Nand Persaud & Company aiming at tougher sugar challenge
If Rajendra Persaud, one of the two brothers who sit at the helm of Nand Persaud and Company Ltd, is disappointed over the fact that the company will now have to formally restate its interest in the acquisition of the Skeldon Sugar Factory, he does not show it.
Less than forty-eight hours after the Corentyne businessman had sketched some of the company’s plans for the multi-million dollar processing plant to the Stabroek Business, the state- run National Industrial and Commercial Investments Ltd. (NICIL) announced that companies that had earlier expressed an interest in buying parts of GuySuCo’s operations, will now have to submit new proposals.
On Saturday, Stabroek Business had met with Rajendra alone in his Corentyne office; the company’s joint CEO, his brother Mahendra, had traveled to Georgetown to join officials of Alimport, the Cuban state agency that has been responsible for negotiating a historic agreement under which the Berbice company has recommenced shipping rice to Cuba after almost two decades. The Alimport officials had travelled to Guyana to witness the loading of the first 7,500 metric tonnes of white rice onto a vessel for Cuba.
The new Guyana/Cuba agreement for the sale of rice, the first bilateral trade agreement between the two countries since the thaw in relations between Havana and Washington, had been executed in July and Stabroek Business had reported then that the deal was likely to be extended to include the creation of a rice milling plant and warehouse in the Port Mariel free zone in Cuba that would increase the Guyanese company’s rice exports to Cuba beyond the levels agreed