Carvil Duncan freed of another GPL fraud charge

Senior Magistrate Fabayo Azore on Thursday dismissed a fraud charge against former Director of the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Inc., Carvil Duncan, who was on trial for conspiracy to defraud the power company of $27.7M.

Magistrate Azore, in her ruling, noted that there was not sufficient evidence to convict Duncan and that Prosecutor Dominic Bess failed to prove key elements of the case.

It is alleged that Duncan, between May 7th and May 8th, 2015, conspired with another to steal the sum of $27,757,547, which was the property of GPL.

He was represented by Attorneys-at-law, Glenn Hanoman and Everton Singh-Lammy.

Duncan was previously charged with conspiring to steal $984,900 from GPL but was freed of that charge in 2016 by Magistrate Leron Daly due to insufficient evidence.

It was reported that Duncan and a former senior GPL official, Aeshwar Deonarine were part of a multi-million-dollar fraud at the power company. The men are alleged to have illegally transferred close to $28M to their personal bank accounts from GPL.

The Government had asked the police to investigate Duncan and Deonarine last July. It was reported that the men paid themselves without authorization.

The discovery of the suspicious transfers was made by independent auditors who were probing an account which holds proceeds of oil shipments from Venezuela. It was while tracking payments to GPL that auditors unearthed the strange transactions.

Police issued an arrest warrant for Deonarine after he fled the country.