Customs declaration on steroids: Statia’s back ripe for the sack

May 02, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – I am glad that there is a Ramps Logistics and an Exxon in Guyana. Though it is painful, their presence helps to breakup the routine drudgeries of the PPP Government, the rants of its two headmen aka headhunters, and the delirious ecstasies of the surrounding cast of thousands. I am still to decide that if Guyana was a true oil story captured in motion picture form, whether it would be a horror thriller or a Gothic tragedy.

GHK Lall

Get a load of this fellow Guyanese. An audit of Exxon’s expenses went from US$214M to US$3M, just like that, and nothing happens. One poor fellow who was a willing lamb that went without a bleat to his unjust desserts. The comedy about his punishment was that it was no punishment at all, and a running joke for the perp at whose doorstep the US$107M giveaway was placed, as well as all those in the vicinity of the charade. We have become a land of actors, with one academy award-winning performance after another. Justice is served. It was the first full length screenplay of the still developing Guyana’s oil novel. It promises to be an encyclopedia and a thriller of a read.

The latest chapter is this one ensnaring Ramps Logistics, Inc., a CARICOM business brother, and Exxon, Guyana’s American partner. If I had my choice of partner, I would settle for Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, or John Gotti. In this still unfinished chapter involving a pumped up, blown up, souped up, and revved up, customs declaration, the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) looks like the hero. But, given that this is Guyana, the darling GRA could still be made into the overwrought villain. I wonder where this features in the policy man’s makeup. I now cut to the gunfight, something that the man from the Alamo, Marshall Alistair Routledge, should identify with well. On the dark side in the black hat stands Ramp Logistics. On the other end of the sunbaked, dusty street, there waits a riled-up, Exxon pretending to have on a white hat (painted over).Don’t look at Exxon. Don’t dare to try to stick this US$12.1B to Exxon. There is the real bad guy over there, Ramps Logistics. Man, these are the days when I long for the warren that is Wall Street in downtown Manhattan.

It is no big deal for something like this to happen, since these, ah, slips happened all the time. Stuff happens, and that is why there are fans that have to spring in extra duty and clear the stain and stench away. The reminders, the mantras, the commandments, no matter how differently they are framed and expounded, all come back to the same place: don’t let any such escapades (no matter how they are part of the ingrained routines) ever get into the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Keep the damned dirty laundry in the house and among family and friends. That’s what friends are for, just such contingencies when they get out of the bag. It is do or die. With this fiasco now making the rounds, and generating tsunami-like waves, in Stabroek News and Kaieteur News, those who didn’t do well have to die. They don’t hang people anymore, those who get caught with standard practices that mushroom into handwringing blunders when they wend their way into the public domain. But they do die a quick, bloodless corporate death. Kaput! Off with their heads, the foolish four-flushers and dice players, who committed the cardinal sin of doing what gets the company’s name plastered all over the paper. Wall Street firms would take the hard multimillion dollar hit, swallow their financial pain. But just keep things contained. By God! Just don’t let any whisper, not a hint, get into the news.

If this was Wall Street, a specialty-chartered plane would be sent here to airlift the Exxon people near this paper perversity submitted to the GRA back to Spring, Texas, and then from there to make their way into the badlands of America’s still Wild West. I shouldn’t have to say it, but there would be a stopover in Port-of-Spain to dump off the Ramps Logistics worthies whose fingers twitched, or eyesight was too good for their own good. People would have been fired unceremoniously, including any commanding managing director, since the embarrassment occurred under his watch. To be clear: Guyana is not Wall Street, for here the errant live happily ever after, and even get to laff in the face of Guyanese in their distress. This place is the joke of the century: the Three Stooges, Bud and Lou, Eddie Murphy and Richie Pryor, all rolled into one big show. Hear me out on this one: nothing is going to come out of this. Not one damn, blasted, bloody thing.

But there is something that I am concerned about: the staying power of the GRA man in charge: Godfrey Statia. This guy is a problem. A thorn that is causing too many troubles. An officer of the State who doesn’t know that there are times to look the other way. Look at all the ministers in the PPP Government. It is why they are still where they are. Look away, learn some more, live to last another day. One customs declaration for fingers-full of millions miraculously mutating into the magnificence of US$12.1B. It is my belief that Mr. Statia is seeing too much, pushing too hard. Like that other genuine Guyanese Dr. Vincent Adams, he had better pack his bags: his back is right for the sack. He is a block to Texas-style business. This is why I love Guyana; why I love the PPP and Exxon more.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)