Kaieteur News report on Amaila Falls misleading
-Prime Minister

Prime Minister Samuel Hinds on Friday defended the Government’s position with respect to the statements made by the Kaieteur News about the sale of the Amaila Falls Hydropower project by Fip Motilall to Sithe Global.
Mr. Hinds added that the action by the newspaper is one aimed at harming the people of Guyana with its inuendos, as it relates to corruption and the development of Guyana.
“They wanted to create corruption and to be really flippant about it and I felt that this was really harmful to our people because many of them do not have the experience in these sorts of matters on how large projects get done,” he said.
He added that while it was Government’s aim to clarify the misconception in Thursday’s edition of both the Kaieteur and Stabroek News, the papers seem to still have gone out of their way to distort and mislead the public since they were bent on creating mischief as the article boast varying errors.
Among the errors was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which showed that the contracts between the said parties were inked in 2006, when according to Mr. Hinds this was only signed in 1998 when Mr. Motilall began work on the study for the development of the Amaila Falls project.
Government has been over the years implementing measures aimed at improving the electricity situation in Guyana and one such, initiative was to resort to Independent Power Produce (IPP), to increase generation.
This however, did not materialize, according to the Prime Minister, as the many proposals brought forward by companies were costly.
“So you see the 2006 MOU was for the IPP which did not materialise. But the Kaieteur News either they don’t understand anything that is not simple or they purposely set out to distort and mislead the public,” Prime Minister Hinds said.
Since the mid 1980s, the Amaila Falls project has been recognized as an interest site for development and as such, Motilall and his partner SYNERGY continued to proceed to refine the project.
The Prime Minister however, indicated that efforts are apace to close the project before the end of 2011, since a lot of finance is involved and is regarded as the largest one in Guyana’s history.