Guyana’s procurement rules are enforced exactly when it would be better to waive them, and waived exactly when they matter most.

The government of Guyana has opened a fourteen-day tender for the salvage of the MV Barima. Thirty people remain inside that vessel. The tender restricts eligible companies to those with experience in Guyanese or wider Caribbean waters. The world’s leading marine salvage companies are based in Fort Lauderdale, Rotterdam, and London. They are not in the Caribbean. They will not qualify under the terms as written.

Now let us establish what this government does not tender for.

The government of Guyana spent US$759 million on a Gas-to-Energy contractor without competitive tendering producing the best available option. It awarded a GYD $870 million pump station contract to a company whose principal is closely affiliated with the Vice President. It has hidden mining contracts from Parliament. It has awarded contracts to companies that had never done work of comparable scale. The tender process, in Guyana, is enforced with maximum rigour exactly when speed matters most and waived with maximum flexibility exactly when money matters most. That is not procurement policy. That is a pattern.

What Guyana Sole-Sourced and Did Not Tender: The Record

Let us put the figures on the table, because the public deserves to understand the scale of what has been awarded in Guyana without the open competitive process now being applied to the recovery of thirty bodies from a sunken vessel.

Gas-to-Energy NGL plant and 300MW power station: US$759 million  awarded to Lindsayca-CH4 in December 2022 without truly open international competition

Power China International competing bid rejected: US$703 million  US$194 million cheaper than the winning bid. The cheaper, more experienced bid lost.

GTE total projected cost 2026: US$2 billion+  experts warn final cost could reach US$3 billion after delays, disputes and grid upgrades

Arbitration settlement paid secretly to Lindsayca-CH4: US$102.7 million  government initially denied paying it. Paid for delays caused by the government’s own site handover

Additional demand from Lindsayca after winning arbitration: US$250 million  further demanded to continue construction after already receiving the settlement

GPL transmission lines contract: US$422 million  awarded to Kalpataru Projects International, an Indian company, without standalone Guyanese competition

Tepui Group Belle Vue Pump Station: GYD $870.5 million  awarded to company affiliated with VP Jagdeo. 10% completion by due date. Government still owed GYD $121.7M.

Tepui Group Good Hope infrastructure contract: GYD $688 million  contract not published on NPTAB website. GYD $120M mobilisation advance paid before work began.

Guyana’s total 2024 capital budget processed through procurement: GYD $666 billion  approximately 58% of the entire national budget

The opposition, in 2024, stated publicly that breaches of procurement laws and the award of contracts to the friends, families and favourites of the PPP government occur regularly and are in the tens of billions of dollars. The Alliance for Change noted that a small percentage of the chosen elite benefit from government procurement, with the lion’s share concentrated and allocated to the few while the masses are given the crumbs in manual labour contracts.

The Public Procurement Commission, in its review of the Tepui Belle Vue Pump Station contract, found several breaches in the award process. Some evaluators refused to sign off on contract awards and some resigned when questionable and controversial award recommendations were made. The NPTAB was described by the PPC as having been slow to supply documents and having awarded similar contracts to others who also lacked the experience and prerequisites.

The government that awarded a US$759 million gas plant contract to a consortium whose US member had five employees and a track record consisting almost entirely of Venezuelan projects is now running a fourteen-day competitive tender for a salvage operation that three phone calls to known companies could have initiated two weeks ago. The selective application of procurement rigour in this country is not an administrative inconsistency. It is a feature.

The Caribbean Restriction: Why It Makes No Sense and Who It Serves

The MARAD tender notice specifies that eligible companies must have a proven track record in Guyanese or wider Caribbean waters, particularly in environments characterised by strong currents and restricted visibility.

Guyana1News has no objection to requiring experience with currents and restricted visibility. Those are legitimate conditions at the Barima wreck site and any competent salvage operator should be familiar with them. What we object to is the geographic restriction. Restricting eligibility to companies with Caribbean experience eliminates, at a stroke, the world’s most capable and most experienced marine salvage operators.

• Resolve Marine Group is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is the largest United States-based marine salvage company. It operates in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. It responds to maritime emergencies worldwide. It has worked in the Caribbean and in South American coastal environments. Whether it meets the specific wording of a Caribbean experience requirement under a strict interpretation is ambiguous at best and exclusionary at worst.
• SMIT Salvage is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a subsidiary of Boskalis. It has been in continuous operation since 1842. It has handled vessel recovery operations in turbid, current-affected coastal environments across every ocean on earth. It is not a Caribbean company. Under the MARAD tender as written, its ability to qualify may be limited.
• Ardent Global, formed from the merger of Svitzer Salvage and Titan Salvage, manages integrated salvage capabilities across the Atlantic basin. Titan Salvage was the lead salvage company on the Costa Concordia operation, the largest and most complex vessel recovery in maritime history. Whether Ardent’s Atlantic-basin experience meets the Caribbean geographic criterion is not clear from the tender notice.

