ACTING Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manzoor Nadir, on Friday wrote to Mr. Cobus de Swardt, Managing Director of Transparency International (TI), on what he said were the “known and public biases” of members of the Guyana Chapter of TI.

In his letter, Minister Nadir named several persons who had affiliations with opposition political parties and have demonstrated hostility, bitterness and vitriol to the Government of Guyana. Among those named were Christopher Ram, Enrico Woolford and Keith Parks.

Expanding on his observations, Nadir said that Mr. Ram is the legal counsel of the Transparency International Guyana, he had a hand in writing the opposition PNC/R 1G manifesto for the 2006 elections. Also his attacks and criticisms in the media are well documented.

Nadir referred to Enrico Woolford as a senior information disseminator under the illegitimate PNC Government of the post 1992 era, and Woolford’s current sarcastic anti-government news broadcasts.

As for Mr. Parks, Minister Nadir noted that he is closely affiliated to a political party, through family relations. His son-in-law, Mr. Mike Singh, is the opposition PNCR international relations liaison. Mr. Parks brought Mr. Singh to have a meeting with the Guyana Chapter only recently.

In addition, the government’s letter to TI chronicles the close links between two lawyers from the same firm. Mr. Gino Persaud was removed as a government representative from the Council of the University of Guyana. Mr. Persaud works in the same law office with Mr. Timothy Jonas, who has a family with Nadia Sagar, the executive officer of the Guyana Chapter.

The government also said that while it has no problems with transparency and opening itself to scrutiny at the highest level, “ those who are coming to scrutinize us, who are coming to make comments on us, should be above reproach”, and that the Guyana Chapter of Transparency International has started out with tainted people among its flock.

On the One Laptop Per Family Project, the government’s letter to TI stated that the gift of US$50,000 by Huawei, was used to buy 142 laptops for poor families around the country. It went on to recall that the president, at the time of the launch of this initiative, invited the diplomatic community, the donor community and others to make similar contributions.

The Chinese government, at the recently concluded joint commission meeting, said that it will be providing 21,600 of these laptops, telling TI, “It is not uncommon for donor countries to stipulate only companies from the donor country can supply.”

Huawei is one of the largest companies in the world and is among one of the top three companies in terms of the provision of IT hardware and software and the building of platforms; there are not many companies of the same status as Huawei and, “we have been dealing with them for a number of years”.

Nadir called for a purge of the Guyana Chapter of TI and said that government supports any work to ensure good governance and transparency.