Accounting fiction

Oct 21, 2025 Editorial, News

(Kaieteur News) – Prominent Guyanese Chartered Accountant and Attorney-at-Law, Christopher Ram, took aim at ExxonMobil’s tax maneuvers in Guyana’s oil sector and took it down several pegs. He cut the ladder from under ExxonMobil’s feet, with the company’s Guyana Country head, Alistair Routledge looking wanting, and held-up by a thread.

Nevertheless, we would not be surprised if Routledge does summon his team of advisers to the spanking new ExxonMobil headquarters in Ogle, and come up with another innovative verbal fig leaf to cover ExxonMobil’s tracks in what now ranks as a Guyana tax scandal of the grossest proportions.

Fig leaves that expose more than they camouflage have become part and parcel of how ExxonMobil conducts its oil operations in Guyana. There are those audits that have been hanging in the air, like some nasty reminder of how the presence of oil has shredded the last remaining local principles. Those three audits, what can be rightly branded exercises in subterfuge, with the pretenses around them are a big fig leaf by themselves, and part of a stink and tricky culture.

That culture is now under the microscope, through the worst accounting fiction in Guyana’s history, according to Ram, and the lead contributor none other than Guyana’s so-called oil partner, ExxonMobil. In view of what has been said, written, and revealed so far in the haze of taxes paid and who paid, tax receipts issued and who collected, it could be said that what was done by ExxonMobil makes con artists in Guyana look like rank amateurs.

The company has a bunch of explaining to do, and to this point it hasn’t been a picture of convincing forthrightness. The auditors who were supposed to look and drill deep, also have as big an explanation to make. Not as a professional courtesy, but what becomes mandatory, given the scrutiny that ExxonMobil’s tax acrobatics is now subject to.

What were they looking at, and if they were really looking with serious professional intent? How could they have missed, or bypassed, an item as huge and as disputed as taxes paid by ExxonMobil, or who paid for the company, and not insert red flags in their writeups? And, the question for Guyanese, is what did this country paid for and got, auditors worth their weight in gold, or aiders in the cause of ExxonMobil, and what reeks of the politics of Guyana? In a takedown reminiscent of wrestling done brutally right, Ram described the glosses and gimmicks around the tax issue in Guyana, that has reached as high as three US Senators, as one instance of “pretending” after another. It is of “a government pretending to pay, companies pretending to be taxed, and auditors pretending not to notice.”

Guyana has become that kind of country, with leading Guyanese politicians pretending at being principled, companies pretending to be partners, and the checks and balances mechanisms (sniffer dogs) pretending to be wide awake and on the job. If the Guyana Police Force had sniffer dogs like the Government of Guyana hired, it is highly probable that those dogs that are supposed to unearth would deliver the opposite of what is expected. That is, bag after bag of rotted and useless onions, while wagging their tails and pretending that those onions are oysters. In what other direction, to what other conclusions, do the oil audits that have been completed take Guyanese?

Have an audit, any superficial, even comical, one, so that ruling politicians can state in a tight voice that required audits have been done, no matter how much the quality of them is suspect, as other politicians have stated. While ExxonMobil and the PPPC Government engage in their post audit review pretenses, they compile the first volume of a bestselling book on the worst accounting fiction in this country’s history. That accounting fiction involving taxes has now transformed into a horror fiction for ExxonMobil, which is now being read by a select group of US Senators. Time is running out on CEO Darren Woods regarding his response to the senators. Time is also running out on the Government of Guyana, the ExxonMobil consortium, and all those who stained their hands in what have been nothing but a comprehensive tax farce.

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accounting, Christopher Ram, Editorial, ExxonMobil, Fiction, tax

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