Strikers and waivers

Feb 27, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – As Guyanese continue to grapple with the high cost of living and teachers struggling on the streets for a livable wage, it is a good time to remind citizens that this country in 2022 waived over US$500M in taxes to oil companies. It is a staggering sum considering how many Guyanese live with a daily struggle to survive.

It is just under half of the royalties and profits deposited into the Natural Resources Fund for 2022. To some extent, when the tax giveaways are compared to what Guyana received for its oil wealth in 2022, it is the equivalent of grabbing what is coming with two hands, while giving up one leg to do so. It is not surprising, therefore, that the PPPC Government is so meagre in its provisions for pensioners, public servants, and those living in poverty in Guyana. The oil companies are profiting at the expense of the citizens, who are supposedly the richest in the world. Many Guyanese are struggling, and some of them are even starving, but more than a half billion American dollars could be waived so that oil companies can plunder and pillage the patrimony of the peoples of this nation.

We raise the enraging issue of oil companies paying their fair share of taxes, and a steel wall of resistance is encountered. The PPPC Government, with Vice President Jagdeo in the lead, is unmoving: no taxes on ExxonMobil’s earnings from the Stabroek Block. The government finalized a new Production Sharing Agreement, but Jagdeo digs in his heels, which means, ExxonMobil’s operations and escalating production levels in the rich Stabroek Block are exempted. No one should have any doubts whose side he is on, and ferociously so. This newspaper’s publisher brought a tax filing in court, only for the Government of Guyana astonishingly to rush out immediately to stand by the side of the oil companies. If there were any Guyanese who still harbored some slight belief that this country and its citizens came before the interests of oil companies, with ExxonMobil at the top of the list, the PPPC Government’s smashed any such belief. The Attorney General of the Guyanese people, Mr. Anil Nandlall, was given the dirty job of fighting against his own citizens, for the benefit of ExxonMobil and others, and he promptly did so.

Payment of some level, some amount, of taxes has been a big bone of contention in Guyana. The oil companies love where there are with zero taxes on profits, and in Vice President Jagdeo and Attorney General Nandlall, they could not have asked for better allies. These two veteran Guyanese political figures use their wisdom and their strength to derail what could benefit Guyanese immensely. The people who are the richest, the most talked about in the world, are also the most weakened from the inside (by their own), reduced to the most pathetic by the machinations of their own. The government fills the financing needs for public works projects by borrowing from everywhere, while ensuring that oil companies, especially ExxonMobil, are free to fill their coffers. The people of ExxonMobil, from investors to Darren Woods to Alistair Routledge to the most junior worker, are all having their version of a predator’s ball from Guyana’s oil. Meanwhile the Guyanese people are pushed to crawling on their knees due to a crippling cost-of-living environment.

The PPPC Government and its loyalists condemn those who rail against the 6.5 percent increase for public servants. But neither government nor propagandists have anything to say about getting an amount as low as 6.5 percent in taxes from the oil companies for all the wealth that they ship out of this country. The government made a total joke of itself with its increase in pensions for the elderly, and then added insult to injury with the sickening way in which it distributed the one-off $25,000 cash grant. If the likes of Bharrat Jagdeo, Anil Nandlall, and Ashni Singh spend a quarter of the energies and fight that they manifest on behalf of ExxonMobil and its ilk, then that little effort would do so much to better the lives of Guyanese. Taxes totaling $108 billion are given up to oil companies, while a sizable portion of Guyana’s population hangs by their fingernails. This is government at its worst and oil companies at their happiest.

Anil Nandlall, Ashni Singh, Bharrat Jagdeo, companies, Production Sharing Agreement

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