…over repeated accusations of his involvement in “Paper Shorts” murder
Businessman Azruddin Mohamed has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Guyana Police Force (GPF) Sergeant Dion Bascom, for defaming him when he made allegations of a Police cover-up in the investigations into the 2021 murder of Ricardo “Paper Shorts” Fagundes.

According to the Statements of Claim filed by the businessman through his attorney Naresh Poonai, Mohamed is seeking a judgement for damages in excess of $100 million, exemplary, punitive and/or aggravated damages in excess of $100 million and an injunction restraining Bascom or anyone acting on his behalf from repeating the defamatory statements he had made about Mohamed.
Mohamed pointed out that he and his father operate Mohamed’s Enterprise, a business known regionally and internationally for gold trading, adding that he is well known for his philanthropy, his practice of the Muslim faith and his successful car racing and sports team.
According to Mohamed, his reputation has now been besmirched because the defendant made “several untrue, dangerous, disingenuous, malicious, irrational, unfair, unsubstantiated, unfounded and baseless statements that were defamatory of the claimant.”

Mohamed documented Bascom’s verbatim defamatory claims during his Facebook broadcast on August 11, 2022, including Bascom’s claims that one of Mohamed’s employees was implicated in Fagundes’s murder and that Mohamed had paid an over $30 million bribe to a senior figure in the GPF to cover up the murder.
“Sometime thereafter, the defendant removed the broadcast and video from his Facebook page/profile, however, by that time, the broadcast and video were already seen by members of the public, downloaded, shared and disseminated widely locally, regionally and internationally and the claimant will rely on portions of the said broadcast/live video at trial,” Mohamed documented in his Statement of Claim.
The businessman also noted that on August 12, he sent Bascom a written letter demanding the Sergeant retract his statements, apologise and compensate the claimant. Far from doing that, Mohamed said that Bascom further defamed him and refused to back down from his earlier statements, claiming to have evidence of the cover-up. In fact, Bascom went on to claim that Mohamed only started doing his philanthropy after Paper Shorts’s murder.

Azruddin Mohamed