PNCR does not owe City Hall rates and taxes – PNCR General Secretary; Jagdeo calls on Maikwak to pay debt; says PNCR can’t get City’s tax break

Last Updated on Friday, 30 August 2024, 22:01 by Writer

The main opposition People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) does not owe the Georgetown City Council any rates and taxes, the party’s General Secretary Sherwin Benjamin said Friday but he declined to say whether the property is vested in a company named Maikwak Limited.

“What we know is that the PNC doesn’t owe… I know that the PNCR doesn’t owe the Council,” Mr Benjamin told Demerara Waves Online News. Mr. Benjamin declined to say whether the lands were vested in Maikwak Limited.

But General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Bharrat Jagdeo on Friday insisted that now that it has been established that the PNCR’s land was vested in Maikwak, the PNCR would be unable to benefit from a policy that was approved by the Georgetown City Council this week that would allow political parties to pay 25 percent of their valuated rates and taxes.

“We have now demonstrated that Maikwak, the company to which the lands have been vested, is situated at Congress Place and the lands are in Sophia but since the lands are vested to a private company and not to a political party, the policy taken by City Hall will not apply,” he said.

He said that company must pay the GY$6.7 billion debt to the municipality’s treasury. “Whoever owns Maikwak will have to pay the GY$6.7 billion in full,” he said.

A senior PNCR source said also that Maikwak never received a demand notice from the Georgetown City Council. Earlier Friday, City Mayor Alfred Mentore said definitively that the PNCR did not owe City Council and, in relation to the company, he said, “I don’t know who is Maikwak. Maikwak is a separate personality and that has to be dealt with differently,” he said. Mr Mentore said he was “very cautious about what I say” because the claim was that the PNCR owes the debt.

Mr Jagdeo said his party had no interest in paying reduced taxes and it was obvious that the PNCR-led A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) councillors did that for the benefit of their party. “We never requested that amendment that they passed and they passed it clearly to benefit APNU,” he said.

Sources said Maikwak had obtained almost 40 acres of land in the Sophia-Liliendaal area from the state-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, but over the years had given up portions of the land to the owners of Beepat’s, a well-known city importer and distributor.