Although not a party in the action brought against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo confirmed that the government supports appealing the ruling that ordered the agency to be compliant with the liability clauses in ExxonMobil’s permits.
“I am not going to run down the judge,” Jagdeo told a press conference on Thursday. “I think a lot of things were not understood clearly. This decision needs to be appealed by the EPA because it makes the EPA look like it is not doing its work. The EPA is staffed with professionals and it has been doing its work. We have to make sure our institutions don’t act based on economic nationalism or the peripheral noise out there. We are playing in the big leagues now. We are not a backwater country where you can do whatever you want and get away with it. For that reason alone I think the decision should be appealed.
“I agree with the Attorney General,” he added, while explaining that it was the Attorney General who advised that the case should be appealed.
Justice Sandil Kissoon, in a ruling on Wednesday in the action brought against the EPA to enforce the liability clause in the permits issued to ExxonMobil Guyana for its offshore oil operations, described the EPA as “submissive”. He said it had abdicated its responsibilities “…thereby putting this nation and its people in grave potential danger of calamitous disaster.”
The judge bluntly said that the circumstances giving rise to the action disclosed the existence of an “egregious state of affairs that has engulfed the Environmental Protection Agency in a quagmire of its own making.
“It has abdicated the exclusive statutory responsibilities entrusted to it by Parliament under the Environmental Protection Act 1996 and the Environmental Protection Regulations 2000 to ensure due compliance by Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited [EEPGL].”
President of the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI) Frederick Collins and another Guyanese citizen, Godfrey Whyte, had moved to the court last year to get the EPA to enforce the liability clause in the permits issued to ExxonMobil Guyana for its offshore oil operations.
The litigants had said that the resort to the court was to make sure that the company took full financial responsibility in case of harm, loss and damage to the environment. ExxonMobil’s local affiliate, EEPGL, has agreed in the permit to provide insurance and an unlimited parent company indemnity to cover all environmental loss and damage that might result from a well blowout, oil spill or other failures in the Liza 1 Development Project in Guyana’s Stabroek Block.
The duo, through their battery of attorneys led by Senior Counsel Seenath Jairam, had told the court that “…the agency, through its human minds, including its officers has failed or omitted to carry out or to show that it has carried out its legal duties and or obligations thereby amounting to misfeasance in public office by them and by failing or omitting to act, has acted unreasonably, irregularly or improperly and or has abused its power.”
Jagdeo said this country needs foreign investors and when decisions are made they have to be with global standards. He reasoned that all insurance claims must have a determining value, as even with comprehensive or total, there are limits.
“There is nothing like that in the world of insurance – unlimited. You can have full coverage but that coverage – it is a defined risk,” he said.
He said that he believes that regulatory agencies should not be constricted in the execution of their work.
“I think it is threading on murky waters when you start directing a regulatory agency as to how to do its own job and give them a timeframe to get it done. You cannot supplant yourself and know what they face in that. Our courts have to make predictable decisions, not in favour of or against the government, … well reasoned. EPA has to be able to justify everything it does without the politicians,” Jagdeo said.
