Guyana’s learning curve in the oil and gas sector is unlikely to be littered exclusively with pleasing revelations all of which have to do with the positive transformational effect that the industry promises to have on the welfare of the populace and the development of the country as a whole. Even the limited knowledge to which we have had access so far points unerringly in the direction of the industry’s unpalatable dimensions, not least, those that have to do with the dangers of an environmental backlash as well as the alarmingly high levels of corruption in the sector involving, variously, high officials of government and other influential functionaries and which, all too frequently, ensue with the complicity of the international oil companies.
In recent weeks we in Guyana have been recipients of a somewhat ‘rude’ awakening arising out of the disclosure that the country’s State Assets Recovery Agency (SARA) had launched an investigation into the likelihood, or otherwise, that there might have been an element of corruption in the previous political administration’s decision made just before it demitted office in 2015 to award two oil blocks to companies that had no noteworthy entrepreneurial profile. The assertion that the awards of the oil blocks were made a matter of days before ExxonMobil had broken the news of its first oil find, have given rise to speculation that there was a dimension of irregularity to the awarding of those oil blocks.
