One day after Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo claimed that Trinidad and Tobago businessmen have been soaking up the foreign currency in Guyana by conducting lots of their international transactions from Guyana, Opposition Member of Parliament and Leader of the Alliance for Change, Khemraj Ramjattan, believes the Guyana Government must take the blame for the situation.

 On Thursday, Vice President Jagdeo highlighted the issue at a press conference.

“We noticed a trend here, where some Trinidadian companies are procuring large quantities of goods for their businesses in Guyana, and in Trinidad, and making payments from here to their suppliers. So, they are utilizing our foreign currency to make those payments,” Jagdeo said.

In response today, Opposition Member of Parliament Khemraj Ramjattan told reporters that not only is the Government facilitating many of the Trinidadian companies here, but it is also directly responsible for the shortage of US currency, owing to the “poor management” of the non-oil sector.

According to Ramjattan, several Trinidadian companies have been awarded billions of dollars in contracts particularly in the construction industry and are taking all of their money out of Guyana in US currency.   

“After the oil [industry], construction is the biggest money maker in Guyana now, and, a number of these Trinidadian companies are being given contracts…we understand now that they were the ones who went and bought up the foreign currency,” the Opposition Member of Parliament said.

The Opposition MP said to compound the situation, the poor performance of the non-oil sector has been impacting the availability of foreign currency at the Bank of Guyana.

“It also speaks of the bad progress being made in the non-oil sector. A part from the important oil sector that brings in billions or hundreds of millions of US dollars, to get the foreign currency problem solved your non-oil economy has to be doing well,” he said.

The Bank of Guyana in its Quarterly Report in July said the production of gold and bauxite declined in the first quarter of 2023. According to the report, bauxite production dropped by 17.8 percent when compared to the same period in 2022 while gold declarations fell by 5.3 percent.

MP Ramjattan said the impact is being felt daily.

“Foreign exchange comes through other things like gold production, foreign currency comes through bauxite production or whatever sugar cane is producing. And so, basically, the shortage, now that it is being sopped up by his Trinidadian friends, big set of Guyanese money that he paid them up front, these other non-oil sectors are not producing the amount of foreign currency, gold declaration has gone down every low, a number of the other sectors like rice and sugar is a blackhole as I indicated,” the AFC Leader said.

Opposition Member of Parliament, David Patterson also explained today that while Guyana’s economy is being fueled heavily by the oil sector, the oil revenues do not go directly to the Bank of Guyana. He said the bank only accesses those revenues in US dollars when the Finance Minister draws down from the Natural Resources Fund, and places the money into the Consolidated Fund. (Svetlana Marshall)

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