Dear Editor,
Regarding AG Nandlall’s letter, “It is the law that describes Mr. Mohamed as a fugitive offender,” SN, December 16, I previously blogged that the extradition case against the Mohameds did not comport with the raw definition of who or what constitutes a ‘fugitive’, even as the PPP government is seeking the extradition of the Mohameds under the Fugitive Offenders Act of June 2024.
The Mohameds are wanted in America, but there is such a thing called ‘due process’ that affords them the right to fight against being extradited. Convicted drug smuggler Barry Dataram, whose lawyer was Glen Hanoman, used that due process successfully via repeated court appearances in Guyana. The Guyana government did not even exhibit a ramped up eagerness back then to help extradite Dataram as it does now to extradite the Mohameds. Dataram eventually returned to the United States where a negotiated agreement allowed him to receive a ‘time served’ court decision, and he resumed normal living in America as a naturalized U.S citizen.
What we may well be looking at in the Mohameds’ case, however, is a matter that’s above the Attorney General’s pay grade because the PPP government appeared to have now politicized the Mohameds case by denying, through delaying tactics, the constitutional right of Opposition MPs to elect their Opposition Leader. The lack of constitutional compliance by the House Speaker, more than the legal opinions of the Attorney General, is what the public should focus on: a political persecution and prosecution because the government apparently has no information from its own investigation to try the Mohameds, so it ceded the matter to the United States, which has all the information. Alleged crimes with their roots in Guyana are likely to be tried based on their fruits in the United States.
If we go back to OFACs June 2024 release elucidating the rationale for sanctions against the Mohameds, the release noted, towards the tail end, that sanctions were not designed to be punitive in application but to elicit behaviour modification from the sanctioned. That OFAC would later upgrade its sanctions to indictments could now be construed as no behaviour modification detected while it monitored the PPP government and the Mohameds to see if they could resolve what was clearly a Guyana problem.
But the Guyana problem could not be easily resolved because the PPP did not have information on which to build the gold smuggling case since America held on to that information to avoid compromising its investigation that led to the sanctions. It was an investigation that uncovered PPP government officials as facilitators, and a network of players in Florida, New York, New Jersey and further afield. It was a massive network. This explained why the PPP was deliberately left in the dark by the U.S to fumble and stumble with the Lamborghini case that featured the hapless and compromised GRA against Azruddin Mohamed.
In retrospect, things took a bizarrely sharp turn when Azruddin, sensing he and his father were on their own as the PPP government began distancing itself from them, decided to form a political party and run for the presidency in the 2025 elections. The PPP government, long a compromised entity, could live with certain private players being engaged in ‘the smuggling game’, but it could not comfortably countenance any supporter or associate openly challenging the party for political power. Not even Sports Minister Charles Ramson Jr, who announced in 2019 his intention to become the PPP presidential candidate, was allowed to do so as Bharrat Jagdeo reacted with a declaration that the party would not tolerate a ‘newbie’ to make such a run. Jagdeo already had his preference in mind.
Anyway, within three months of Azruddin announcing his run for office, it soon became clear he was making waves, even if not within the PPP strongholds. By the time the elections were over and the dust had settled, Azruddin’s party, WIN, captured the second highest number of votes, 109,666, and was poised to become the main parliamentary Opposition party. That’s when we saw the PPP government became extremely agitated and the United States Attorney’s Office for Southern District of Florida went into overdrive. On November 28, 2025, it put out a press release, “Former Guyanese Presidential Candidate and Businessman Charged in $50 Million Tax Evasion and Money Laundering Scheme.”
To observers following the Mohameds saga, something transpired just before the November 28 press release to indicate the saga became politicized, causing OFAC to suddenly switch up from modification-inducement sanctions to straight up criminal indictments. Court cases pending against the Mohameds in Guyana were withdrawn in favour of the case by the U.S authorities. Jamaican lawyers were hired by the PPP government to use the Southern Florida Grand Jury 11-count indictment to present a case in Guyana’s court for the Mohameds’ extradition.
To many Guyanese, therefore, the Mohameds are being punished, not for gold smuggling, but for being a threat to the PPPs stranglehold on political power as a vote-splitter. The PPP prefers the PNC to whip up its support base by covertly playing the PNC race card as the alternative to abhor. With an Indo-Guyanese leading WIN and no PNC as the main parliamentary Opposition, the PPP cannot easily prey on its gullible supporters’ racial insecurities. In fact, WIN could go on to become that formidable third force that frustrated and angry Guyanese have been looking for since the AFC in 2006. It’s a potent threat to both the PPP and PNC, both of which need each other to remain relevant to respective race-based supporters, and must be stopped even that means the PPP and PNC must set aside their differences.
This Mohameds saga is now a full-blown political warfare and WIN must be stopped. To this end, the Mohameds must be removed from Guyana. Even if other ‘Mohameds’ are still out there hustling gold, they are no political threat to the PPP.
Circling back to the top, in closing, the reported utterances of the Attorney General in the Mohameds’ extradition case must be viewed as dead giveaways that the PPP government has politicized the matter. Observers are now left to draw only one conclusion: the U.S authorities are once again doing the PPP government’s job, as with the 2009 drug smuggling case against Roger Khan in New York.