Opinion
Pre-contract cost… US$460M seem to have been pulled from an alternate universe
It is simply unheard of for a company to just quote a figure to be paid, whether by another company, a person, or a government, without at least giving a breakdown of the expenses. So said Chartered Accountant, Nigel Hinds, yesterday as he expressed his concerns about the US$460M pre-contract cost that ExxonMobil wants Guyana…
We need to renegotiate the oil contract
Contrary to much of the callous and unfair criticism that the current government has received I have measured their ‘works’ against their critics and I am confident that this regime will deliver a return to a sense of law and a better feeling about being Guyanese. Their infrastructural works are testimony to it, and they…
Too many silent on giveaway of Guyana’s wealth
The silence is deafening. It is indeed unfortunate that so many Guyanese are keeping quiet in the face of the glaring atrocities highlighted in the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) that Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman signed with ExxonMobil. That is the crux of comments made by Chartered Accountant, Nigel Hinds. Hinds said that advocates…
Could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? Part 3
The second part in this series addressed the question of how much money Guyana will likely receive. It is generally known today that the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) is quite favourable toward ExxonMobil. We tried to understand this within the context of the Anglo-American corporate governance framework, which sees a corporation as having the sole…
Had Guyana got the lower end of a reasonable contract, we would have been much better off
You found out that your backyard has gold. Someone comes along and tells you he can dig up your gold. So you sign a contract with him that stipulates you are only entitled to 10 percent of your own gold. The gold digger finds 10,000 bars of gold, therefore according to the provisions of the…
Exxon should pay US$1B up front to Guyana, energy expert says
With billions already gained on the stock market from its oil find here, ExxonMobil and its partners can “more than afford” to pay Guyana US$1 billion instead of the US$18 million received as a signing bonus, according to energy expert Dr Vincent Adams, who also strongly believes that the government should go back to the…
Exxon should pay US$1B up front to Guyana, energy expert says
With billions already gained on the stock market from its oil find here, ExxonMobil and its partners can “more than afford” to pay Guyana US$1 billion instead of the US$18 million received as a signing bonus, according to energy expert Dr Vincent Adams, who also strongly believes that the government should go back to the…
There is no sharing in Exxon’s Production Sharing Agreement
If one adds the collective losses from contracts that were mismanaged; investments that fell through, like the glass factory under Burnham and the Skeldon Factory under Jagdeo as well as the Marriott; if you also consider all that was given in bailouts and loans to agencies that had to be written off; those losses will…
The oil find in Guyana is huge
We don’t need to hear about the personal sacrifices of politicians during past political campaigns or the hardships of being a leader, especially when such inflated speech is used as a means to defend the worst contract ever agreed upon, if opportunity losses to Guyana are computed on a per capita basis in the Production…
IDB did not help draft Petroleum Bill
A recent article in the Stabroek News ‘No plans to revisit Exxon deal’ (Jan 26) suggests that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) was involved in the drafting of the Petroleum Commission Bill: “…the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Monetary Fund and the Commonwealth had helped with the drafting of the proposed legislation and stakeholders consulted…