Introduction
It was good to see Dr. Mark Bynoe, Director/Head of the Department of Energy in the Ministry of the Presidency speaking publicly on the petroleum sector. While Minister Joseph Harmon has been assigned responsibility for the sector by President Granger, and will necessarily be answerable to the National Assembly, the day to day management and oversight of the sector seem now to fall squarely on Dr. Bynoe.
In an interview with the State-owned Guyana Chronicle published last Wednesday, Dr. Bynoe was cautious about any “revisiting, revising, [or] renegotiating” any petroleum agreement but in a masterpiece of officialese, assured the Chronicle that “we” will continue to engage deeply to ensure that value leakage is reduced wherever possible.
Foreign experts
In this regard, Bynoe seems to rely heavily on international experts helping the Department of Energy working with the Audit Office, an independent constitutional office and the Guyana Revenue Authority, a statutory body committed to secrecy and confidentiality in its work, to conduct cost recovery audits. Some of these international experts will no doubt be drawn from the IMF, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat, the very institutions that touted the Petroleum Commission conceived to do some of the very work which the Department of Energy is now assuming, but of which everything is silence.