The question the government has not answered is why the Caribbean geographic restriction was written into this tender at all. The Barima wreck site presents specific hydrographic conditions: turbid water, strong coastal currents, shallow to mid-depth coastal seabed. The relevant expertise is experience with those conditions, which exist in river-fed coastal environments on every continent, not experience in the specific geographic zone of the Caribbean. By restricting to Caribbean experience rather than to environmental experience, the tender may have functionally excluded the most qualified companies in the world from the bid.

The comparison with the Gas-to-Energy project is again instructive. For a project requiring specialist natural gas processing and power generation construction, the government did not restrict bidders to Caribbean companies. It solicited international interest. The winning consortium had its primary track record in Venezuela. The competing bidder, Power China International Group Limited, is a Chinese state-backed construction giant with no Caribbean operations. Neither restriction of Caribbean experience was applied when the contract was worth US$759 million.

For the recovery of thirty bodies from a sunken vessel, the government has written a tender that may limit the pool to companies with Caribbean presence. The asymmetry between those two procurement decisions is not explainable by policy. It requires a different kind of explanation.

When Guyana spent US$759 million on an energy project, it hired a consortium with Venezuelan roots and five-employee credentials. When Guyana needs to recover thirty missing Guyanese from a sunken vessel, it restricts the bidders to Caribbean companies. The procurement logic of this government runs in exactly the wrong direction.

What the Tender Should Have Said

Guyana1News is not opposed to a tender for the Barima salvage. A competitive process that identifies the best available company at the best available price is legitimate procurement practice. What we are opposing is a tender whose geographic restriction may exclude the best available companies and whose two-week timeline is slower than the decay rate of the bodies it is trying to recover.

A properly constructed emergency tender for the MV Barima salvage would have:

• Specified experience with turbid water, restricted visibility, and strong current conditions rather than Caribbean geographic presence, allowing the world’s leading salvage companies to compete.
• Been accompanied by direct proactive outreach to Resolve Marine Group, SMIT Salvage, and Ardent Global, inviting them to submit proposals by the closing date rather than waiting for them to discover a tender notice.
• Included an emergency expedited evaluation clause allowing MARAD to award within 48 hours of tender close if the assessment is clear-cut, rather than allowing the normal multi-week evaluation process to run its full course.
• Specified forensic evidence protection protocols in the technical requirements, as it appropriately does, but also required tenderers to submit a mobilisation timeline so that speed of response is evaluated alongside price and technical merit.
• Been accompanied by a ministerial statement committing to a specific date by which a contract will be awarded and a specific date by which salvage operations will begin, so the families of the thirty missing have a timeline they can hold the government to.

None of those elements are in the tender notice as published. The tender as written is a standard procurement document applied to an emergency situation. Standard procurement documents applied to emergency situations produce the timeline Guyana1News has already mapped: a salvage operation that begins, under optimistic assumptions, seven weeks after the vessel sank.

The Question the Government Must Answer

Guyana1News is asking the government one direct question, and we are asking it publicly so that the families of the thirty missing can see both the question and the answer.

The Government of Guyana awarded a US$759 million contract for the Gas-to-Energy project to a consortium that included a company with five employees and a track record in Venezuela, without requiring that company to have any experience in Guyanese waters. That contract was not limited to Caribbean companies. It was not subject to the same geographic restrictions now being applied to a salvage contract worth a fraction of the price.

Why is the salvage of the MV Barima, which will cost an estimated US$2 to US$10 million, being subject to geographic restrictions and a fourteen-day competitive process, when a US$759 million construction contract was awarded without equivalent restrictions and has now grown to over US$2 billion with a secret arbitration settlement on top?

The government owes the families of the thirty missing a complete, public, and honest answer to that question. Not a press release. Not a ministerial statement with talking points about transparent procurement. An honest explanation of why the rules that are being strictly applied to a ten-million-dollar rescue operation were not applied to a billion-dollar energy contract.

If the answer is that different procurement rules apply to different types of contracts, publish those rules and explain why the emergency salvage of human remains from a government vessel does not qualify for emergency single-source procurement. If the answer is that the government is committed to competitive tendering in all circumstances, explain the Gas-to-Energy award. One of those answers must be wrong. The public is waiting to find out which one.

Remove the Caribbean restriction.

Expedite the award.

Explain the double standard.

Raise the MV Barima

Source: Guyana1news