Transparency Institute wants International Maritime Organisation to investigate MV Barima tragedy

Last Updated on Thursday, 23 July 2026, 21:24 by Denis Chabrol

Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc. (TIGI) on Thursday urged government to ask the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to investigate the sinking of the MV Barima which appears to have unofficially claimed 102 lives.

“An independent, impartial and objective international investigation led by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), staffed by global maritime experts with no institutional stake in the outcome — not a domestic Commission of Inquiry under government control,” TIGI said.

Notably, Prime Minister Mark Phillips in his latest update Thursday evening made no mention of rescue, but repeatedly spoke about recovery. Still relying on a working figure of 179 passengers, including 18 crew members,  government said 77 were rescued and 72 bodies recovered.

Prime Minister Phillips said after Wednesday’s 5 PM press briefing,  overnight the figure grew to 70 as five more bodies were recovered. He said two bodies recovered Thursday, therefore, took the figure to 72.

That means that 30 persons were still unaccounted for.

“While search and recovery operations remain ongoing, technical teams continue to work on repositioning the MV Barima as part of the broader recovery effort,” said Mr Phillips, a retired Brigadier and former Chief-of-Staff of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF).

TIGI, which is affiliated to the global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, also wants international civil society organisations with an established presence in Guyana to be appointed as full members of the Commission, not observers. That organisation also called for the immediate recusal of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill, Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar, and the Maritime Administration’s MARAD’s senior leadership from any role in the investigation. T

“Guyana’s institutions have exhausted the public’s trust. This is no longer a domestic accountability question alone — it is a call for the international community’s attention and assistance, so that the families of the MV Barima can get what the Mahdia families are still fighting for years later: the truth, and justice, without having to sue the state to get it,” TIGI said.

With government initially saying that there were 116 passengers and 17 crew members aboard the 87-year old Scottish-made colonial era vessel,  TIGI said, “the gap between the manifest and the true passenger count sits at the center of this tragedy, not its margins.” After the identities of several rescued passengers did not match those on the manifest, government resorted to surveillance video recordings at the Kingston Goods Wharf, Water Street to estimate that 179 passengers were aboard the craft when it sank late Saturday night about 10 miles off the Essequibo Coast. TIGI noted that Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill has himself called the discrepancy “criminal.” In light of that, TIGI wants a Commission of Inquiry to ensure full public accounting of the manifest fraud — how dozens of additional souls went uncounted, who is responsible, and what enforcement follows.

Head of the Guyana Police Force’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID), Deputy Commissioner Wendell Blanhum on Thursday told Demerara Waves Online News that the captain and three crew members remained in custody. Mr Edghill said the captain and a crew member tested positive for marijuana hours after they were rescued.

Justifying the need for an independent investigation, TIGI said a minister could not publicly prejudge the very facts an independent investigation exists to determine and then oversee that same investigation. TIGI said, through Executive Member Fred Collins, has now added its voice to Rescue Guyana’s and the Amerindian People’s Association’s (APA).  Collins was direct: Guyanese have no appetite for another domestic inquiry that collapses into what he called a “circus maximus.”

“The reference is not abstract,” TIGI added, noting that in May 2023, 20 children — most of them Indigenous girls — burned to death in the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire.  That organisation said a Presidential Commission of Inquiry followed. “Three years later, families remain in the High Court, alleging the State pressured them into grossly inadequate settlements without independent legal advice, then fought to have their claims struck out entirely. That is the precedent Collins is naming: a domestic process that ended not in justice, but in the state litigating against grieving families for years. No one is prepared to watch that repeat,” TIGI said.

“No repeat of the Mahdia model. The public will not accept another inquiry that produces a report while the state simultaneously fights its own citizens in court for years afterward,”  TIGI added.