The Ministry of Natural Resources has denied a Huffington Post report that that the United States’ Energy Governance and Capacity Initiative (EGCI) is “involved in writing oil and gas regulations for the country of Guyana, where Exxon has just announced another major oil find.”
The January 17 report on the online blog, headlined ‘Conflict: Tillerson would Write the Rules for Exxon’s Major Oil Find in Guyana,’ argues that if Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, were to be confirmed as US Secretary of State, he would in essence be in charge of a programme which “is currently helping the Guyanese government write profit sharing agreements, environmental regulations, and develop a strong rule of law to counterbalance corporate power” in the country’s nascent oil industry.
However, the ministry, in a press statement issued last Thursday, stated that there “is no truth to the assertion in the article that the EGCI will be playing any part in writing Guyana’s oil governance laws, or any laws for that matter.”
If further clarifies that the lead agency supporting Guyana in preparing a suite of legislation for the oil and gas industry is the Commonwealth Secretariat.
While the government has acknowledged that the EGCI can be a useful programme once implemented, it maintains that it is but one in a raft of assistance measures that Guyana is receiving to bolster and in some cases build capacity in oil and gas governance and the support it has been offering Guyana for the past six years does not in any way include writing oil and gas laws or regulations for this country.
Additionally, the government stressed that the relationship between Guyana and the EGCI programme in Guyana, which began in 2010, predates the Ministry of Natural Resources, which was established in 2012 and the current coalition administration, which came into power in 2015.
“Indeed, the Government of Guyana has had many engagements with the officials of the United States’ Department of State as part of the capacity building initiative. However, the EGCI programme has only been partially implemented through a series of scoping studies that were conducted in 2016,” the statement added.
