Jaguar That Became a Leopard: a chronology of convenient truths – Pt One

Dear Editor,
My last three letters examined the Leader of the Opposition’s year in office, his sister’s dissertation, and two words his other sister cannot walk back. The remaining question is whether anything the Mohamed camp says can be taken at face value. The fair test is to set their statements beside the documents, in the order they happened. What emerges is not one lie but a method: a story is told with complete confidence until a document contradicts it, and then a new story is told with the same confidence.
Start with the car. On December 7, 2020, Azruddin Mohamed declared his 2020 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster to customs at US$75,300, on a form declaring it “true and correct” and accepting that the GRA could reassess the value within seven years. The US Department of Justice later supplied, under treaty, the seller’s invoice from Texas, billed to him, stamped “paid” and matching the chassis number, for US$695,000. Bank records showed US$622,000 wired to that seller over three days, described as racing services, travel, and marketing. In a video that circulated in June 2025, he could be heard boasting that the car cost him US$1 million. Three prices for one car: US$75,300 for the taxman, US$695,000 on the invoice, and US$1 million for the audience. The smallest is the one he signed.
There is a contradiction inside the contradiction. Having accepted that the GRA could reassess, he argued in the High Court that it had no power to do so and won that point of law in November 2025. He is entitled to the ruling. But a man who signs an undertaking at the customs counter and disowns it in court has told us what his signature is worth. The matter was not cleared on the facts. The DPP discontinued the local charges because of the US extradition request, not because the evidence failed, and the car now features in the Florida indictment, which alleges a separate scheme to evade more than US$1 million in Guyanese taxes.
Charged in May 2025, he did not answer the invoice; he changed the subject. “I have proof where Irfaan Ali facilitated and assisted with the clearance of the Lamborghini,” he said on May 29. On June 2, he released a “first tranche” of WhatsApp messages which he said were exchanged with the President in 2020. “In this game of chess, timing is everything, and here is the proof,” he declared. It proved nothing. Had he shown that he sent the President the seller’s US$695,000 invoice and then asked for the car to be cleared at US$75,300, he would have had a case. The only invoice in the messages was his own, for US$75,300, the figure already on the customs declaration. Nothing he published put the true price before the President.
Sending an under-valued invoice to someone else does not make it true. The “matter sorted” exchange concerned a hold-up at the licence office, not the car’s value. On his own evidence, the President did what he routinely does for citizens who ask: he helped someone through a stalled Government process. If the invoice was false, the deception was practised on the President, not by him; the President has said he was never shown the US$695,000 invoice. In the same video, Mr Mohamed called the car a “good deal” at around US$75,000 because it “had some electrical issues” and “it was COVID time,” a story the invoice and wire transfers do not support. Then, on August 22, 2025, when asked whether his family had been “in bed” with the Government, he said, “Irfaan Ali never granted me no favour”, when 11 weeks earlier he had called for the President to demit office over that very favour. Both cannot be true, and he said both.
June 2025 also brought the jaguar. WIN presented Guyana’s national animal, a figure on the Coat of Arms, as its symbol, and its leader called it a jaguar on the campaign trail. When GECOM ruled on June 27 that a national symbol could not be used for partisan branding, the animal changed species overnight. “If you Google the image, it’s not a jaguar. It was a leopard,” he said. A video of him calling it a jaguar soon circulated. A small story, and that is the point: when a rule got in the way, the facts were redrawn, spots and all.
In July 2025, launching the WIN manifesto, he told voters that “very soon I will be delisted” and that “when we take office on the 2nd of September, the United States of America will work with us.” The day before, the US Ambassador had said Washington was “very concerned” about a sanctioned individual entering Government. There was no delisting. A federal grand jury indicted him on October 2, and the United States requested his extradition on October 30. He also pledged to refuse the salary of the presidency, which he did not win. But in February 2026, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs disclosed that he had designated a party member to collect his pay in cash, and his own camp later published a pay slip showing he had drawn an MP’s salary. The spirit of the promise did not survive the first payday.
After the indictment was unsealed, he told Kaieteur News: “My father is the owner of Mohamed’s Enterprise, not me.” The indictment records him as holding a 10 per cent stake, and the US Department of Justice describes father and son as the owners. Contesting an allegation is every accused person’s right. Disowning a shareholding on the record is something else.
The method runs in the family. In February 2026, a Facebook page associated with Hana Mohamed reported a “bombshell revelation” in the extradition hearing: undisclosed extradition requests over “massive drug shipments” and a stunned courtroom. Glenn Hanoman, counsel for the Requesting State, called the post “entirely false, misleading, and without factual foundation”; the testimony, he said, was “innocuous, routine, and unremarkable”. In April, her post claimed the Government had hired 15 lawyers against the family and named several; the Supreme Court had to clarify that those named were its own Judicial Research Counsel. Officials also called out WIN for amplifying fuel-shortage rumours.
The chronology continues, and the subsequent events raise further questions about the consistency of the accounts being presented to the public.
Yours faithfully,
Concerned citizen

Source: Guyana Times