Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 12, 2020 News
… Its work led to formation of EITI
The globally respected anti-corruption watchdog, Global Witness, recently released a report titled ‘Signed Away’. That report detailed how a poor negotiation process and questionable behaviour by Government officials led to the inking of a lopsided oil deal with an Exxon-led consortium for operations in Guyana’s lucrative Stabroek Block.
A firm consulted by Global Witness is quoted in its report as having calculated that Guyana stands to lose US$55B over 40 years due to unfair fiscal terms. And this is calculated at an oil price of US$65 a barrel.
In response, the Government of Guyana issued a statement condemning the work of the transparency advocate as sensationalist, agenda-driven, malicious and extraordinarily speculative.
Then, Government referred to the institution’s suggestions as preposterous, and the presented US$55B figure as arbitrary and utterly absurd, despite the fact that a detailed economic model has been published by the firm, OpenOil, to support its conclusions.
The Norwegian firm, Rystad, has published its own report, which claims Guyana will get a much higher share.
Unlike OpenOil, Rystad’s assumptions and its economic model are not public. Hence, its claims cannot be independently verified.
Yet, Government continues to embrace that report.
There have also been attempts to cast aspersions on the integrity of Global Witness, by officials like Carl Greenidge who called the non-governmental organization a pack of “jokers”.
This would strike many as absurd, as the anti-corruption body’s reputation precedes it as one that has spent decades fighting corruption, exposing human rights abuses, and helping governments recover significant sums of lost revenue.
Its work involves investigations, productions of reports, and executions of several campaigns against abuses.
Notably, Global Witness had conceived the Publish What You Pay campaign, which advocates for an open and accountable extractive industry. This led to the establishment of Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the world’s first anti-corruption mechanism for the extractive industries.
EITI works toward complete transparency for the movement of trillions of dollars in revenue around the world. Global Witness is a member of the EITI international advisory group and sits on the EITI board.
EITI refers to Global Witness and its work, on its ‘EITI history timeline’ page (See link: https://eiti.org/history).
Guyana became an EITI member in 2017, so it can learn about and execute principles of transparency for its extractive sectors.
Before its ‘Signed Away’ report, Guyanese have known of Global Witnesses’ hand in exposing a bribery corruption scandal, thought to be the world’s largest.
Kaieteur News reported that, in 2011, Global Witness exposed Shell’s participation in a vast US$1.1B bribery scandal for the rights to operate a lucrative Nigerian oil block, OPL 245.
Following a lengthy investigation by the NGO, it was able to access documents showing that this money for the rights to exploit the country’s natural resources did not go to benefit the Nigerian people as it should have done, but to the country’s former Energy Minister, Dan Etete.
This is just one of the many transformational projects executed by the NGO, well documented on its website (https://www.globalwitness.org/en/)
It won the 2007 Commitment to Development Award, sponsored jointly by the Center for Global Development (CGD) and Foreign Policy magazine, for its exposure of the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and the international trade system, as well as human rights and environmental abuses.
At that time, there was particular mention of its first investigation of illegal timber sales by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which led to the shutdown of that trade in 1995.
This, and the NGO’s many other honours and awards demonstrate its immaculate record.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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