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Partnership or perversity

Jun 12, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – ExxonMobil has a unique understanding of how an equal partnership works.  However, it is cut, an equal partnership in any enterprise is 1:1 or 50:50, or some identical math construction.  Certainly, it could never be claimed that US$6.5B for one half of the partnership and US$1.6B for the other equals 1:1 or 50:50.  However that is kneaded, the dough still comes out the same uneven way.  It is not a half and half partnership.  Using the simplest arithmetic alone, that calculation and profit-sharing relationship is 4:1.  In this pretense of a fair and equal partnership between ExxonMobil and Guyana, the company collects US$4 for every US dollar that is given to this country.  This leaves us with one conclusion: ExxonMobil must have its own brand of math, fuzzy numbers, fuzzier conventions, and the fuzziest results. The numbing, painful part of this setup is that Guyana gets cheated and taken for a ride on each occasion that the money is counted.  The practices of this American oil giant, as aided and abetted by a captive and cowering PPP/C Government, lead to this latest revelation (US$6.5 vs. US$1.6B) about how this supposedly equal partnership operates.

The people who are the bona fide owners, the first shareholders, in Guyana’s wealth do not have the privilege to view the billions in expenses that ExxonMobil bills against local oil revenues.  If they cannot view, then they can neither review nor question. They cannot raise any objection about millions charged that are too much, or millions that should not be charged in the first place because they do not belong in the Guyana oil revenue bucket.  This is as big a loophole that could be, and that any oil superpower company could get.  To intensify the darkness, when the elected government of the owners of the national wealth partner with the local offshore oil consortium to conceal the billions of expenses, then the result is the result.  That is, US$6.5B for ExxonMobil and its gang, and US$1.6B for Guyana.  To make this clear, it is a sharing ratio of slightly over 4:1 and not 1:1, as the 2016 ExxonMobil-Guyana Production Sharing Agreement (contract) stipulates.

The limited audits that have been completed on Guyana’s behalf relative to ExxonMobil’s expenses have uncovered from the foul to what should be regarded as felonious.  In regular commercial activity, any other company had tried to pull the tricky ones that ExxonMobil did would have found itself in more than hot water.  Its business would have been placed under all kinds of critical scrutiny and possibly other penalties to teach the harshest lessons. But not so in this Guyana that is most talked about country in the world, and where the skullduggeries perceived of foreign oil operators are joined by those of locals. The newest one is that the audit report involving US$7.3B in ExxonMobil’s expenses that was introduced with much fanfare (and political self-congratulation), has now been found out to be only part of the report, with dozens of pages missing.  In this country, government buildings have been burnt to the ground to keep major frauds from being detected.

Those were the early steps that were taken at misleading. They are now taken to a new level with audits and audit reports on ExxonMobil oil bills.  The small items, small amounts to tease citizens, are part of the report published online.  The huge expenses involving big-ticket items are nowhere to be seen in the official report released to the public.  It could be a random human error, but that itself would be an accident characterised by much premeditation.  Politics always takes precedence over principle and professionalism, and in Guyana, politics is king, maybe even God.

Guyana got stripped naked, robbed with its eyes open, through the diabolical terms and conditions of the 2016 ExxonMobil contract.  Today, the reality of how clever ExxonMobil was and is registers even more powerfully.  What is celebrated as a 50:50 partnership, with equal profit-sharing, is a total farce.  This 50:50 partnership is so unequal that the 4:1 profit number in favour of ExxonMobil includes the measly 2% royalty that Guyana gets with its share of the profits.  This is more than a farce, it’s a fraud.

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