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Jagdeo wants to know why GRA taking so long to release Exxon’s audit reports
Kaieteur News – Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo at his weekly press conference on Thursday promised that he will find out why the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) is taking so long to release the reports of two audits on billions of US Dollars in expenses racked up By ExxonMobil from 1999 to 2020.
Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo
“So let me find out why this one [one of the audit reports] is not in the public domain,” Jagdeo told reporters after Kaieteur News told him that its attempts to source the reports from the GRA have been futile.
So far two audits have been conducted to review ExxonMobil’s multibillion expenses for the lucrative Stabroek Block. The first was done by a British Firm IHS-Markit and was a review of some US$1.6 billion in costs incurred by Exxon during the period 1999 to 2017. The second was done by a local consortium, VHE, supported by an overseas company for some US$7.3B in expenses racked up by the Oil Company from 2018 to 2020.
Jagdeo said that while one of the audit reports may be publicly available, he will find out why the other has not been made available. It must be noted that the two audit reports handed over to the government were never released through the appropriate government channels.
Instead, the documents were leaked to sections of the media that widely publicized the findings.
The Vice-President has repeatedly said that he and his Cabinet want to stay far away from getting involved with audits to avoid political interference and has directed the media to get the documents from GRA because it has the authority to make them public.
However, three years have passed and the agency has failed to release the two audit reports to the public.
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Report on Guyana for 2021 flagged the secrecy of ExxonMobil’s audit reports.
In 2019 ExxonMobil Guyana Limited (EMGL) began producing oil in the Stabroek Block. To this end, the report noted, “The amount of cost oil deductible by EMGL in arriving at profit oil is subject to audit by the Government of Guyana. At the date of this report, two such audits were carried out by separate teams, but agreement has not been reached on any potential adjustments to be made.”
It added, “These reports have not been made available to the public as the audits are considered incomplete.”
The core objective of the EITI report is to help the understanding of the level of contributions of the extractive sector to the economic and social development of Guyana to improve transparency and good governance at all levels of the extractive industry value chain.
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