Even as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) confirms, contrary to Government’s earlier assertion, that the Government of Guyana must pay all Corporate Income Taxes for Exxon from Guyana’s share of oil profits, Minister Raphael Trotman has been caught with yet another lie. More than four months ago, he announced that Government had established a Cost-Recovery Task Force to analyse the expenses that the oil company has claimed. Trotman even claimed that the Budget Director at the Finance Ministry, Sonya Roopnauth, is the head of that cost-recovery team. But the Finance Ministry is now confirming that no such team exists, that the team will be named sometime in the future and Roopnauth will not head the team. The Ministry claims it could not proceed with appointing a committee because the Terms of Reference which Trotman was supposed to have developed have not been completed.
Lies and fabrication, misinformation, misdirection, obfuscation are various techniques the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) has been using to avoid accountability and transparency. They have a playbook and this playbook is visible with the oil contract. In APNU/AFC’s oil contract playbook, the goal is to keep the nation in total darkness. But their playbook has proven to be ineffective because despite APNU/AFC’s desperate effort to keep details of the contract a secret and despite overt and blatant lies, the Guyanese people have become aware of the sordidness of the contract.
In this regard, we have much to be grateful for because of the herculean effort of sections of the private media.
We have to be grateful to a number of political activists who have scrutinised the contract, even when APNU/AFC has tried desperately to hide the details. Christopher Ram has played an indispensable role in bringing information relating to the contract to the Guyanese people. The Leader of the Opposition, Bharrat Jagdeo and the People’s Progressive Party have been in the forefront in and out of Parliament exposing APNU/AFC’s playbook of deceit in this scandal.
Expenses for expenditures up to the end of 2016 have already been submitted, amounting to US$460 million. Even though it is coming up to almost one year since the APNU/AFC received the account, no review has been conducted. Initially, APNU/AFC claimed that the account was being reviewed and then Trotman was quoted as saying that a Cost-Recovery Task Force was established under the leadership of Roopnauth to audit the US$460 million expense account submitted. Now we know that no audit has been done and none is planned for the immediate future. This is consistent with another lie that the APNU/AFC has perpetuated. The contract, in fact, provides for minimum to zero scrutiny of the expense account. APNU/AFC has denied this.
The same way the APNU/AFC has distorted the truth about the Cost-Recovery Task Force, the same way they tried to obfuscate with the provisions in the contract relating to taxes. When Bharrat Jagdeo, the PPP, Christopher Ram, and the private media and others exposed the fact that the contract requires the Guyana Government to pay all corporate taxes, APNU/AFC accused them of spreading fake news. Now the IMF has confirmed that the contract will require Guyanese taxpayers to foot the bill of all corporate taxes that the company will owe to Guyana. The APNU/AFC signed a contract in which Guyana must use its portion of the profits from oil to pay taxes.
Virtually every aspect of the contract has been shrouded in secrecy, lies and misinformation, entirely consistent with the APNU/AFC’s playbook, a playbook that elevates lies and fake news as critical component of governance. This is the reason why, to this day, we do not know the truth relating to the signing bonus which they kept as a secret for more than a year. Once we exposed them for receiving US$18 million, we discovered it is in a secret bank account. Since then we have heard that it is in a secret bank account in the Bank of Guyana, in the Consolidated Fund, used to pay the legal bills for the International Court of Justice and is in a secret account in a foreign bank. Which is it? The playbook of lies and fake news want us to keep guessing.
