Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has stated that the Guyana Government will have to look at implementing stricter regulatory mechanisms to prevent gold smuggling, which continues to affect the country’s revenue and small and medium scale miners.

In an interview on the “Starting Point” podcast on Monday night, Mr. Jagdeo said the Government has made serious efforts to arrest the situation. He claimed, however, that foreign nationals, including Chinese nationals, are now involved in the illegal gold trade locally.

“The Problem is when you charge people for smuggling gold, they get bail and it’s harder to charge them for money laundering offences, so we now have to strengthen the charges that we place on those people,” Mr. Jagdeo said.

The current Government has repeatedly been accused of turning a blind eye to gold smuggling, but Mr. Jagdeo has denied those claims. He said steps have been taken to address the issue, including restricting the purchase of gold from specific dealers.

He noted that recent sanctions on businessman Azruddin Mohamed over allegations of gold smuggling, has put many other local gold miners at risk.

“Illegal gold smuggling put the sector at risk, because we have had to fight off because when we just got into office the Canadians said we don’t want to buy gold from Guyana anymore because we are worried about contaminated gold coming into the system, at that time there was a worry that Venezuelan gold was coming into our system and then re-exported,” Mr. Jagdeo stated.

Mr. Jagdeo noted that concerted efforts have enabled local authorities to pinpoint new tactics being used by gold smugglers.

Some of the efforts include the establishment of a task force and a rigorous assessment of gold declarations being made from time to time.

The task force, which is comprised of the Attorney-General, the Minister of Finance, the Commissioner-General of the GRA, the Head of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the Governor of the Central Bank and representatives of the Guyana Gold Board, has already identified loopholes in the existing regulations and work has started to update the regulations

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