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Ram questions Govt. Minister’s competence on oil and gas sector
– says Minister at sea about provisions of Petroleum Agreement
Recent statements regarding the oil and gas sector by Public Infrastructure Minister, David Patterson not only prove his lack of knowledge on certain essential issues, but make it clear that he is simply incompetent.
This perspective is held by Chartered Accountant and Attorney-at-Law, Christopher Ram.
In an interview with Kaieteur News, Ram reminded that it was Patterson who boldly stated that the specific details of the cost recovery for ExxonMobil have not been worked out.
Ram said that such a statement from Patterson, who happens to be one of the members of the Quintet Plus One Group, the celebrated assembly to which Granger entrusted the oil and gas sector, reflects a clear case of ineptness.
Since Patterson made such a pronouncement, Ram said that it is therefore safe to assume that Patterson is not fully au fait with the provisions of the Petroleum Agreement which he, Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman and others, have caused to be signed with ExxonMobil.
Public Infrastructure Minister, David Patterson
Chartered Accountant, Christopher Ram
The anticorruption advocate said that Patterson must be familiar with Article 11 of the Petroleum Production Sharing Contract. Ram said that there are nine paragraphs to that article. Even more significantly, he said that Annex Section Two and Three are dedicated to matters of cost recovery and contain precise information on definitions, documentation required, and units of account, rights of audit, classification and allocation of costs, expenses and expenditures.
“Patterson, instead of making banal, empty statements, needs to say precisely what he and the Quintet do not understand about these provisions. He also needs to explain his own knowledge or lack thereof, of the application of Section 51 of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Act as it relates to the taxation of production-sharing agreements.”
The Chartered Accountant opined that Patterson should also take time out from making misleading statements to the media and instead, spend the next several weeks reading and understanding the Petroleum Exploration and Production Act and the regulations, as well as seek to understand the agreement of 2016, to which he as a member of the quintet would have contributed.
“Now if Patterson by his statement to Kaieteur News is suggesting that the Quintet Plus One abandoned all the provisions of the 1999 Petroleum Agreement with ExxonMobil, then he is in fact, beyond hope.”
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