Corruption thesis that ignored most credible, consequential corruption case study in Guyana’s history (Pt 2)

Dear Editor,
Take the murder of Ricardo “Paper Shorts” Fagundes, shot more than 20 times outside Palm Court on Main Street on 21 March 2021. The Police reopened the case last year. In July, detectives held Udoh Kanu, a former manager at Mohamed’s Security, and Mark Richmond, a former security guard attached to the family’s business, before releasing them on $1 million station bail each. They also named Satrohan “Depo” Rajkumar, a member of Team Mohamed’s racing outfit, as wanted for murder. Mr Mohamed denies any involvement and says he has never been a suspect; his father says witnesses are being coerced. No one has been charged, and no one should be convicted in a newspaper. But a researcher writing about violence, patronage, and the abuse of power in Guyana would at least have asked why a five-year-old execution keeps leading investigators to the family payroll.
Take the stray bullet. In September 2013, a teenager, Ryan Persaud, was killed by a stray bullet near his home on the West Bank of Demerara, weeks after another stray round from recreational shooting had struck his family’s house. Reports at the time said a city businessman was questioned and released for lack of evidence. The case was closed, and no one was charged. The reports name no one, and I make no accusation; the record does not support one. The family’s racing brand was tied to the case only last year by a partisan Facebook page. I raise it for one reason: a thesis built on what people believe would have counted it as evidence, and an honest one would have had to test it. Hers did neither.
Take the roads. On June 29, 2022, a jeep driven by Nadia Mohamed, the wife of Azruddin Mohamed, collided with a motorcycle on Mandela Avenue. Odessia Sam, a 42-year-old mother of five, died. Police said the motorcyclist failed to stop at the junction, and Mrs Mohamed was released on $100,000 bail. Fault is a matter for the authorities, and I assign none. Yet within a week, images circulated online that were said to show Team Mohamed’s vehicles racing unlicensed on public roads. Five children lost their mother, and the spectacle went on.
Take the workers. In November 2010, Stabroek News reported that three security guards at Mohamed’s Enterprise on Lombard Street were held for hours, struck repeatedly with a baseball bat, had soapy water poured into their mouths and were bound and gagged with tape after being accused of theft.
One, a 63-year-old supervisor, had both hands broken. Another suffered five fractured ribs. When the newspaper was visited, a man who identified himself as the owner’s son called the guards “drunkards”, and an employee warned that the paper would be sued if it published. Days later, Nazar Mohamed apologised publicly, dismissed one employee and suspended another. The apology is to his credit. But a dissertation that speaks of extraction, marginalisation, and the concentration of power might have found space for the men who guarded the family’s gold and were tortured on the family’s premises.
Take the road manners. Her sister, Hana Mohamed, WIN’s Director of Political Affairs, was captured on video haranguing a working man on the road because, she insisted, her Prado could not get past him. The footage suggests it could. A woman in a luxury SUV, a man trying to earn a living, and a demand that he get out of the way: the whole hierarchy of the Mohamed world fits in one frame. Nor was it a one-off. On Christmas Day last year, Police stopped her driving a Toyota Land Cruiser on the Eccles Public Road. They allege that her brother, a sitting Member of Parliament, walked up and told her to drive home rather than to the Police station, and that she did. She was to be summoned for failing to comply with the directions of Police in uniform. She called it political persecution. In September, the Chief Magistrate had to order her, in open court, to stop posting about a state witness who testified that he feared for his family’s safety. She answered by calling him “lying and treacherous” online.
The thread that ties all of this together has a name: bullyism. Guards beaten with a bat on the family’s premises. Tax officers turned back at the family’s gate. A Police stop is treated as a suggestion. A Magistrate’s warning answered with another post. A working man was told to make way for a Prado. A 20-year-old constable was written off as “collateral damage”. This is how real corrupters behave when no one is surveying them. They take the language of anti-corruption and turn it into a weapon aimed at the state, while the habits of the powerful go unexamined at home. Corruption is not only money diverted from the Treasury. It is the settled belief that rules, roads, and the people on them exist for other people. By that definition, Ms Mohamed did not need 232 respondents. She needed a mirror.
None of this is a conviction, and I say so plainly. That is the point. Ms Mohamed’s dissertation convicts a governing party on percentages. I am asking only that the same instrument be turned around. If 94 per cent of an undisclosed sample believing corruption is widespread counts as scholarship, then US Treasury findings of bribery, a US$695,000 supercar declared at US$75,300, a murder probe that keeps reaching the family’s former security staff, guards tortured on the family’s premises, and a household pattern of bullying the powerless are, at the very least, material she was obliged to address. On the evidence of the summary her own family published, she addressed none of it.
Every serious social scientist is taught reflexivity: declare your position and test your conclusions hardest where you are most invested. A researcher who is the sister of the accused, the namesake of a designated company, a beneficiary of the family fortune and a candidate for the accused’s party had more to declare than most. The examiners at St Andrews graded a dissertation. They did not try the PPP, and they were never asked to weigh what was left out. Guyanese can. Corruption is real, here as everywhere, and it deserves rigorous study. But a study that measures opinion about others and ignores documented findings about one’s own is not an investigation of corruption. It is a deflection with a bibliography.

Yours faithfully,
Concerned Citizen

Source: Guyana Times