In the Thursday September 12, 2019 edition of Stabroek News (SN), our claim that the award of the petroleum exploration licences was subject to the Public Procurement Act was rejected by the Public Procurement Commission and by Dr. Anand Goolsarran, a former auditor general and past president of TIGI. Our column to which these individuals were responding was published under the title “Article #7 – Exxon Contract: A major oversight or wilful blindness? – The procurement act 2003” in the September 4, 2019 edition of SN.
If our argument that petroleum exploration and production are subject to public procurement has no merit as indicated by our critics, it would mean that the lawyers and politicians who amended the constitution in 2000 wasted a golden opportunity to close a door to one yawning corridor of corruption. It would mean that they wasted the time invested in drafting a law which could have preempted most of the problems we have now with the oil contracts. This would be especially telling because a few months after they signed an oil exploration contract (the 1999 Exxon agreement with Exxon) they either did not know that exploration for petroleum was a service and that it was possible to block that crevasse through the very Act they were drafting, or worse, they left it open so they could continue to do backroom deals with the oil companies.
