Guyana and the vanishing 50-50 profit sharing

Jun 23, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom column…

Kaieteur News – Guyana finds itself looking like a fool in the face of the rising profits being declared by the ExxonMobil-led consortium. The agreement between the government and the oil companies was supposed to be simple—a equal 50-50 split of profits derived from oil. Plus Guyana gets 2% royalties on top. In short Guyana, gets 14.5% profit oil and the oil companies 12.5%.

But like most things concerning governance in Guyana, the reality bears little resemblance to the promise. The oil companies appear to be enjoying profits that eclipse Guyana’s share many times over. This is now headline news and is causing not simply concern but consternation.

This different is not a minor accounting hiccup. This is not a misstatement in a footnote. This is the mother of all illusions. And the government, instead of removing the illusion, has become the magician’s assistant—waving the wand, drawing the curtain, and smiling as the rabbit escapes the hat with the nation’s wealth in tow.

What’s most astonishing is that the government appears more annoyed by the public’s questions than it is alarmed by the possibility of being swindled. Rather than confront the arithmetic, it obfuscates it. Rather than prove that the math adds up, it dismisses or ignores those who dare to count.

The core issue, as many rightfully observe, is that Guyana’s share of profit oil is calculated after expenses. The companies first recover their costs—costs that they themselves declare—and only then does Guyana receive its sliver of the remaining pie. And let us not forget we get an additional 2% in royalties that is not cost-recovery.

This structure, more akin to a reimbursement scheme than a revenue-sharing agreement, has proven a reliable mechanism for international oil companies to inflate expenses, delay meaningful payouts, and walk away with the lion’s share of the kill. In effect, the companies eat first, eat most, and then hand the government the leftovers.

If this is a 50-50 split, it is only in the way that a master and his servant might split a feast: the master eats, the servant waits, and at the end of the night both are said to have dined together.

And yet, faced with growing public skepticism—economists, activists, accountants, and laypersons all asking how such a vast gulf could exist between Guyana’s earnings and the oil companies’ profits—the government has not produced the detailed reconciliations or transparent explanations that would quiet the uproar. Instead, it has adopted the posture of the imperial scribe: deferent to power, dismissive of critique, and incapable of acknowledging its duty to explain and clarify.
It would seem that the government has forgotten the primary obligation of a democratic administration—to its people, not to its extractive patrons. The citizens are not unreasonable. They are not calling for retroactive nationalization. They are asking why, if the contract says “fifty-fifty,” the reality says “five and fifty.”
They are asking why the government, which was so eager to trumpet the arrival of the oil age, is now so reluctant to explain the terms of its bounty. They are asking, with increasing volume, whether this wealth is truly theirs—or merely something leased out to them in symbolic gestures while the real beneficiaries board private jets and count barrels in boardrooms.

This issue, unresolved and festering will not die a quiet death. It is not an accounting error that can be amended in the margins. It is a question of trust, and with elections looming, it may well become a referendum on whether the government can be trusted at all. When profits disappear like smoke and the people are told to be grateful for the ash, resentment builds. And when that resentment grows unaddressed, it metastasizes into political consequences.

Here is Guyana, a small state, rich in resources and rhetoric, ensnared by its own illusions, governed by men who confuse silence with strength and ambiguity with strategy. But if the accounting is wrong then this could well be a case of double jeopardy. Guyana got a bad deal and now even that bad deal is not adding up.
Beyond the flawed oil agreement itself, the government bears a solemn responsibility to assure the Guyanese people that the nation is not being further pickpocketed of even the meager pittance it is due. Transparency is not a favour to be granted but a duty to be discharged.

If Guyana must live with a lopsided deal—one that history will no doubt judge harshly—then it must, at the very least, be assured that the crumbs left for it are not being quietly swept into the deep pockets of multinational auditors, contractors, and cost-recovery loopholes. It is not enough to say we are getting what we are owed; the government must prove it, openly and unambiguously.

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

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• ExxonMobil, Guyana Oil, Peeping Tom, profit sharing, royalties

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