Is expenditure on Esso’s Ogle Office arecoverable contract cost?

By Christopher Ram On In The Road To First Oil |

Introduction

Following a question raised in the National Assembly by Opposition MP Mr. Ganesh Mahipaul, ExxonMobil’s Country Manager Alistair Routledge, emboldened by his increasingly comfortable relationship with the PPP/C, reacted to Mahipaul by declaring that the approximately US$160 million expenditure to build the company’s headquarters at Ogle, East Coast Demerara, would be recovered from oil revenue. Routledge volunteered that “the cost recovery mechanism had been cleared by both the previous and the current administrations”. Of course, neither the APNU nor the PPP bothered to indulge Guyanese with that detail.