Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo has defended the government’s engagement with Dominican Republic-based InterEnergy Group to supervise operations at the Guyana Power and Light (GPL), saying the company’s proposal for the work is reasonable and well below market rates.
It was recently reported that InterEnergy would provide supervisory services to GPL at a cost of US$650,000 per month.
At his press conference today, Jagdeo reminded that the government had inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) last year with InterEnergy. In a recent statement, GPL said the MOU was signed in January 2024, to explore collaborative opportunities. The arrangement was said to focus on InterEnergy technical expertise sharing and consultations.
Earlier this year, the government signed a US$422 million contract to upgrade GPL’s transmission network. Jagdeo noted that supervision of this new infrastructure being developed for the 300-megawatt gas-to-energy (GTE) project needs specialised attention.
Explaining the rationale behind outsourcing, Jagdeo said, “When you build something, a tower, like those towers, you want to build them to international standards. You can’t get the GPL staff to supervise it. They don’t have time, they are busy trying to keep the power on and fixing the old system.”
He also pointed out that industry-standard supervisory fees typically range from 5% to 8% of a project’s value. “InterEnergy proposal is significantly lower,” he noted.
Further, Jagdeo said, “So this is a company that is well known, great technical capability and when you look at the cost compared to other supervision cost, based on scale of the civil work contract, you can see it’s a small amount, and it was not secretly done.”
He clarified that no final agreement has yet been inked with InterEnergy. “They have not signed the agreement, as yet. The negotiations are still going on. So let me make it clear, the InterEnergy agreement has not been signed until now… there is a proposal that went to cabinet that spoke of this but we now need to see that they are actually delivering on what is in the proposal,” Jagdeo said.
He continued, “When a company makes an offer you look at it compare it with others but then you have to discuss and concretize in clear legal language, what this is and that negotiations is still ongoing and I’m not even sure it will be concluded before the elections.”
Jagdeo also noted that the final agreement, once concluded, will be made public. He added that there remains a possibility of the talks failing, in which case the government would have to explore alternative options. However, he expressed hope that talks with InterEnergy would materialise.
