Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – A civic movement headed by well-known Guyanese Writer and Businessman Dennis E. Adonis, is asking the US Senate to take a closer look at the operations of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT), a telecommunications service provider that is owned by the American Company ATN International, and a murky shareholding entity that is registered to a concealed clique in Hong Kong.
The movement’s primary US chapter, Guyana Liberators, which functions out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is largely loose, but have at least one goal in common; – and that it is to break what they termed as an “illegal monopoly” that is currently being enjoyed by the American company.
Before last week, the web-networking group was functioning almost without any leadership, and seemed to have become distant in their pursuit. But after the US Company allegedly continued to target a Guyana based news publication of which Adonis is a key stakeholder, the author and businessman decided to take up their cause.
According to Adonis, the company has seized every phone line belonging his media company, under the cover of two disputed phone bills, which he labelled as a concocted strategy that the company is using to muzzle press freedom.
Now, the author has angrily dumped all of his September paychecks from Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Google Books into the movement’s campaign efforts to bring the American company to account at the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).
With cash doled out on the table now, a DC lobbyist that runs on partial fees has taken up the case, thus giving the grouping enough life to appoint Adonis as its new head of mission.
“We are all fighting for the same cause”, explained Adonis, … “I have more than enough reasons to want the horrible monopoly that GT&T has on Guyana to be let loose, – and freedom of choice to choose from one of many telecommunications service providers is certainly one of them”.
Taking a third party look at the case, former DC lobbyist Nick Holder told the Florida Morning Post that in his view, the primary objective seems to be more of a general pressure strategy that can cause the American company to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the finger pointing, as it can definitely trigger some interest from the SEC.
“Lobbying against big corporations is always a costly punishment for the pockets of those big corporations, since the complainers are generally ordinary folks that are mostly donor-supported. They hardly have anything to lose’, he said.
He further stressed that the SEC is always hungry for information, and would certainly want to see what is on the table for them to chew on, especially knowing that Guyana has been labelled as a country where corrupt dealings between big corporations and politicians are chronic.
According to Holder, “I think that the ultimate goal of lobbying here may very well be beyond breaking a monopoly in a poor country. Because if only a single act of corrupt dealing can be recognized by the SEC, that can be sufficient enough to rattle a company down. We will just have to wait and see how this goes”.
