academic; Red House as of April 2001 became property of the National Trust via gazetting under the provisions of the National Trust Act. Ramotar as President therefore would have signed a lease invalidly issued with the Lands and Surveys Commission as lessor. It seems ‒ presuming that the recently remembered imprimatur was actually given ‒ that Mr Ramotar would have been misled by his Minister of Culture, Dr Frank Anthony; Chairman of the National Trust and fellow CJRC Inc principal, Dr James Rose; and then Commissioner of Lands and Survey, and statutory National Trust member, Mr Doorga Persaud.
In brief, Mr Ramotar would have put his signature (actual or implicit) to permission for a lease document that his venerable Attorney General Anil Nandlall has explicitly claimed as not needing said signature, issued under an inapplicable section of the law. Were the implications not so dire, this would be the height of comic absurdity. I look forward to a swift reconciliation of this issue in the interest of the people of Guyana and the protection of their common heritage from illicit appropriation, however risible and clumsy the attempt.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
Cultural Policy Advisor
