Guyanese don’t be fooled

Dec 11, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Many voices were raised to high volumes over the US$9.5B in unaudited bills that Guyana’s oil czar, the Vice President publicly conceded had to be paid because time had run out. Guyanese looked at that US$9.5B in unaudited bills and kicked up a racket, let out screams of agony, since they are the ones who will have to pay. It is an enormous amount, in Guyana dollars, unimaginable and unnerving, to a great many Guyanese, yet there was their own Vice President stepping up to the microphone to announce, rather casually, that we have no choice but to pay, since the permitted two years are gone. After the sustained outbursts and pushbacks, His Excellency, President Irfaan Ali, decided to run to the rescue and offer some damage control: he promised an audit of the huge multi-billion dollar bills submitted by Exxon.
Guyanese may be pleased at this presidential development and ease back on their haunches, trusting that the right thing will be done in the right way by the right people with the right results favouring Guyana’s interests. On the other hand, we at this paper are not so trusting, because we think that this is more hoping for the best, that we may get lucky, and that a clean, comprehensive, and credible audit of those billions in bills from Exxon will happen. We are this skeptical, because our key political operators have made promises that sounded sincere and sensible before, many of them, only for this country and its people to end up holding the nasty end of the stick, very costly ones.
We are skeptical because we look at what is happening in Africa, and involving another powerful and cunning oil company with global reach. This was the story, not altogether surprising, that we carried recently: “A lesson for Guyana…French oil company sends auditors on fishing expedition in Mozambique -as hundreds of millions in ineligible dollars in cost are detected -Guyana still to scrutinise billions of US dollars expended by Exxon” (KN November 29). There is a harsh, costly lesson for us with this kind of audit precedent, certainly not the only one of its kind, as the citizens of Mozambique are discovering to their dismay. It is where a genuine and probing and dogged audit sheds light and leads to the revelations of how companies really operate, how they cheat with every trick at every turn. Oil companies have had many decades of experience, and armies of highly skilled accountants to cook their books and dump the damage on the heads of gullible and unsuspecting Third World countries. Oil companies are not just robbing the poor, they rob the dead, and the unborn, so callous and criminal they are.
It is for good reason, therefore, that we say that we are skeptical. Exxon has proven to be very wily, and this company with global reach has its tentacles everywhere, with powerful grip sucking the life of all those touched. Look at our compromised governments, take a peek at our conspiring private sector, and peer beyond at our professional elites already in the bag and sewn up hand and foot.
Indeed, our headline and strapline tell the grisly financial story of what has occurred in Mozambique; it is the dollar equivalent of brutal physical crimes committed against citizens by corporate oil bandits. Hundreds of millions of US dollars are involved, and the game is on, and which would have been blindly and docilely paid. But only if Mozambique was as nonchalant with its expenses and as helpful to France’s Total S.A, and Italy’s ENI, as our own Vice President of oil is to America’s Exxon. There is a lesson for us Guyanese, many of them.
As Mozambique citizens are finding out, oil companies drag their feet to release documents, provide documents that have no bearing to the project, and withhold financial documents that have no bearing to the project. It is of diversions, stonewalling, and misleading in Mozambique. In a sense we are glad that the Vice President readied Guyana to pay Exxon, because the outcry leading to the President’s audit promise opened our eyes as to what Exxon could likely attempt here. Lessons are there for us from Mozambique.

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