Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday disclosed that the new Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) Headquarters will be constructed at Ogle, East Coast Demerara (ECD) and three hotels will be built on the state land which was previously earmarked for this project at Pattensen, ECD.
“The idea is to put the hotels there around the (Arthur Chung) Conference Centre and then the GRA goes out a little bit further which would give easy access to people who have to get the services,” Jagdeo told reporters during a press conference which was held yesterday afternoon at Office of the President.
More than a week ago it was revealed that the state-earmarked land at Pattensen for the GRA Headquarters had been transferred to hotel developer Pasha Global of Suriname.
However, the Government had remained silent on the reason for the decision and terms of the transfer.
Jagdeo yesterday explained that the decision to take away the Pattensen land from the GRA is one Government is “conscious” of and it is not an attempt to “deprive” the agency.
In fact, he said the new GRA Headquarters will be built near to the Ogle four-lane highway so that it can be easily accessible to the entire population following the completion of the various infrastructures that are being put up around the country.
“…We are now building this infrastructure in a way where when you come across the bridge of a four-lane road going to Parika, we are already upgrading the road going to the Wales, to the gas-to-energy project, you have a by-pass into Crane, come across the bridge, you then coming in, twelve lanes coming into the city. We said in the future to make sure that people from Region Three, the East Bank and the East Coast and then Georgetown, all have easy access to the GRA, that along the four-lane road which we just started, that is in the Ogle area, that is where the new GRA Headquarters will go,” Jagdeo explained.
“So people can come easily, they don’t have to come into the city. They can come on the highways from Region Three, East Bank, East Coast and Georgetown, easily and flow straight into that highway and that is where they will be located. And we have massive amounts of land there at Ogle,” he added.
Jagdeo revealed that the two other hotels that will occupy the state land at Pattensen belong to Edmond Braithwaite, a Guyanese living overseas and a Barbadian company. Pasha Global has already commenced construction.
Jagdeo pointed out that there is a need to “bring the hotels closer to the city”. “So the land that was there before, at Liliendaal that was for the hotel, we now decided that there will be three hotels there,” he said.
The construction of the international hotels, he said will see the employment of about 1500 to 2000 Guyanese.
“So that is the idea. It’s not to take away no land from GRA. But the Government services have to be done in a manner in which it is accessible to majority of our people and they should not occupy all the prime properties in the country. You have to utilize those to create other employment opportunities…To build out our hotels. We need 2000 to 3000 rooms to host a proper convention,” Jagdeo told reporters.
The land at Pattensen is state property and it remains unclear whether it was sold or leased to the hotel developers.
In 2015, the GRA received expressions of interest for the designing of a new headquarters at Liliendaal but the location was not identified.
The designs were submitted just short of three years after the GRA moved into its Camp Street premises in a much-criticised deal.
It saw the tax agency paying a monthly rent of around $5M to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) after the then PPP/C government spent $227M to retrofit the building for the revenue agency. The arrangement had been seen as a way of helping the NIS to recover from bad investment deals. The building was previously owned by CLICO (Guyana) Inc., which had a large sum outstanding to the NIS when it collapsed.
During his August, 2015 budget presentation, then Finance Minister Winston Jordan had lamented the poor state of the then GRA’s current headquarters, saying it was not fit for occupation.
