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Canje owner had no assets, no proven track record, no finances to acquire Canje block
Kaieteur News – It has been seven years since Mid-Atlantic Oil and Gas Inc. registered as a company, and five years since it was awarded the Canje oil block. It is now 2020, and Mid-Atlantic has not stabilized itself at an office space, and its website is still ‘Under Construction’.
This paints a fair picture of the company entrusted by the Donald Ramotar administration with the job of developing one of Guyana’s most lucrative oil blocks.
Mid-Atlantic received the Canje block without demonstrating the requisite assets, proven track record and finances to acquire and develop such a block.
[From left] Mid-Atlantic Oil & Gas Director, Hewley Nelson; former Director, Nicholas Chuck-A-Sang; Director and sole Shareholder, Edris Kamal Dookie
When the company was incorporated, two directors were named, Nicholas Chuck-A-Sang and Hewley Nelson.
Nelson has served on several public boards, and was even General Manager of Hand-in-Hand Trust, but he has no experience to boast in oil and gas work. Chuck-A-Sang is a petroleum engineer, whose years in the public service and with private consultancies, especially in mining, do not equip him with what is required to develop ultra-deep water oil blocks.
One other individual, Edris Kamal Dookie, whose email address is found on the Canje agreement and was later identified as the company’s sole shareholder, also could not have brought what is needed to the table. He had founded CGX, alongside the Canadian, John Cullen in 1996. The company benefitted from several licences granted to it by the Guyana government over the years, but has very limited drilling experience to tout. Studying the details of the Canje block would certainly lead one to question how such a big block fell into such tiny hands.
Located 180km offshore Guyana, the Canje block lies in ultra-deep water. There are only a handful of companies in the world with the capability and track record to drill in ultra-deep water, including ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Total. Mid-Atlantic is certainly not one of them. This is why, immediately after it was awarded the block, the company started to sell off stakes.
Mere weeks after receiving Canje, Mid-Atlantic handed stakes in the block to JHI Associates, a company run by Collen, Dookie’s Canadian associate with whom he founded CGX.
Cullen’s company also did not have the requisite assets, proven track record and finances to develop ultra-deep water blocks. Like Mid-Atlantic, it was formed only a few years before receiving stakes in the block, and appears to have been formed for the sole purpose of owning the Canje block.
The unqualified owners of the block later went on to sell a 35 percent stake in the block to ExxonMobil in February, 2016. Exxon went on to become the operator of the block, later that year. The companies also sold another 35 percent stake in the block to the French oil major, Total SE in February, 2018.
With the assets, finances and track record needed, these two oil majors can develop the Canje block. However, the circumstances under which the block reached those companies likely resulted in losses for Guyana to the tune of billions of US dollars. It is unclear what percentage of those losses was paid to Mid-Atlantic and JHI Associates. The monies paid to them for the transfers in stakes were never made public.
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