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Focus on the money
Editorial…
Kaieteur News- Guyanese should be happy with the money they are receiving rom ExxonMobil for their oil. This is the position of Alistair Routledge, President of ExxonMobil Guyana. In effect, what he is saying amounts to this: Don’t lose sight of the gusher of money coming into Guyana’s coffers, it is better not to get carried away by what should be, but is not. Like the peripheral issue of taxes, and all those others that are helpful to ExxonMobil’s profit numbers, but shortchange Guyana. Guyanese should be thankful to the American oil supergiant for its fairness and generosity.
It is obvious by now that there is a widening gap between what many Guyanese accept as being fair and generous and what ExxonMobil says that they are, what has been delivered. Royalties at the beggar’s level of 2% can never be considered to be fair, nor could a murky half and half partnership profit sharing, when 75% in expenses is snatched right off the top of oil revenues. Routledge is thrilled to highlight the money coming from ExxonMobil to Guyana. We are angry and focus on the contract terms that empower his company to pay zero corporate taxes, with ringfencing provisions that are conspicuously lacking. We are even more agitated with the Guyana Government’s arrangements that facilitate ExxonMobil’s billions in expenses to be concealed, enable it to block auditors from the smoothest access to its production data. With only these few areas segregated and pushed to the center of the public domain, even the numerically challenged can quickly come to one conclusion. Taxes and ringfencing stand at the head of the pack of issues and areas, where the big money that should be landing in Guyana’s Treasury does not travel one centimeter away from the company to this country.
Moreover, there is an embarrassing side issue on zero corporate taxes paid in Guyana by ExxonMobil. The company doesn’t pay one small dime in corporate taxes to Guyana, but it is shameless enough to collect a tax receipt from this country’s tax authorities. That is not adding insult to injury, it is a robbery compounding the one from before. What type of partner is ExxonMobil when it makes such a neat self-serving arrangement that has phantom corporate taxes written all over it? What kind of company is ExxonMobil that it stoops so low as to collect a receipt for what it did not pay, did not deliver? But the ExxonMobil Guyana President is pleased to sell his company propaganda to Guyanese: look at all the money that Guyana is getting, and which has no equal.
Because of weak and cowardly leaders, even conspiring ones, Routledge could put on his haughty airs, and direct Guyanese on where they should focus. ExxonMobil grabs the oil wealth of Guyanese for a song and dance, and then has the audacity to tell the owners of the national patrimony where they should look, and what they should leave alone. Is ExxonMobil an oil partner, or is it a modern-day enslaver? The company takes the hog of the oil money through a program of shenanigans (expenses hidden, audit findings held up, trinkets instead of treasure), and tells citizens how to think.
When there is a shady government such as what Guyanese survive under the PPPC, and leaders are the apologies that Guyanese have, then there will always be a company like ExxonMobil, and a corporate chieftain of the caliber of Alistair Routledge to complete the circle. There is the spoonful of honey in one hand, and there is the steel-studded brass knuckle in the other. Oil money is coming in a trickle to Guyana compared to the cascade of profits pouring into ExxonMobil. According to Routledge, Guyanese should rejoice over this, delirious about how they are doubly blessed. For one, they have a world class friend in ExxonMobil, and there is the cashflow to prove it. In the usual classic manner of oil giants like the one in Spring, Texas, it is not so much what is put on the table, it is what is pushed under it. Guyana is getting plenty as it is from ExxonMobil, it shouldn’t get greedy and ask for more. Taxes are not happening.
(Focus on the money)
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