Govt. denies ExxonMobil funded 2015 Elections campaign

Jan 20, 2017 News

– Says “no truth” to EGCI writing Guyana’s oil and gas regulations

A few days ago, an article emanated from a considered ‘reputable’ media outfit, accusing international oil giant, ExxonMobil, of funding the coalition A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC)’s 2015

Former CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson (Reuters Photo)

successful General Elections campaign.
The company has since denied the allegation amid the resulting upsurge of discourse amongst the Guyanese populace and members of the Diaspora.
Kaieteur News yesterday asked Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman – who is deputising for the State Minister, Joseph Harmon – if the APNU+AFC would have received any funding from the international company, which is currently conducting oil exploration exercises in Guyana’s waters.
The Minister replied that he believes that the media outlet was “just repeating some propaganda that emanated elsewhere,”
“So it is absolutely not so,” the Minister said before stating: “As you should recall, the discovery was made during the tenure of the former Government, not during the tenure of the APNU+AFC coalition…So it is absolutely not true. There wasn’t any financing. In fact, I hazard a guess that if it was so endowed, the margin of victory would have been larger,”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Natural Resources in a statement, zeroed in on an article, purportedly done by the online version of the ‘Huffington Post’, and published on January 17, 2017, which was captioned, “Conflict: Tillerson would Write the Rules for Exxon’s Major Oil Find in Guyana.”
Rex Tillerson is an American businessman. He was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ExxonMobil from 2006 to 2016 before being revealed as President-elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State nominee.
The Ministry stated that it would like to ‘clarify’ for the benefit of the public, that there is no truth to this assertion that the United States’ Energy Governance and Capacity Initiative (EGCI) is “involved in writing oil and gas regulations for the country of Guyana, where Exxon has just announced another major oil find.”
“The Commonwealth Secretariat is the lead agency supporting Guyana in preparing a suite of legislation for the oil and gas industry.”
The Ministry indicated that while the EGCI has been lending support to Guyana for the past six years in the area of capacity building to manage eventual oil and gas revenues, it is in no way writing oil and gas laws or regulations for this country.
“It is important to note that this relationship between Guyana and the EGCI programme in Guyana predates the Ministry of Natural Resources and the current Coalition Administration as it commenced in 2010. Indeed, the Government of Guyana has had many engagements with the officials of the United States’ Department of State as part of the capacity building initiative. However, the EGCI programme has only been partially implemented through a series of scoping studies that were conducted in 2016.”
The entity said that the EGCI can be a useful programme once implemented and is but one in a raft of assistance measures that Guyana is receiving to bolster and in some cases, build capacity in oil and gas governance.

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