Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:38 AM
Feb 06, 2020 News
… country exactly where it was 20 years ago
By Kemol King
When it comes to transparency and public disclosures, Guyana’s growth is yet to impress. Its very orientation is secrecy, and continues to see a refusal to create an environment of full disclosure.
These and other comments were made by First Vice President of Transparency International Guyana Institute (TIGI), Fred Collins, on a recent edition of the Kaieteur Radio show, Petroleum 101.
There, Collins and TIGI Director, Turhan Doerga, discussed the importance of transparency in the oil sector, against the backdrop of a report by the Transparency International’s central body that Guyana has improved significantly in its corruption perceptions index. Beside that report’s findings, Collins posited his view that Guyana has a lot more to do to foster a culture of transparency.
The TIGI Vice President made reference to events since the signing of the 1999 petroleum agreement with ExxonMobil, by the then President Janet Jagan. It took nearly two decades for that agreement to be seen by the public.
He explained that since then, Guyana has been accustomed to very low standards from its leadership, and that that leadership has fostered a culture of giving excuses for the secrecy it wants to maintain.
But that secrecy has been proven to be unnecessary, Collins told Kaieteur Radio.
For instance, he said that calls for the release of the 2016 Stabroek licence, signed by Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, had initially been met with excuses about the importance of protection for oil companies’ proprietary information.
“There was nothing like that in the 2016 contract,” Collins said.
It was President David Granger who took it upon himself to make the contract public. It turned out that instead of exposing proprietary oil company information, the details of the contract elicited years of complaints and protest from the public that the deal was not only lopsided and unjustly exploitative, but that some of the concessions Government granted to ExxonMobil and its partners were more than the law allowed, Collins explained.
The anti-corruption advocate said he had sensed for a while, that “there was no real reason, no valid reason for that contract not to be disclosed, except it was going to be embarrassing to see what we had agreed to.”
In addition, the Bridging Deed which gave renewed life to the expired 1999 agreement, leading to the 2016 agreement, has still not been published by a Government agency. It had to be leaked to the media. A perusal of the Deed by Kaieteur News indicated that there is an ‘escrow letter’ which remains elusive.
Collins also mentioned the several drafts of Guyana’s local content policy, and how the Trinidadian consultant, Anthony Paul, had initially formulated a draft which had stringent provisions to ensure Guyanese benefit from the petroleum sector.
“They discarded that and brought somebody connected to Exxon, who took out all of that.”
The Government had eventually replaced Paul with Dr. Michael Warner, a consultant who Kaieteur News has shown had been affiliated with the oil major.
In this regard, Collins said that that instance speaks volumes about how the “trajectory of our transparency is downward.”
“For some strange reason,” the TIGI Vice President said, “we will not… create an environment of full disclosure unless there is a radical shake-up of the political order because neither the Government or the opposition seems to be anywhere close to delivering to the populace that kind of orientation which we need.”
People’s Progressive Party (PPP) General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo, has said that he is in favour of full disclosures about Government transactions. However, several large-scale deals signed during his tenure as President, remain shrouded in secrecy.
Doerga told Kaieteur Radio, “One would think that after the secrecy was exposed and taken apart in the press that they would have learned… Guyanese don’t sit and just swallow it.”
The TIGI Director referred to the commotion over the sale of Guyana’s oil. It was a US-based publication, Bloomberg, which revealed that Government had invited a select group of oil companies to handle the trade of Guyana’s oil.
The Department of Energy had held a hurried press conference shortly after the Bloomberg report, where it gave a limited explanation about the process thus far, except that the companies were chosen based on their track record.
When Energy Director, Dr. Mark Bynoe, was asked why the public was not notified of the matter sooner, he said that there are matters the public does not have to be notified about until after they have transpired.
He had explained that that matter was one for which the Government decided it would notify the public after the deal was signed.
The public later learnt that Royal Dutch Shell was the company chosen by Government to assist with the trade of its crude.
“If you see the atrocities of Shell in other countries,” Doerga said, alluding to the company’s sordid reputation.
Shell has been implicated in a US$1.1B bribery and corruption scandal for a coveted Nigerian oil block.
The Guyana Government’s considerations for choosing Shell are unclear.
“We are being confronted that Shell now got the contract with some frivolous reason that they have to establish what quality the oil is and what price can be achieved of that, and so forth,” the TIGI Director said.
“Them a spit in me face and tell me it’s raining,” an old, Creole adage.
“It is getting more ridiculous,” Doerga said.
He posited that the resource does not belong to one or two private citizens, but that it belongs to all the people of Guyana.
And with that, “Everything is supposed to be transparent,” Doerga stated.
Government has joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), in a move that suggests that it will commit to internationally accepted principles of transparency in its extractive industries.
Jagdeo giving Exxon 102 cent to collect 2 cent.
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