As ExxonMobil forges ahead with the construction of its headquarters at Ogle on the East Coast of Demerara and with no publicly known price tag on the project or if any monies would be recovered from cost oil for it, Opposition Parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has moved to the National Assembly for answers he says are owed to this country.
“ExxonMobil has begun construction of its new office campus on [a] 15 acres green field site adjacent to Ogle Airport on the outskirts of Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. The facility will be ExxonMobil’s in-country headquarters according to details revealed by the update on the 13th April, 2022 on LinkedIn. Can the Honourable Minister of Natural Resources inform the National Assembly if the cost for the ExxonMobil Office Campus is cost recoverable?” Mahipaul asked in questions he said he has since sent to Parliament.
“If yes to the above, can the Honourable Minister of Natural Resources inform this house what is the total cost for the ExxonMobil Office Campus and what real-time monitoring mechanisms are in place to ensure costing are not overpriced?” he added.
Mahipaul said that while he has used the National Assembly as the medium for the information to be released, and that he is an opposition MP, he wants the entire nation to set aside politics to assess the issue, since the monies earned from the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement “is for all of us.”
He posited that the populace should band together and review the issue and make their voices heard, “because this affects everyone; and opposition and government supporters will suffer, if not addressed.”
Following calls for expressions of interests for the headquarters’ construction, ExxonMobil in 2019 announced that a joint venture between NABI and KCL Oilfield Construction Services Guyana had won the contract.
No information about funding or costs was released and the APNU+AFC did not make clear if any of the costs would be recovered through the cost recovery mechanism of the 2016 PSA.
Construction commenced but was halted in mid-March of 2020 because of the COVID pandemic.
Through a sublease arrangement, on 10 acres of land leased to Ogle Airport Inc (OAI) by the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, ExxonMobil plans to construct its state-of-the art corporate headquarters. Head of the National Secretariat of the Guyana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GY-EITI), Dr Rudy Jadoopat, had in 2019 said that the organisation has not been privy to the cost of the agreement between ExxonMobil and OAI for the lease of land for the oil company’s corporate head office.
The company has said that the state-of-the-art campus will be constructed on a green field 15-acre site comprising two buildings, associated infrastructure and a net zero energy footprint. The plans also include the construction of a roadway as the designated site has no road access.
Mahipaul contended that the PPP/C owes the people of this country insight into what is its position on the project and if it would be cost recoverable, given that Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo had told a press conference in February of the same year that should his party win, it will ensure the costs are not recovered.
“As the nation prepared for General Elections and regional elections, Mr Jagdeo was the one that said that this country should not pay for this complex. [He said] that Exxon should build it themselves and it should be from their own pockets. Given that was his position and that nobody knew about what is the deal, with reference to Exxon and this campus, I believe that the country needs to know if it is cost recoverable,” Maipaul asserted.
“The country should know what is the cost and the country not should be paying for it in the end. If that comes out [of profit oil], it means it lessens our profit oil. All the expenses Exxon claims will lessen our share. We ought to ensure that it is not abused and overpriced and bloated. We cannot allow for a company to do as they wish and then foist it on the Guyanese people. It would be a total abuse of our oil resource. We have to monitor and ensure we are getting valuable for money. If every item or piece of operation it is cost recoverable, that means Guyanese have to foot that bill. It has to be managed where there is transparency and accountability, prudent financial management and real time management of the resource and works… to ensure we get value for money,” added.
And while there are audits of spending to ensure checks and balances, Maipaul said that judging from the first two, it doesn’t seem that auditing would be good enough.
“The audits happen years after the spending here in Guyana. If they spend X today, we check that two three years down the line,” he reasoned.
According to Mahipaul, citizens should know what revenues they are getting from their resources because it does not belong to any individual, company, or political party.
And when technical language is used to explain to the populace the costs, he said it must be simplified also.
“If you want to build a chicken pen and you don’t have the capital. I say to you that I will build the pen and buy the eggs and you will rear the chicken and we split the profits for everything fifty-fifty. Now If I tell you that the pen costs $10 million to build, will you just accept that? Won’t you look into if I said I am using greenheart if it’s that and not soft wood? If I say a sack of cement is $500,000 per sling, would you not want to know what the charges are when you know it is $100,000.”
“When we have the payback, you must know that I did not extort you with bloated costs and then still come for the profit to split half and half,” he said.
