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Oil and trust
(Kaieteur News) – Senior personnel from ExxonMobil have long insisted that the company is genuine partner alongside Guyana. One that can be trusted, because it nurtures a healthy, mutually respected, partnership.
It is a game oil companies play globally, while reaping huge profits and making suckers of those who believe their commercials. Guyana is a prime example, a terrible one, of a country played for a fool, with ExxonMobil then completing the job by wrapping its tentacles tightly around leaders, governments, the legislature, and citizens.
There is a one-sided contract, with massive profits for ExxonMobil, and pittances for Guyana. The existing laws of Guyana cannot touch ExxonMobil, and Guyana’s parliament cannot make any new laws that tampers in any way with that obscenity that’s called an oil contract. But ExxonMobil’s people persist with the myth that the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement that they signed with this country’s APNU+AFC Coalition government is a fair one, with trusted people on their side of the table. The bitter reality is prosperity for ExxonMobil from Guyana’s oil, and impoverishment for Guyanese from what they own.
Auditors selected by the Guyana Government were allowed to view only what ExxonMobil was comfortable with them seeing. Whatever the company had to hide was declared off-limits, with auditors blocked from checking what was going on at offshore operations. Still, ExxonMobil’s senior managers say without any loss of face that they can be trusted, that Guyana’s interests are always paramount.
An audit that had US$214M in findings has been an ongoing joke, with ExxonMobil not yielding an inch, so that a long outstanding matter between two partners, with the exact same objectives, could be amicably put to rest. A partner or a stalker always on the hunt for a sucker, that’s our question, that’s our position. There is another aspect in that same US$214M IHS Markit (of British origins) report that is still a mystery. How did that US$214M in audit findings plunge from there to the negligible bottom of US$3M? Who had a hand in that, and which side of the partnership thought of that enormous multimillion dollar reduction in findings, influenced it, and almost got away with it? Unless there is a Guyanese whistleblower of standing and credibility that US$211M deduction negotiated will probably remain a secret as long as the oil lasts.
Now, there is a new development that tests the substance of the Guyana-ExxonMobil partnership. It was not a development announced in Guyana for the benefit of the Guyanese owners of the local oil bonanza. It was announced in the US for the inspiration and excitement of ExxonMobil’s shareholders. More oil has been discovered by ExxonMobil in Guyana’s Stabroek Block.
Is this not unbelievable, that the people who the oil wealth belongs to are left in the dark, while the people who invest in it are privy to information on new oil discoveries. Again, the question raises its head, but now with a difference: how much can Guyanese trust not only ExxonMobil, but their own government, to keep them fully informed about their inherited patrimony?
We at this paper have long taken the position that there is an incestuous relationship between the PPPC Government and ExxonMobil. There are too many missing links, too many secrets, and too many instances of verbal dodging that made matters worse. Did ExxonMobil inform the PPPC Government of new oil discoveries in the Stabroek Block? If it did, why didn’t the government think it necessary for that to be shared with citizens, or was it operating with an agreed-on gag order? And if ExxonMobil informed its shareholders without informing the Guyana Government, where does that leave this so-called trusted partner in the eyes of every Guyanese?
Interestingly, what ExxonMobil disclosed in its 2025 Annual Report went to the lengths of lumping new discoveries here with those in the US. That is cleverness taken to another level, with revealing while still concealing. After all the gyrations about ‘monetizing’ and ‘prioritizing known oil resources’ and ‘oil reserve estimations are a complex and time-consuming exercise, this is how and where new oil found shows its face. It is said that no tricks, no living, but what is enraging is how Guyanese end up getting repeatedly tricked.
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