Guyana on Thursday announced that it has lost all confidence in Senior Deputy Director of Caricom’s Office for Trade Negotiations (OTN), Carl Greenidge because of comments he made in a tribute to his late former ministerial colleague, Winston Murray. 

Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon told a news conference that government has formally told the Caricom Secretariat that it found Greenidge’s remarks about government’s management of the economy to have been “offensive.”  “Cabinet went further and has decided to notify the secretariat that the functionary’s conduct has led to a gross loss of confidence by the Government of Guyana in his ability to represent the interests of Guyana and the government and the community and at bilateral levels,” said Luncheon. 

Demerarawaves.com told that government has objected to remarks by Greenidge, a former Finance Minister in the Peoples National Congress administration from 1985 to 1992, that suggested that the country was being poorly managed. 

“Guyana can, and with visionary leadership, be lifted from the nightmare in which it finds itself,” Greenidge has said. 

Luncheon said that government had not advocated Greenidge’s resignation but wanted to ensure there was respect for protocol.

Greenidge has been nominated to be the presidential candidate for the PNC in Guyana's general elections scheduled to be held next year.

Acting Foreign Minister, Manzoor Nadir explained that Guyana has not specifically requested that Greenidge be dismissed and his future employment would be left to the Caricom secretariat. 

“If they feel that by not being able to represent us that he can’t effectively do his job, they have to make that decision but we have been quite clear that he can’t get up and say that Guyana requires visionary leadership to get out of the problems that it’s in and expect to represent this government,” Nadir told demerarawaves.com

As Minister of Finance he headed the Guyana teams which negotiated the many agreements, such as Paris Club and the first ever programme for the clearance of arrears to the Multilateral Institutions under the so-called ‘Intensified Collaborative Approach’ for chronically indebted countries and buy-back of commercial debt, on which successful management of Guyana’s ERP and HIPC eligibility were based.

Mr. Greenidge’s professional interests are extensive and he has published on a variety of issues ranging from privatization to the management of a common property resource and the political economy of agricultural modernisation.

He has served on a variety of international bodies including the European Forum on International Cooperation (EUFORIC), the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) and the 5th UN Expert Group on Financial Issues of Agenda 21 which spawned the ‘Nairobi Initiative on Capacity Building for Financing Sustainable Development’.

He was Vice Chairman of each of these bodies and is a former member of the Advisory Boards of the University of Oxford’s Regulatory Policy Research Institute (RPRI) and Regulatory Policy Centre (RPC).

Most recently he has been a Coordinating Lead Author of the International Agricultural Assessment of Science and Technology (IAASTD) with responsibility for East, South Asia and the Pacific Regions.

He is the father of two daughters and a son.