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Int’l experts not needed to tell Guyana how to secure larger share in oil deals – Chris Ram
Chartered Accountant, Christopher Ram
Chartered Accountant, Christopher Ram, believes that the brake should be put on the guesswork and bungling in the management of the country’s petroleum resources by the current administration.
Ram declared that if this is not done, Guyana will engage in cycles of errors and eventually corruption when ‘we should be thinking carefully and acting decisively’ rather than thinking everything will turn out right.
He took note of the plans announced by head of the Department of Energy, Dr. Mark Bynoe, to hire a technical expert to ‘tweak’ the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), which has been used a model for the ExxonMobil deal and other oil companies.
“Of course, there are lots of experts out there, as there are charlatans and carpetbaggers,” Ram stated in his column, ‘Road to first oil’.
Further, Ram stated, “Dr. Bynoe appears locked in and enamoured of the PSA. And even if he is, it surely does not require international experts to tell us what needs to be done under the PSA to ensure that Guyana gets a larger share.”
Ram noted that some of these international experts will no doubt be drawn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat, the very institutions that touted the Petroleum Commission conceived to do some of the very work, which the Department of Energy is now assuming, but of which everything is silence.
He said Dr. Bynoe seems to rely heavily on international experts helping the Department of Energy working with the Audit Office, an independent constitutional office and the Guyana Revenue Authority, a statutory body committed to secrecy and confidentiality in its work, to conduct cost recovery audits.
Ram noted that Dr. Bynoe’s use of the word ‘tweaked’ appears to have been copied from Minister Raphael Trotman, but the only difference is that Trotman’s tweak turned out to be an entirely new agreement.
According to RAM, ‘Dr. Bynoe’s entrée’ has not offered any assurance that the confusion, incompetence and dishonesty, which have underlined this current administration’s management of the sector will fundamentally change in the short term.
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