Could it be that with the end of communism, the State under the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has become something of a criminal enterprise whose institutions are being used to enrich the ruling oligarchy and its associates? When the overarching ideology that buttresses state centralism disappears, perhaps it is too much to expect that relatively poor apparatchiks will not seek to enrich themselves while overseeing the enrichment of others.
The infamous Russian billionaire/oligarchs arose out of the capitalist reforms and rapid privatization process that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1990s. In 1991, the Soviet Union became the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with Boris Yeltsin as its first president, tasked with managing the transition from communism to capitalism. Although somewhat overstating the case, by 1993 he was bragging to The Financial Times that he and six other Russian oligarchs-controlled half of Russia’s huge economy.
According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a criminal enterprise is a ‘a group of individuals with an identified hierarchy, or comparable structure, engaged in significant criminal activity’. Under international and U.S. laws, where persons have shown themselves to be capable of egregious and criminal behavior – insidiously evading regulations or instigating and carrying out violent acts – they can be prosecuted for membership of criminal enterprises. It appears that without any specific crime being committed, simply being a member of a criminal enterprise is enough to warrant prosecution.
For some time, the nature of capital accumulation and privatisation in Guyana has been giving rise to Soviet-type concerns and to this day one could hardly consult the media without coming upon allegations of corruption, cronyism, etc. Added to this, since the PPP returned to government in 2020, two particularly telling events suggest the question at caption.
In around mid-2022, the vice-president and general secretary of the PPP, Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo in an interview with US VICE News appeared to have found himself in what to me seemed a classical principal/agent/client framework of corrupt behaviour. The vice-president, the presumed principal, had a meeting in his home that was arranged by his agent, one Mr. Su, who lived next door to the VP in accommodation he rented from the VP. He assured the client, the Vice News operative posing as a legitimate businessperson, that Mr. Su was his friend and that he would provide him with what necessary government support he needed to facilitate the project in which the client was interested. This was after Mr. Su had already informed the client that the VP was his normal facilitator for this kind of backdoor illegal operation. In these kinds of relationships, the principal is merely expected to authenticate his agent and no one expected money to directly change hands. However, it is largely on the latter ground that the VP claimed innocence and there the matter rested, with the state investigative and legal authorities claiming that no one had laid any complaint!
However, not long after the president and his VP were ignominiously invited to Washington for a dressing down, and as if for all to see that the state of Guyana is associated with criminal activities, in April 2023 the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ms. Mae Toussaint Jr Thomas, while transiting in the United States of America on her way to China, was inspected and her cellphone seized by immigration officials at Miami International Airport. She was subsequently informed that her United States visa had been revoked and she had to make alternative arrangements to return to Guyana. When the news finally broke in Guyana, she and the government admitted that she was interrogated on the outward part of her journey but presented the situation as merely a ‘routine second check’.
Deliberately or accidentally, by their actions the US authorities broadly outlined an investigative pathway that the PPP government could have taken if it so desired. The events suggested that the PS might be abusing her office, and that information to support this position could be found in her communications records. One would have expected that Guyanese investigative authorities would at the very least have thoroughly scrutinized those and associated records and found little or nothing, for there the matter rested, apart from Ms. Toussaint Jr Thomas being transferred from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Ministry of Labour.
The transfer suggests that the regime was aware of a problem with Ms. Toussaint Jr Thomas but that her transferal was as far as it intended to go. Indeed, as if in an act of contrition, Toussaint Jr Thomas was later torpedoed into the upper echelons of the PPP, becoming a member of its important central committee at its most recent congress. As a matter of fact, if one understands how these matters are fixed in ‘democratic centralist organizations’, this move may not unreasonably be considered something of a promotion!
Interestingly, last year, when issues having to do with the possible illegal activities of the Mohameds arose, President Irfaan Ali, who appoints permanent secretaries, informed that his government had not received any notification from the US authorities about Nazar Mohamed, who is his friend and had supported him during the 2020 Elections.
What a surprise then when on 10 June 2024, after an investigation that lasted some two and a half years, the United States Department of the Treasury, in collaboration with many other US government organisations, imposed sanctions on Nazar Mohamed, his son Azruddin Mohamed and Ms. Toussaint Jr Thomas for, inter alia, smuggling massive amounts of gold out of Guyana, which cost the Guyana government some US$50 million in unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2023. The former PS is alleged to have used her office while serving at the Ministry of Home Affairs, to offer benefits to the Mohameds that included contracts, licenses for weapons, and passports, etc. The Mohameds apparently also paid bribes to other corrupt Guyanese government officials to facilitate the award of government contracts and ensure favorable treatment in criminal or civil matters!
It cannot be denied that the regime has a track record of rule breaking – I mentioned a few last week that are more directly related to issues of governance – and association with dubious individuals. During the crime spree of 2002-2008, during which hundreds of persons lost their lives, Mr. Roger Khan, who was later found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison for drug trafficking, witness tampering and gunrunning, had to be nabbed by the Suriname authorities and passed on to the US authorities in 2006. Khan had taken out a public advertisement in which he stated that instead of his being pursued by Guyanese authorities, he had been fighting crime with the police force at the behest of the Guyana government.
How in a context of such illegal profligacy, can a government be surprised that its request for information dealing with these high-level investigations was ignored by the US authorities? Ms. Toussaint Jr Thomas has been sent on leave and has now resigned from the PPP ‘to save its good name’! These events indicate why simply being a member of a ‘criminal enterprise’ is enough to warrant sanctions! After decades of destructive tomfoolery, on my reading, the window remains barely open and the PPP needs to stand back and consider a more moral and materially productive national course.
