Formula, only the formula, Jagdeo

Jun 20, 2025 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – When Guyana’s Vice President with Responsibility for Oil, Oil Management, and National Policymaking, Bharrat Jagdeo, is uncomfortable, he first squirms, then goes around in circles that go all over the place and which still end up nowhere. He provides a lesson in artful dodgery for students, young and old. He was asked a simple question, the answer to which ought to have been at his fingertips, yet he flitted, like a mosquito from place to place in search of a hiding place, but found none. The question was what is the formula being used for calculating the profit from oil, and what he offered as an answer was an exercise in the convoluted and the circular.

The question in part was: “can you explain Exxon and its partners reporting that their profits for 2024 being $10 billion, but Guyana only got $2.6 billion US despite it being a 50/50 profit sharing?” This was section one of his answer: “so I saw, I saw something about Exxon, um reporting a trillion dollars in profit over the 3 years and they said that the government got about $1.3 trillion. So that’s about consistent with the formula, which says that 14.5 per cent of the 25 per cent which is set out for as profit sharing would result in those that configuration, and they would have 10.5 per cent. So that’s consistent from what I saw. It can’t be any different in these years.” The question was very specific: “profits for 2024…”. But there was Guyana’s oil czar responding with “profit over the three years…”. When he begins in that manner, then Guyanese know by now that what they will get is some verbal six-for-nine.

Jagdeo didn’t disappoint, for he continued with “so that’s consistent with the formula…”. What is the formula, and how does it result in unequal dollar amounts for Guyana on the one side and ExxonMobil and its partners on the other? We use Jagdeo’s submission on this formula that was causing him to experience a spell of blurred vision: “…says that 14.5 per cent of the 25 per cent…would result in those that configuration (sic) and they would have 10.5 percent.” Only in the new math world concocted by Guyana’s former Finance Minister, and now its Vice President of Oil, Bharrat Jagdeo, could US$10.4B for ExxonMobil and its two partners and US$2.6B for Guyana be said to be equal. And for 2024 only, and not this “over the three years” outlier that he slickly inserted into his answer. By any existing math and accounting standard, there is no way in the world, no matter how it is bent or squeezed that ExxonMobil’s US$10B balances with Guyana’s US$2.6B. However, this is twiddled and tweaked, half and half, or 50:50, or any other arithmetical construction, Guyana still comes up very short. Guyana is ‘holding the wrong end of the stick’, as another crude local political operator once said.

The question that we at this paper have is why is Jagdeo so determined to avoid sharing with Guyanese the oil profit formula that is being used to calculate the profit? On paper, it’s the equal profit share of the two partners? What is it about this profit formula that has now grown into a creature of mystery that is triggering the equivalent of epileptic twitches in the man that put himself in charge of this nation’s great oil wealth? What is in this formula, if one indeed exists, that it has to be kept a secret from Guyanese? Perhaps, in the consideration of Jagdeo and his PPPC Government, what is one more little secret to add to the mountain of oil secrets? Only one more secret to what has been compiled during his leadership of this oil sector that has come to mean so much for the citizens of this country? The issue for us with what may be another little secret for Jagdeo is that it leads to a big dent in the pockets of Guyanese.

We don’t’ know how long Guyana’s oil leader will continue along the mystery path he has chosen. What we do know is that when Jagdeo does so, the people of this country pay heavy prices.

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Bharrat Jagdeo, Editorial, ExxonMobil, National Policymaking

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