Opposition members present during the September meeting with ExxonMobil insist that the company did say government agreed to the cost reduction from US$214 million to US$3 million and are of the view that the United States oil major should make its position public.
However, to date the company has remained mum on the meeting and what transpired.
Stabroek News yesterday reached out to ExxonMobil for comment but up to press time there had been no response.
“In the said meeting ExxonMobil said that they agreed with the government to US$3 million because it was too time consuming to continue to go through all the information and reduce it further. He went on to state that they have all the information on their expenditure,” a letter to the editor signed by the five members of Parliament who were present, stated.
The five are: Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton, AFC MP David Patterson, AFC MP Ricky Ramsaroop, and PNC MPs Shurwayne Holder and Elson Lowe.
“We the undersigned wish to state that what we highlighted is what was conveyed to us in the meeting, and it is now opportune for Exxon to honour its comment that it operates based on integrity, transparency and accountability and state publicly what it told the Opposition delegation it met,” the letter added.
The Opposition MPs said that in a meeting held on September 8, “ExxonMobil Guyana Ltd, through its Country Manager, Mr. Alistair Routledge stated that Exxon will not neglect its responsibilities in the event of an oil spill and that his company has always operated with integrity, transparency, and accountability.” It is in the same meeting that the audit was raised and the group said that Routledge gave the answers they attributed to him.
The letter from the Opposition MPs was triggered following Vice Presi-dent Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday telling a press conference that ExxonMobil told President Irfaan Ali that it never told the opposition that the IHS Markit audit’s questionable expenses figure was reduced from US$214 million to US$3 million and that government had agreed to it.
“At the meeting of the Cabinet, the President called Exxon. Exxon said they never told [APNU+AFC MP David] Patterson there was an agreement. Patterson reported that Exxon told them there was an agreement on the US$214 million; they said they never said that to Patterson. They said they submitted documents to support the reduction,” Jagdeo said.
However, Opposition Member of Parliament Patterson says that he does not believe anything Jagdeo says, but if the US oil giant did tell government that, he challenges them to also say it publicly as he and the other Opposition Members of Parliament stand ready to dispute those statements.
“If he is saying that, then Jagdeo is reporting a lie because we were all there, there were like eight persons in the room. Anybody can tell you word for word what Exxon reported to us,” Patterson told Stabroek News when contacted on Thursday.
“As I told you before… Exxon said that they, government, have agreed. They also confirmed and they said they had to go through boxes and boxes of documents and to continue would be time consuming. They said they have all their records and they agreed to US$3 million. That is when I learned it is was US$3 million,” Patterson iterated
He said that if what Jagdeo is reporting is true, then he would “publicly challenge ExxonMobil to say that is not what Mr. [Alistair] Routledge [ExxonMobil Country Manager] said,” he added.
Last month, Patterson told Stabroek News that Routledge had told the Opposition that government had accepted that the US$214 million sum found by the IHS Markit audit would be reduced to US$3 million, statements contradictory to government’s position that it had accepted that the company overstated their expenses by the US$214 audit sum.
“They said they had completed it and they had resolved the audit issue. I went in thinking it was reduced to US$11 million but Routledge said it has been reduced to US$3 million. I was shocked. I asked him if he was sure and to confirm it. He said yes,” Patterson had told Stabroek News in an interview.
“He also said they could have been reduced further because they have all their record boxes. Boxes and boxes of records, but it was time consuming so they and the government said, it was a waste of energy and manpower trying to do that [sort the boxes of documents] and they agreed to the US$3 million sum.”
The Opposition Member of Parliament said that he had been rushed to attend the meeting which occurred at Congress Place in early September, after AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan called him and asked him to attend at short notice. He said he went in with a number of questions and of top priority was to seek an update on the audit, as he had read various reports in the news that the sums had been brought down through government and company discussions.
