In 2018, then Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo blistered the APNU+AFC administration over its sloth in auditing US$460m in ExxonMobil costs but now in 2021, as PPP/C Vice-President he has casually excused his government from forensic scrutiny of nearly 20 times that amount – US$9b.
Jagdeo last week announced that ExxonMobil’s post-2017 expenditure for the Liza-1 and Liza-2 wells would not be audited as government was not able to select a strong local group to undertake it, although it had advertised this year for foreign firms.
“We have been very disappointed that we have not been able to select a group to do the audit of the post-2017 expenditure on Exxon. The reason is we did not have a strong local content. We had two local groups that came in but they were not strong enough. We want to build a capacity in Guyana to do this audit,” Jagdeo said.
