ISN’T Freddie Kissoon a rarity? In a letter to Kaieteur News Kissoon states: “Let me say unambiguously, I do not believe that the OAS Assistant-General Secretary ever spoke to someone by the name of Annan Boodram.”

Well Mr. Editor, here is that e-mail exchange between myself and Mr. Ramdin, who, by the way is a very humble person, totally bereft of egotistical displays and acclaims of self importance.

From: Ramdin, Albert <ARamdin@oas.org>
To: caribvoice@aol.com
Sent: Fri, Aug 28, 2009 2:41 pm
Subject: RE: Questions

Dear Mr. Boodram,
Thank you for inquiring. I have requested information from our officials who attended a peer review meeting on campaign financing in Miami and they assured me that no discussion took place regarding and no reference was made to Mr. Vishnu Bisram’s performance, qualifications or expertise.

Best Regards,
Ambassador Albert R. Ramdin
Assistant Secretary General

From:& nbsp;caribvoice@aol.com [mailto:caribvoice@aol.com] Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 10:39 AM
To: Ramdin, Albert?
Subject: Questions

Dear Mr. Ramdin:
In a column in Guyana’s Kaieteur News earlier this week, columnist Freddie Kissoon claimed that an OAS meeting in Miami too a decision calling on the public to disregard Vishnu Bisram as a creditable pollster. Can you please verify this to be so?

Annan Boodram
The Caribbean Voice
718-542-4454
www.caribvoice.org

Mr. Editor, any reader is now free to contact Mr. Ramdin and verify whether this exchange took place. Of course, I’m not going to request that Freddie be shut out of the pages of the newspapers, since I’m a firm believer in freedom of expression. Besides it was the same Freddie who had promised to stop writing if he could not prove the Kaieteur News wrong when that paper provided a dismally low attendance for Freddie’s much marketed lecture at UG some time last year. Freddie was never able to produce the tape or any other evidence to disprove the Kaieteur News’ numbers but he is still writing.

So the question is who now believes a man who makes promises that he never keeps, who lies without compunction and who refuses to retract his lies in the face of information disproving those lies?

ANNAN BOORAM $11 million pump cost the government $64 million, I searched the internet and came upon ‘De’ran Gear Inc’. The listed price as at May, 2008 for an M30 Propeller Pump Gear Drive is US$46,650. Options to be added to the listed price of standard drives included Marine Package etc, which total over US$10,000 – items I am not sure if were actually included in the pump, but which do not take away from the essence of my argument. The contractor shipped and supplied from Texas, Florida a similar pump to the government for US$40,000, apparently donating all types of factory discounts to the government. Add to this the US$45,000 cost of the John Deere engine and the total so far is approximately G$18,000,000. (I hope this primary school maths is not confusing the initiators of the Kaieteur News project “Show Government to be corrupt”. Now – and this is left to the Kaieteur News Engineering Department to do as homework – add the price of the pump, and the price of the works, add the price of the other things the Kaieteur News photograph pointed arrows at, and give me the answer, quick!

I am left wondering how the contractor made a profit. If the Kaieteur News now thinks the same way, its next headline should be “Stanleytown Pump stolen from America!” Now that should sell some extra copies of the Kaieteur News.
DAVE SHIW SANKAR