President Dr. Irfaan Ali has defended the government’s decision to award the Wales Gas-to-Energy contract to Lindsayca, stating that the American energy company was selected through a public tender process and was not handpicked by his administration or any individual within government.
Speaking at his first press conference of the year on Friday, President Ali responded to questions from Kaieteur News about whether Lindsayca remains the right partner for the project, which involves the construction of a 300-megawatt power plant and a Natural Gas Liquids facility at Wales, West Bank Demerara. Ali stated that Lindsayca came through a public process and that neither he nor anyone else in government personally selected the company.
The president acknowledged that the project has gone well beyond its initial completion deadline and said his administration is not happy with the delays. He stated, however, that the priority is now finishing the project in the interest of the Guyanese people and ensuring that electricity rates are reduced by 50 percent. Ali pointed to the recent statement from the Office of the Prime Minister outlining new milestones, including the first power turbine coming online before the end of 2026, all gas turbines being fully commissioned by the first quarter of 2027, and combined cycle operations completing by June 2027. The Prime Minister’s office stated that failure to meet those milestones will allow the government to reinstate liquidated damages against the contractor.
The defence of the tender process comes against a backdrop of serious questions raised by this publication regarding Lindsayca’s fitness for the contract at the time of its award. Kaieteur News reported that when Lindsayca secured the near billion-dollar contract, the company was facing bankruptcy proceedings, multiple lawsuits including allegations of money laundering, and lacked demonstrated experience in constructing a project of comparable scale. The Request for Proposals process began in September 2021 and concluded with bid submissions in September 2022, requiring companies to submit three years of audited financial statements to demonstrate financial standing.
Chartered accountant and attorney Christopher Ram reviewed Lindsayca’s financials for the period 2016 to 2019 and concluded that the company was under significant financial strain, with issues going directly to liquidity, sustainability, and the reliability of its reporting. The government has not publicly addressed how a company in that financial condition satisfied the qualification criteria of the tender process.
Earlier this week, the government confirmed a US$97 million settlement with Lindsayca relating to disputes over soil stabilisation works and delay provisions, bringing the effective contract value to approximately US$856 million, a 12.8 percent increase over the original sum of US$759 million. The overall project cost, including transmission works, substations, and the new national control centre, is now expected to reach up to US$1.1 billion.
President Ali’s insistence that the tender process was above board does not resolve the central concern, which is not whether a process existed, but whether that process functioned as it should have. A public tender is only as credible as the evaluation criteria applied and the rigour with which those criteria were enforced. If Lindsayca was in financial distress and lacked the relevant project experience at the time of bidding, the question is not who selected them, but who cleared them.
The government has so far declined to release the evaluation scores or the technical and financial assessments prepared during the bid review stage. Without that transparency, the public is being asked to accept that the process worked on the President’s word alone. That is not an unreasonable thing for a head of state to offer, but it is an insufficient answer when the contractor in question has since required a US$97 million settlement, missed multiple deadlines, and delivered a project that is now budgeted at more than US$1.1 billion against an original estimate of US$759 million.
The release of the full tender evaluation report should now be treated as a non-negotiable public interest matter. Guyanese deserve to know not just that a process existed, but what that process found, and how a company with the financial profile Lindsayca carried at the time of bidding was deemed qualified to construct the largest energy infrastructure project in the country’s history.
SOURCE: Kaieteur News, “Pres. Ali defends U.S. multi-million-dollar GTE deal with troubled contractor,” May 23, 2026
