Guyana’s Natural Resources Fund (NRF) commonly referred as the “oil money fund,’ stood at US$534 million according to information released in the Ministry of Finance’s October report.
Notably, the PPP/C government is looking to amend the laws governing the NRF to safeguard and insulate it from political manipulation.
Local interest in the growth of the NRF centres mainly on public and political pronouncements linked to the integrity of the fund’s safekeeping arrangements. Public comment has been quick to raise concerns that what is regarded as savings to be committed to the future of the country could fall victim to corrupt misdirection.
Earlier this year, local commentators argued over reports that the Government of Guyana might favour the adoption of the model embraced by Kazakhstan for managing its oil and gas savings. The idea had been frowned upon in several local quarters on the grounds that the model adopted by the Central Asian country that shares a border with Russia in the North and China in the East had been infiltrated by official corruption.
While Cabinet includes a Minister of Natural Resources – the portfolio under which oil & gas properly falls – Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo is regarded as the country’s oil & gas ‘Czar’, by virtue of the fact that he undertakes the vast majority of the oil & gas-related international travel, makes the important oil & gas pronouncements and appears to be the sector’s key decision-maker.
Earlier this month Jagdeo announced government’s plans to auction new blocks for offshore oil exploration by the third quarter of 2022. “We’re hoping that latest, next year’s third quarter, that we will be able to auction the new blocks. That requires us now to aggressively enforce the relinquishing provisions in all of the contracts so that, added to the existing pool of areas available, we will have now the relinquished areas which can then form part of the auction that will take place,” Jagdeo was quoted as saying. He has also reportedly gone on record as stating that the security arrangements for protecting the country’s oil funds was not robust and the government is reportedly tabling legislation designed to improve the arrangements for safeguarding the fund which is currently deposited in a United States federal bank.
“You can say safely that before the ending of 2021 we will have nearly half-billion US dollars in the Natural Resource Fund that is intact and not a dollar has been spent from it. As of right now, we have US$436 million in Natural Resource Fund that is the proceeds or the revenue that our country would have gained from the sale of its crude. We would have completed seven lifts,” the country’s designated Natural Resources Minister, Vickram Bharrat had said back in September in a rare comment on the country’s oil & gas savings.
