Introduction
Today’s column brings together the manifest debt deformations of ExxonMobil [its zombification] on the one hand; and other deformations more directly related to the firm’s culture, its management performance, social and cultural interactions in the wider society, and consequently its reputational risk exposure. Adding its classic zombie debt status [as defined in finance, business, and economics] to its other recognized deformations, produces synergies, hence my designation of ExxonMobil as a zombie plus corporation. The addition of the two features compounds the negative effects of being a highly leveraged corporation and therefore immediately rules out such standard solutions as bailouts. The question that this now poses is: can Guyana’s petroleum sector sustain a turnaround of this compounded outcome?