Introduction
This column has had an extensive rest – more than half the year while more and more of the defects and inadequacies of the infamous “ExxonMobil” Petroleum Agreement (PA) have been exposed. Paradoxically, it seems that it is the Government which has been the one to make the admission by way of its engagement with the IMF while Minister of Natural Resources Mr. Raphael Trotman has blamed the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission for the Agreement which he claims he signed “on the advice and direction of the GGMC.” It must be only in Guyana can a senior Minister sign an Agreement mortgaging the future of this country without sanction or consequence.
The admission came in the wake of an IMF country report critical of the absence of ring-fencing in the Petroleum Agreement, a point made by several commentators on the PA but ignored by the same Minister and his Government. Indeed Column # 67 referred to non-ring-fenced cost but not a word was uttered by Trotman or the Agreement’s defenders. I therefore think this is a good point for the reappearance of the Column which it is hoped will run for the rest of the year.