(This is the seventh of a series of articles by Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc on the Production Sharing Agreement signed between the Government of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil.)
In our last article, we dealt with the miscalculation of the licence area in the contract with Exxon. Prior to that we discussed some history which suggests that the claim that Venezuelan belligerence was the justification for the resort to illegality in the invention of wholesaling of license blocks when no such concept was available, was an afterthought.
In this article, we expose the fact that the award of exploration licences ought to have been put to public tender, that it was not an option, and that therefore every licence which has been awarded without public tender is illegal, including the 2016 “contract” with Exxon.
