Dear Editor,
The scale of the devastation wrought by Yuri Garcia Dominguez and his wife, Ateeka Ishmael, is almost too vast to comprehend, yet its details are etched in the broken lives of 17,000 Guyanese citizens. Between 2019 and 2021, under the banner of Accelerated Capital Firm Inc (ACFI), this duo orchestrated a financial massacre that drained an estimated GYD 5.4 billion (US}27 million) from the pockets of the working class.
They preyed on the vulnerable during a global pandemic, promising 50% monthly returns on “Forex trading”—a sophisticated lie supported by webinars and digital smoke and mirrors. From the pensioner who surrendered their final gratuity to the single mother who invested her children’s education fund, the magnitude of this fraud was not just financial; it was a psychological assault on the national trust. Today, the victims are left with empty bank accounts while the perpetrators, once safely in state custody, have been allowed to vanish into thin air, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions and a growing suspicion that the scales of justice in Guyana are weighted against its own people.
The deafening silence surrounding the disappearance of these“fugitives” is not an oversight; it is a calculated insult. While the Attorney General’s Office and the Guyana Police Force bask in the praise of foreign nations for their “alacrity and veracity” in pursuing extraditions that advance external interests, they have quietly buried the grand theft that hollowed out our domestic economy. We are being asked to suffer from a state-sponsored amnesia, to forget that a man facing over 100 counts of fraud was granted the freedom to slip through the fingers of our security apparatus and reportedly relocate to the luxury of Miami. The average Joe is now watching a masterclass in selective justice, where the urgency of our officials is a commodity sold to international allies, while the domestic victims are treated as a disposable footnotes.
We must put the stinging questions directly to the Attorney General, the Commissioner of Police, and the heads of every state apparatus mandated to extract justice:
- To the Attorney General: Why has the same legal ferocity applied to foreign extradition requests not been utilized to return Dominguez and Ishmael to Guyana? Can you provide a specific date on which a formal Request for Provisional Arrest was actually filed or if not when would you be filing with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding these fugitives?
- To the Guyana Police Force: At what precise moment was the surveillance of these high-stakes fugitives discontinued, and who authorized the conditions that allowed them to jump bail and exit the country undetected?
- To the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and SOCU: Given your mandate to track illicit financial flows, what specific international cooperation has been initiated to freeze the assets of ACFI principals in foreign jurisdictions, or has the trail been allowed to go cold by design?
- To the Ministry of Legal Affairs: How many millions in taxpayer funds have been expended to date on foreign-led legal matters for the last year, and how does that figure compare to the resources allocated to recovering the $5.4 billion stolen from 17,000 Guyanese families?
The authorities are clearly counting on the passage of time to dull our outrage, but they forget that they are paid by the very people they have failed to protect. It is an abrasive reality that our legal system has become a concierge service for international diplomacy rather than a shield for the Guyanese citizen. We are here to remind the state that we have not forgotten the “digital wallets” that were never opened or the “trading platforms” that never existed. We demand to know why the “cloud of uncertainty” regarding this escape hasn’t been cleared by a transparent investigation into the facilitators of their flight. Justice in Guyana should not be a tiered system where the small man’s loss is an inconvenience and a foreign request is a priority. We are still here, we still care, and we will not be silent until the same dedicated scrutiny shown to requests for extraditions is applied to the thieves who walked out of our front door with our nation’s future—and to the 17,000 citizens they were allowed to betray before vanishing on bail.
Regards
Hemdutt Kumar
