THE blame for the state of the ailing US$200M Skeldon sugar factory and for the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) lays squarely at the feet of the PPP administration, Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman said on Thursday.He was speaking at the post-Cabinet media briefing at the Ministry of the Presidency. At a recent press conference, Leader of the Opposition Bharrat Jagdeo said he would not accept blame for the state of the sugar factory, saying that it was the Agribusiness Consultancy Team, Booker Tate, that was hired to oversee the construction of the factory to ensure that the quality was done to a certain standard.

The United Kingdom (UK)-based entity had managed the sugar industry for around 20 years from 1990, but relations between it and the then People’s Progressive Party/Civic Administration soured around 2009 amid construction woes surrounding the troubled Skeldon sugar factory and the contract was terminated. “Like every bad worker, you blame your tools when you don’t get your way…the decision to foist a US$200M factory that never generated one kilowatt of power, had bad machinery, water that was drawn from a canal used to cool equipment which apparently could have only used distilled water cannot be blamed on Booker Tate for those lawlessness,” Trotman said.
He said that the nation knows exactly which government and who contributed to the demise of the sugar industry. “That is a smoke-and-mirror exercise, who invited Booker Tate in? Bad decision-maker trying to blame [the] other.”
However, Jagdeo had blamed the current administration for the state of the factory. He said that Booker Tate had been hired as project manager and was supposed to do some of the designs as well as to oversee the chinese contractors designs. He added that the company had been entrusted with this critical aspect of the project because they were the best at that time. “Now, we’re told about all these mistakes that were made, but it was not done by politicians. We hired the best technical people and Booker Tate was considered the best people to oversee the factory…”
Jagdeo’s statement comes days after a Technical Assessment revealed that the facility is falling apart.