Landlordism in the Oil and Gas sector (Continued)

Introduction

Following up on last week’s column we have set out below a Table summarizing the Profit and Loss Statement of Mid-Atlantic for each of the years 2013 (part-year) to 2018 extracted from the company’s audited financial statements lodged with the Commercial Registry, a statutory obligation under the Companies Act. The Company was incorporated since 2013 but did not sign a Petroleum Agreement until 2015, the kind of information anyone would expect to see in financial statements but which is noticeably missing.

The Table shows that the Company has incurred expenditure over the first five years and a bit  over $270 million Guyana dollars of which 80% was spent on Administrative Expenses with the bulk of that expenditure going on Employee Benefits and Consultancy Fees. A perusal of the 2018 financial statements show that 90% of the $75 million in expenses reported in the Statement of Profit and Loss was incurred on Administrative Expenses.