Checking… bona fides

Last December 7, when your Eyewitness heard a Ghanaian investor showed interest in one of our shallow-water oil blocks being re-auctioned, he wrote: “Your Eyewitness has a soft spot for Ghana and, as such, was quite chuffed that a Ghanaian company will be signing along the dotted line this Tuesday to develop one of the oilfields – Block S7 – that had been auctioned off in 2022!! Cybele Energy, headquartered in Accra, the capital of Ghana, was founded in 2012 by the US-educated Beatrice Mensah Tayui, whose bio says she specialises in acquiring “marginal O&G fields”!! She appears to be more of a speculator and had originally made the bid along with an American company, Liberty, which seems to’ve dropped out.
“Your Eyewitness hopes that – since all of the contract’s terms gonna match those of the recent one with Total Energies – a royalty rate of 10 per cent, up from two per cent; a cost recovery ceiling reduced from 75 per cent to 65 per cent; a 10 per cent corporate tax; and a 50-50 profit share – the BONUS is also gonna also match Total’s US$15M bonus!! The last your Eyewitness had heard about Cybele’s bid was that the Ministry of Natural Resources was conducting due diligence checks on the source of funding, etc. The bonus payment should be a good indicator, since it doesn’t appear Cybele’s got a particularly stellar record in actual O&G exploration!!… We gotta be careful with speculators!!”
Your Eyewitness’s signalling of the bonus payment as a test of the company’s bona fides was repeated a few days later in a piece captioned “…oil hype??” when the bonus commitment was made. He wrote: “Your Eyewitness is intrigued that the female-led Ghanaian company Cybele committed to a US$17M bonus for their oil block – when just US$10M was required!! This was for the bid to “be noticed”. Clearly, the company’s record didn’t do that!! Still in doubt, a couple of days before Christmas he followed up once again in “…towards equitable PSAs?? – The Total-Qatar-Petronas consortium deposited its US$15M bonus for the PSA it signed for a shallow-water oil drilling concession. Your Eyewitness had expressed concerns about the second concession signed with Cybele Energies – with a US$17M bonus!! He’s waiting for THAT deposit!!”
Well, his questions were finally answered yesterday when he read the article “Pay or lose licence – Government gives Ghanaian company ultimatum over US$17M oil block bonus”!! “Government on Tuesday announced that after nearly six months of Ghanaian company Cybele Energy promising to pay the US$17 million signing bonus on the awarded Oil Block S7 and racking up nearly US$4 million in default interest, a warning has been issued to the company to pay up or forfeit its licence.”
When it sounds too good to be true…!!

…Inflation??
Your Eyewitness noted with interest Pressie’s announcement of a 25 per cent reduction of electricity rates in Bartica. They now join Mahdia, Linden and the rest of Region 10 in having lower electricity rates than the rest of the country. In the case of Linden last year – responding to PNC leader Norton telling folks there that the PPP was gonna remove its massive subsidy of the electricity rates – PM Phillips, with responsibility for electricity, stoutly rejected that.
He said, “Linden has the cheapest electricity rates in Guyana and perhaps in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for obvious reasons and historical reasons that I wouldn’t go into. And as a government, we are committed to maintaining those rates; we will not increase it… What we will do is find ways of bringing the cost of delivering electricity to the people of Linden downwards”!!
It’s possible that since goods in these interior towns are a tad more expensive – due to logistical costs – the Government’s helping out.
But the rest of the country’s waiting…

…on Iran
Who woulda thought that Iran would not only survive the Yanks’ and Israelis’ attacks – but actually come out strategically ahead – by showing that their control of the Strait of Hormuz is actually more powerful than an atomic bomb?!!