Introduction
Today’s column starts with a wrap-up of my response to the letter sent to Stabroek News by the author of Open Oil’s financial modeling exercise of Guyana’s 2016 PSA. After that, it commences to critique that exercise. For the wrap-up, I offer two brief comments for readers’ benefit.
First, Open Oil’s Draft Report and Financial Statements, 2015 states: “OpenOil is a limited company incorporated in Germany during October 2011. It was founded as a social enterprise (my emphasis) and under its articles of incorporation it is licensed to engage in consultancy to improve governance of the energy sector”. Initially, I had sought to by-pass this description, as I felt at the time of writing, it could be confusing for the general readership of this column.
Now, having reflected on it, I am compelled to inform readers that the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) project, 2015 notes: “the term social enterprise appeared in Germany for the first time in the 1990s in the context of transnational research projects initiated with the help of the European Commission … but only a small group of researchers participated.” Furthermore, “the terms social economy and social enterprise are not legally defined nor understood in detail in Germany today”. (Source: Social Enterprise in Germany: Understanding Concepts and Context, Working Paper No.14, 2015). Readers can see why, in the interest of space, I sought to avoid engaging Open Oil’s formal socio-legal structure.