Energy Dept.’s ‘unusual practices’ heighten suspicions over first oil sales —GAWU

Dec 21, 2019 News

By Gary Eleazar

The unusual practices recently highlighted by a Bloomberg publication with regard to the process used for Guyana’s sale of its first three shipments of crude oil, “opens the door for further and heightened suspicions.”
As such, “…anxieties have been raised as questions abound about whether the correct decisions and approaches are taken.”
This is according to one of Guyana’s largest and oldest workers’ representative bodies, the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union (GAWU), which in a public missive yesterday warned that “despite the potential for transformational changes and much improvement in our people’s quality of life, something we all hope for, it is our firm view that we remain woefully unprepared for whatever may come our way.
The union—in condemnation of the Energy Department’s decision to invite selected companies to bid on the first three shipments of the country’s entitlement of crude—reminded that “we lack even the legislative, as well as the institutional framework to adequately address oil production and the associated issues”.
The agreement regarding oil production, GAWU said, “has been widely criticised and it has been disclosed to be among the poorest arrangements in the world,” and “as a small, developing nation, with so many pressing issues which needs to be addressed, it is upsetting that our people’s resources are not being satisfactorily managed.”
The existing petroleum legislation in Guyana was promulgated in 1986 while the Bureau of Standards’ statutes were enacted in 1981.
According to the union, there are also the ongoing concerns regarding the absence of any real local content policy. It questioned “what are the actual jobs undertaken by locals”
GAWU in its missive noted that “magnificent pictures have been painted about the richness that will accrue to our nation; this could well be the case, but we remind that for the few properly-managed oil nations, there is a litany of bad ones. Oil in many countries has exacerbated inequity, and created rather than alleviated social and economic challenges.”
According to GAWU, this year during an engagement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “we shared views about the possibility of inequality between the oil and non-oil sectors of the economy and its ramifications for wider societal issues…This, the IMF team said, was a concern they had as well.”

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Energy Dept.’s ‘unusual practices’ heighten suspicions over first oil sales —GAWU

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