President Ali and oil

Oct 28, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – When ExxonMobil and its lucrative operations in Guyana’s oilfields are the subject of discussion, President Ali walks on eggshells, as if he is fearful of disturbing the US company. When ExxonMobil is part of the conversation, Guyana’s President Ali is like a man dealing with a hot stove, he touches it and pulls away quickly, and nothing can make him go near to that overheated issue again. It is reflective of the two sides of not only President Ali, but other leading politicians in Guyana, such as Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo and Leader of the Opposition, Aubrey Norton. They are all sharp, swift, and strong on routine domestic issues, but on the biggest thing in Guyana, its oil wealth, they are timid, terrorized, and tottering.

The President of Guyana, a now recognized global oil arrival, goes before a sophisticated and watchful BBC audience, and sounds less like the leader of a significant oil producer, and more like a protector of ExxonMobil’s interests. It was he himself who showed the world his government’s fright, when he said that dealing with ExxonMobil was like dealing with a superpower. It is unbelievable that a leader who holds all the cards could utter a statement like that, reveal such a feeling of inferiority. And there he was again, highlighting “sanctity of contract” which had to be music to the big money people listening.

When the President and his PPP/C Government should be weighing its strengths in Guyana’s oil patch versus ExxonMobil’s needs, the positives are discarded and there is this twinning with the company to yield to its wishes and provide it with whatever enriches it. Taxes represent one such burning issue, with a host of exemptions another.

Which country on this planet agrees to, and continues to bow before, receiving a paltry US$94.5 million in royalty for a whole year (2022), while giving up US$290 million in exemptions to ExxonMobil in the same period? This is not pennywise and pound foolish, this is just plain stupid, and nationally embarrassing as well. No leader still possessing some residual self-respect could ever be comfortable with such an imbalance, such a financial abomination, occurring under his hand. While Guyana’s President Ali carefully expresses concern about exemptions and their elimination, he refuses to touch anything that has to do with tax breaks that favour ExxonMobil so handsomely. Matters have reached such a low state in Guyana, that ExxonMobil has the temerity to use the figure for taxes that it did not pay here to reduce its obligations to the US Treasury.

While British and European investors tuned in to the BBC, they were most likely drooling in anticipation of more handsome returns from involvement in Guyana’s range of oil-related businesses, the ordinary public in Great Britain must have been wondering who calls the shots in Guyana: its head of state or ExxonMobil? The large immigrant population had to be recalling the ravages of earlier colonialism on their home countries and experiencing a sense of déjà vu. From the conquest of arms, it is now to the conquest by paper, as enshrined in “sanctity of contract” which serves as the perfect camouflage for President Ali and his dodgy, disingenuous PPP/C Government.

The official money terms, as stated in the 2016 ExxonMobil oil contract, are the puniest part of the returns, and this is what comes to Guyana as its share. Almost every other term and condition presents ExxonMobil with a king’s ransom, with several tricky features cleverly concealed. Guyanese can calculate the billions in exemptions given away (lost) to ExxonMobil, but they cannot do the same with interest rates being paid on loans made by the company to Guyana, and the expenses that it claims. In the instance of both interest rates charged and expenses claimed, there are many billions of American dollars involved, and through which this country could be overcharged or cheated.

What is interesting about President Ali, who loves his own speeches, is what he leaves out, the costly oil issues he distances from, and how he congratulates himself for executing another Houdini manoeuvre with the nation’s oil. On each occasion that Guyanese leaders open their mouths on this oil, their paralyzed and slippery natures surface.

Aubrey Norton, Bharrat Jagdeo, discussion, opposition, President Ali, Vice President

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President Ali and oil

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