By Gordon French
Caribbean Net News guyana Correspondent
Email: gordon@caribbeannetnews.com
GEORGETOWN, Guyana: Guyana's attorney general Doodnauth Singh on Wednesday appealed a High Court decision to release a shipment of 900 tonnes of soya suspected to be contaminated with salmonella typhimurium on board a ship, Myra, moored mid-stream in the Demerara River.
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| The Bahamian-registered ship'Myra'moored midstream of the Demerara River |
This is the latest twist in the saga regarding the shipment which arrived in Guyana from Guadeloupe on March 10. The importer, a local poultry producer, had publicly bemoaned the way the situation was being handled.
Sources said that the attorney general, acting on behalf of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), has moved to the Appeal Court as part of a necessary process to protect the South American nation from any adverse effects of releasing the shipment, even for testing.
High Court Judge, Justice James Bovell-Drakes had ruled that the soybean stored in Hatch #5 of the Myra, a Bahamian-registered vessel, be delivered to a warehouse operated by the importer, who is listed as the plaintiff in the case.
The ruling further states that under Customs and Ministry of Agriculture supervision, samples of the said cargo be extracted for analysis by Public Health authorities to determine whether the cargo has been contaminated with Salmonella or any other toxic chemicals.
Once the tests prove positive, Justice Bovell-Drakes has ordered that the said cargo be forthwith destroyed or removed from the jurisdiction of Guyana.
Singh will have to fund the costs of the test, according to the court ruling. He stated that he loses some US$17,000 daily once the ship remains mid-stream.
But the Ministry of Agriculture has placed aboard the Myra ranks of the Guyana Defence Force and officers from the Customs and Trade Administration. France had warned agencies here that while the shipment was under their control, it appeared that Hatch #5 of the vessel had been contaminated by salmonella.
The French also instructed the captain of the vessel to transport the cargo back to Europe, where it would be destroyed with the proper sanitary precautions in place. Hatch #5 has been sealed by the French authorities and they had warned that it should not be opened before reaching Europe.
The importer has insisted that some 50,000 tonnes of soybean was shipped from Brazil onboard another ship and was later stored in a bond in France. He said that while being stored in France, five tests of the 50,000 tonnes of soybean were carried out and all of these samples have been tested negative for Salmonella.
According to documents supplied by the importer, some 946 tonnes of the soya were then shipped to Guadeloupe and subsequent tests proved negative.
The GRA has stated that it has detected a forgery among the documents submitted by the importer and as a consequence it fears that any subsequent reports may also be forged.
According to officials, the forgery is said to be a shipping invoice or a certificate of origin purporting to show that the shipment originated in a CARICOM country, to wit, Trinidad and Tobago. The GRA said that this deception was intended to have the shipment attract a lower tariff as befitting goods originating within CARICOM.
However, the importer said that this was not the case since the soybean was purchased from brokers, Superstore 50 O’ Meara Industrial Estate in Trinidad and Tobago. The importer has acknowledged that documentation supplied to the GRA had erroneously recorded the United States as the country and port of loading, when in fact the port of loading was La-Pallice, France. |
