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‘United front needed to fight for better oil deal’
…WPA says all parties, organisations must come together on issue
Kaieteur News-Guyana’s oil reserves which have grown significantly since first oil should be used as leverage when negotiating with oil major ExxonMobil to get more for the citizens, co-leader of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) Dr. David Hinds has said.
Co-Leader of the Working People’s Alliance, Dr. David Hinds.
At the party’s weekly press conference on Monday, he was asked to state his views on the government allowing the oil companies to walk away without paying US million yearly in taxes, which can be used to alleviate poverty here and pay off the country’s rapidly growing debt. Dr. Hinds said the party believes that citizens should be getting more from the oil wealth. “The WPA, like all political parties and patriotic organisations in the country, would like to see more revenues coming to us from ExxonMobil and the oil companies. We are clearly not satisfied that we are getting enough from these oil companies, and we are totally in favour of continuing to raise these issues, and to press these issues in the public domain, and that our government, this government, future government, find ways and means of amicably sitting down with Exxon and the other companies and working out a better deal for our country. We do not favour a confrontation with Exxon,” Dr. Hinds said.
He said while the party does not favour confrontations with investors coming into the country, they are holding to the view that every contract is eligible to be renegotiated, and therefore when it comes to the 2016 oil deal, it is always a part of their agenda and should also be a part of the national agenda to have a renegotiation of this contract. “Therefore, the WPA will continue to press, and support all struggles in the direction of renegotiation to get more from Exxon,” Hinds said.
Dr. Hinds told reporters that while the WPA does not want to ‘holler at Exxon’, “we have reserves that we should use as leverage… that we have built up… one we (the WPA) are saying that we have much more oil reserves than the oil companies are telling us, and that the government is telling us. WPA has said that we feel that we have up to 30 billion barrels of oil. The government has put it less than that…”
Hinds highlighted that there has been a back and forth recently as to exactly how much oil reserves the Stabroek Block currently holds. Nevertheless, “My point is that we should use the oil resource that we have as leverage, as leverage to get more from the oil companies.” Additionally, he believes a united front on the matter would be more effective as “we cannot speak on these matters as individual parties or individual organisations, we have to have a national approach to this question of getting more from the oil companies.” He deemed the government’s approach to sit at the table with the oil giant as “really nonsensical… the government should include the opposition. It should include civil society organisations. It should include experts and other individuals to sit in there. Exxon is going to behave differently, if when it looks across the table, it sees representatives from the major political parties, minor political parties, civil societies, it sees a National Front.” Hence, Hinds said the WPA is ready and willing to throw its weight and that of its supporters behind any venture that will see citizens benefitting more from Guyana’s oil wealth.
(‘United front needed to fight for better oil deal’)
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