One Month After MV Barima Sank, Search Operations Have Ended, No Salvage Contractor Named, And Questions Remain 

By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, August 19, 2026: One month after the MV Barima capsized off the Essequibo coast on July 18, killing at least 73 people, the government’s active search for the 30 still missing has already ended, and despite an August 14th deadline for salvage bids, no contractor has been named to actually recover the vessel.

Search and recovery operations formally concluded on August 5th, less than three weeks after the sinking. Thirty people remain unaccounted for, while five recovered bodies still remain unidentified. For now what remains is a wreck sitting untouched in 13 to 15 meters of water, 28 nautical miles off Guyana’s coast, and a salvage process now five days past its own bidding deadline with nothing publicly resolved.

A deadline that’s come and gone

MARAD’s Expression of Interest window for salvage contractors closed August 14th. As of this week, no company has been publicly named with the Guyana President saying shortlisted companies will now be invited to submit financial proposals for the salvage of the vessel.

Opposition MP Mahipaul, who warned as early as August 3rd that “actual salvage operations are unlikely to begin until late August or even early September,” is still demanding that the government release basic information: the names of every company that submitted a bid, their proposed costs, and their technical approach. He called the delay itself “a cruel, insensitive, and entirely unacceptable delay” that risks destroying forensic evidence and prolonging grieving families’ anguish.

The pre-selection question MARAD never actually answered

The delay sits alongside an unresolved controversy over whether a contractor was effectively chosen before the public process even began. Kaieteur News reported that a Netherlands-headquartered firm, Koole Onshore and Koole Offshore (KMS), with a base in Suriname, submitted a 13-page proposal to raise the vessel dated July 28, five days before MARAD’s competitive bidding process officially opened on August 2. The leaked proposal reportedly stated KMS had been “invited by the Government of Guyana, through MARAD” to submit it.

MARAD issued two separate statements denying any company had been “selected.” But neither statement denied that KMS was approached beforehand, and MARAD never explained the five-day gap between the company’s dated proposal and the tender’s official opening. “MARAD wishes to clarify that no individual, company, or entity has been selected to undertake the salvaging of the MV Barima,” the department said in an August 7 statement, without naming KMS directly.

A month of unanswered questions, on more than one front

The stalled salvage process is only one thread in a month that’s raised repeated questions about the government’s handling of the disaster and its aftermath: an insurance admission that the vessel was uninsured, a $12.7 million replacement ferry that sat unused for three years, disputed millions in unresolved Exxon audit money, and now a salvage tender that missed its own deadline amid unresolved questions about whether the process was genuinely competitive from the start. Meanwhile on Tuesday, Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali said the anxiously awaited Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the sinking of the MV Barima ferry will begin next month.

“In relation to the CoI, the team is in place. They have started looking at their procedures, settling their procedures, and working all their workplan, and from what I’m told in early September, the actual work would commence here on the ground,” he told a  news conference. The President also dismissed calls by multiple opposition parties, civil society activists and individuals for minister responsible for public ferries Juan Edghill and minister responsible for Maritime Administration (MARAD) Deodat Indar to be removed from office.

“I believe that if we honestly and fully want an independent analysis, a transparent analysis, then the CoI, having been established, provides that opportunity. That is why the independence of the CoI was critical and important to us. The CoI, having been established, will conduct its work, make its determination, its recommendation, and then we’ll take it from there. I will not prejudice any action save and except those that are essential in the period from now to the end of the CoI, which include looking at the safety,” he said.

For the families of the 30 still missing and the crew sitting in jail while their bosses remain free, the practical reality one month later hasn’t changed: the wreck remains where it sank, and no one has told them when that will change.

NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking the MV Barima salvage process and its outcome.