Investigations ongoing into controversial GPL email – Crime Chief

Police investigators are currently probing the highly controversial email purportedly sent from an address in the name of former Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Deputy Chief Executive Officer (DCEO), Ash Deonarine, to a current employee of the utility.
The document which surfaced in the public domain last month contains damning allegations against several former and current employees of the utility company. The lengthy email suggests that former GPL acting CEO, Collin Welch, was allegedly framed so that he could be removed from the post. It also outlined instructions to conceal evidence of a massive meter racket within the company.
Head of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), Senior Superintendent Wendell Blanhum recently told Guyana Times that investigations are ongoing. Investigators are trying to determine the authenticity of the email address and the contents of the mail.
However, Minister of State Joseph Harmon had previously declared the preliminary investigations done by the Ministry of Public Infrastructure revealed the email address is fake.
“Some preliminary investigations had been done and … the sense that we got from the brief was that it seems that the email address had been fake, made up,” Harmon had stated at a p

ost-Cabinet briefing last month.
Nevertheless, the Minister of State had pointed out that the contents of the document are of concern to government.
“…the content of the email included matters for which as a government we have to have some concern so the police have been given the documents, as I understand from the report given by Minister Patterson, and they are investigating the authenticity of it and any concomitant issues which arises out of that document,” he told reporters.
GPL has been in the limelight for close to a year now after Deonarine was sent on administrative leave in August last year following the discovery that he allegedly transferred some $27.8 million to his personal account without the approval of the board of directors. He is also being accused of paying former board member Carvil Duncan a sum of $948,000 that was not authorised.
This information was unearthed when the Coalition administration found that close to $142 million of the PetroCaribe Fund was plugged into the operations of the state-owned GPL after it met an empty PetroCaribe fund when it took office and later launched an investigation.