Dear Editor,
I just returned to Guyana in time to join the celebration for our nation’s Jubilee after a busy business trip negotiating for the expanding of the Dynamic flights between New York and Guyana.
On my return, I was astonished to learn of the verbal abuse unleashed on me by Mike Correia in the presence of President Granger, senior members of the Cabinet, members of the diplomatic corps and the full media corps at the renaming of the Ogle International Airport, primarily because I dared to represent the views of the nine dissatisfied aircraft operators at the Ogle Airport.
It is said Mike Correia rules his family business with an iron fist, the same way he attempts to run the airport management and his competitors.
It is not unusual to watch him shout Malcolm Chan-a-Sue and Kit Nascimento into silence during board meetings, this being one of the very reasons I deliberately stay away because of the hostility that predominates meetings chaired by him.
Mike Correia is not an aviation professional of any sort and his embarrassing attempt at trying to drive a wedge between professional aviators such as Captain Chan-a-Sue, Captain Tony Mecdeci and myself is a cheap shot.
It is my hope that even though both of them work for him, that does not spoil the mutually respectful professional relationship we shared over the past four decades.
Mike Correia is extremely intolerant of opinions that are opposed to his own, and it is obvious that he is possessed by an extreme sense of false supremacy driven by his family’s money and which had driven him into believing that his family’s money could indeed buy the Ogle Airport (a public utility) and transform it into a department of the CORREIA GROUP.
(Just look at the Correia Group website)
It is important to note that I represent NATA as its Vice President, (an organisation that represents nine of the 10 local aircraft operators), a responsibility I take very seriously and, therefore, I view Mike Correia’s outrageous outburst as a clear demonstration of the disrespect he harbours personally for all the other nine local operators at Ogle, as well as an opportunity for all the persons who were sitting in the audience to truly, once and for all, see his true arrogant colours.
On a personal note, my wife and I are particularly saddened by his public demeaning of the little fortune which we have struggled to consolidate to invest in OAI while we were also struggling to build our company (Roraima Airways), which is a first-generation family company being built from the ground up, while Mike Correia is managing a third-generation company (the Correia Group) built by his grandparents.
I think it is important to highlight that the Airport was leased to five aircraft operators with the clear understanding that the Airport would be operated by those operators and in a fair and equitable manner, a far cry from the anti-competitive environment that exists today.
Over the past 40 years , while Mike Correia’s father was continuing the building of their family’s gold mining business in preparation to hand it over to him one day on a silver platter, I was serving in the Guyana National Service, planting cotton at Kimbia, singing national songs, while learning to build my country by living and working in harmony with my Guyanese brothers and sisters from all walks of life across Guyana.
I was also serving my country as an army officer and military pilot flying dangerous Medivac missions both by day and by night between the mountains of the deep Mazaruni , bringing vital supplies to our Amerindian families living in the most remote areas of our country’s hinterland, all in the interest of contributing to making my country a better place.
The fact that Mike Correia ranted and raved in his attempt to belittle me, even suggesting that I am anti-national, in front of His Excellency, Brigadier General David Granger, a man, under whose command I had the honour and privilege of serving for more than a decade is revealing in how far Mike Correia will go to silence the minority shareholders and his competitors at the Ogle Airport.
Even as I write this letter , there is another controversy developing at the Airport , where once again Mike Correia is attempting to heist the engineering school away from the Aircraft Owners Association of Guyana (AOAG) , into a private company owned by himself and Malcolm Chan-a-Sue, a company which was registered within the past month.
It’s important to note that this School has been part of the AOAG over the past 20 years, even as Mike Correia manipulated the AOAG governance systems, keeping himself as President all during those 20 years, which is unprecedented in the Private Sector.
I have been a professional aviator for 40 years and I have never experienced such an acrimonious unhealthy atmosphere that exists today at Ogle.
A lot was said and written publicly about the challenges we are facing at Ogle Airport; I would, therefore, close by saying it is my fervent hope that the Government intervenes urgently in a meaningful and even-handed way to halt and reverse the unhealthy and dangerously deteriorating inter-personal relationship between Mike Correia personally and all the other aircraft operators which is not healthy for the Airport nor for Guyana’s aviation industry.
Sincerely,
Captain Gerry Gouveia
CEO, Roraima Airways
