Dear Editor,
I read with concern and some rage the City’s reaction to Mr. Royston Beepat, owner of the Giftland Mall.
About five years ago I had a similar battle with the Council when I tried to sell my property in Queenstown from which I previously did my business.
I was billed for close to three million dollars to which daily interest was added.
For years we would send our cheque which we based our estimated taxes on so as to avoid a bigger bill later but these were always returned. The explanation was that they did not have any record of us being owners of the property. All efforts to prove otherwise was in vain. Following several months of frustrating visits to City Hall and eventually a survey, it was discovered that the property was previously owned and sold to the person I bought it from. By that time my taxes and arrears grew to nearly four million. I had to pay close to two million in 2015 thanks to an amnesty then currently in force.
Mr. Beepat has invested heavily in an area of Georgetown in which there was previously no infrastructure to erect one of Guyana’s most impressive, well-managed and certainly the most popular shopping centre locally. From what I read he did all this with little or no assistance from the City. He is said to have spent over $500 million dollars on public works which included the public access road to the mall and the Demerara estate, street lighting and walkways and a bus shed all at his own expense and must now deal with his own garbage disposal.
If this is the way we treat big local businesses which provide badly needed employment, it is little wonder that start-ups have little chance of growing let alone success.
Where I live in Bel Air Park drains and parapets are seldom cleared and weeded except by home owners with the only apparent service being weekly garbage collection. This trend is common elsewhere.
If you collect taxes you are bound by law to provide at least the basic services.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard Ramsay
