Resource Curse? Guyana’s political impasse about ‘who controls the oil money’ – Bloomberg

Voters at NA Multilateral (Bebi Oosman photo)

The near five-month-old political impasse over the outcome of Guyana’s March 2 general elections has, not unexpectedly, attracted comment in the international oil & gas media with a recent report asserting that the failure, up until now, to see the declaration of the winner of the poll is not unrelated to who controls the country’s fortune-transforming oil wealth in the immediate future.

The Stabroek Business has seen a July 13 Bloomberg article authored by Peter Millard and Kevin Crowley and published by the on-line news resource, Rigzone, that quotes a senior official at a high-profile firm of US energy specialists as linking the still undeclared result of the poll to a political joust over who administers the anticipated huge resources from the country’s oil & gas industry.

The article quotes Jed Bailey, founder and managing director at the US energy analysts, Energy Narrative, as saying that the political drama currently playing out here is “clearly over who controls the oil money,” a comment that has been made all too frequently in local discourses.