Six -to – one is not 50-50 Part 2:

Today continues where Column 190 left off, examining the egregious failures of omission and commission by ExxonMobil, Hess, CNOOC and their auditor, the cumulative effect of which is to present a distorted picture of the economics of their Stabroek Block operations. At the media briefing on EMGL’s 2025 financial statements, John A. Colling sought to explain the gap between the Government’s share of petroleum revenues and that of the oil companies by referring to “petroleum agreement accounting” and a “cost bank”. Yet neither term appears in the 2016 Petroleum Agreement, any annex thereto, or the financial statements of any of the three Stabroek Block partners. Readers sent to the accounts for an explanation will search in vain.

And far from showing seventy-five per cent of revenue going to costs, EMGL’s 2025 accounts show the opposite. Costs, including non-cash charges, amount to less than thirty per cent of revenue, while profit exceeds seventy per cent. Sent to the accounts to find cost recovery, the reader finds disproportionate profits instead.

Three companies, one Petroleum Agreement, one Block, one operator and one audit firm. The accounts should be comparable and consistent. They are not. On matters central to understanding the venture, they disclose different things, omit different things, and sometimes present the same reality in different ways. Where those differences are material, one or more must be wrong. It falls to the auditor who signed all three to explain what will not reconcile.

1 – The basis that will not name itself

EMGL’s basis note states only that its figures represent the company’s “unassigned interest in various Petroleum Agreements”, without identifying either the interest or the agreements. Accounts that do not disclose the very interest being reported fail to tell the reader what they are accounts of. Hess, audited by the same firm in the same year, disclosed its 30 per cent interest in the Stabroek Block in a single sentence. CNOOC, did the same, and a bit more. The information was plainly available; only EMGL withheld it.

The omission affects every figure in EMGL’s financial statements. Every asset, liability, revenue and expense relates to an interest the reader is never told. On that basis alone, the unqualified audit opinion is difficult to sustain.

2 – One tax, one law, three faces

EMGL reports income tax expense of about G$231.6 billion, an effective rate near 19 per cent, yet offers virtually no explanation. Hess provides a full reconciliation and records an effective rate of about 25 per cent. CNOOC records approximately 8 per cent and, alone among the three, discloses that the Government pays its taxes under the Agreement.

One law, one venture, three effective tax rates. No reconciliation between them and, in EMGL’s case, no meaningful explanation at all. The problem is deeper than disclosure. The accounts create the impression that the companies bear a tax burden which, under the Agreement, is borne on their behalf. That is not merely incomplete reporting. It obscures the economic substance of the arrangement.

3 – The depreciation that will not reconcile

EMGL’s income statement records depreciation and amortisation of G$300.8 billion. Note 10 reports depreciation alone of G$431.0 billion. The difference may be legitimate. Depreciation can be capitalised into assets rather than expensed immediately. But the accounts do not bridge the two figures. No reconciliation is provided, no capitalised amount identified, and no explanation offered for the G$130.2 billion difference.

On one of the largest non-cash charges in the accounts, the reader is left to assume what should have been clear and unambiguous.

4 – The decommissioning puzzle

Accounting standards require companies to provide, up front, for the estimated cost of dismantling wells and facilities at the end of their lives. Yet CNOOC, with a 25 per cent interest, reports the largest liability at about G$197.6 billion. EMGL, with a 45 per cent interest, reports about G$102.8 billion and Hess about G$90.1 billion.

The figures may be correct. The accounts do not explain them. Hess and CNOOC disclose the discount rates used in their calculations. EMGL does not, although the valuation depends critically on that assumption. Three companies sharing the same field report markedly different liabilities, using different disclosures and apparently different assumptions, while the largest participant provides the least information.

5 – Hiding the 6:1 mystery

When challenged about the disparity between the companies’ revenues and Guyana’s share, Exxon points to the “cost bank”. Yet that balance appears nowhere in the Agreement and nowhere in the financial statements of any of the three companies.

That omission hides perhaps the most important issue to the financial statements. The balance of unrecovered costs determines how much oil is taken as cost oil before profit oil is shared. It determines who gets what from the Block. Yet none of the companies discloses the balance, its movement during the year, or the amount remaining to be recovered.

The result is that billions of dollars of costs are recorded, but the recovery that explains the disparity is not. The most consequential number in the revenue-sharing arrangement is absent from all three sets of accounts.

The Question the Auditor Must Answer

Directors are responsible for the preparation and the contents of the financial statements; an audit does not relieve them of that burden. Auditors, for their part, are responsible for the contents of the opinion they express on those statements. One omission may be an oversight. Two may be error. Beyond that, the pattern becomes harder to explain. One block, one agreement, one operator and one auditor should produce the most consistent financial statements in the country. Instead, they produce some of the least.

EMGL will not identify the interest on which its accounts are based. It leaves unexplained a G$130 billion difference in one of its largest charges. It discloses no discount rate for a major decommissioning provision. And it omits the recoverable-cost balance that determines how petroleum revenues are shared. These are not defects at the margins. They go to the basis, measurement and understanding of the accounts themselves.

Hess and CNOOC disclosed information that EMGL withheld. Yet all three remain silent on the recoverable-cost balance. And all three present taxation in a way that obscures the economic reality that the State pays their tax.

The big question is not whether every number in the accounts is wrong. It is how accounts containing omissions of such significance came to receive an unqualified opinion. That is a question for the auditor.

This coming Friday, we will look at the growing list of failures by successive governments. Be warned, they make depressing reading.

These columns are offered by Christopher Ram and posted on his blog chrisram.net and are reproduced with the consent of the writer.

Road to First Oil – Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil Minded; Column 190 June 28, 2026

By Christopher Ram

(Kaieteur News) – ExxonMobil Guyana Limited has now filed its financial statements for 2025, and with Hess’s and CNOOC’s already reviewed, we can now do the simple math of comparing the profits earned by and the share of the Government under the 2016 Agreement which holds that the arrangement under which the Government earns the same amount as the combined earnings of the three companies.

We now know that ExxonMobil which holds a 45% interest in the Stabroek Block in 2025 recorded revenue of G$1.713 trillion and a profit before tax of G$1.214 trillion, about US$5.8 billion; after the income tax it is deemed to have paid, it kept G$982 billion, about US$4.7 billion. By contrast, Guyana’s 50% share of profit oil, was G$451 billion, about US$2.1 billion. Exxon’s 45% of 50% is equivalent to 22.5% of the total. Yet, it recorded a profit before tax nearly three times the profit oil earned by the country.

Chartered Accountant and Attorney, Christopher Ram

Taken together, the earnings of the three companies recorded revenue of G$3.59 trillion in 2025 and a combined profit before tax of G$2.52 trillion – about US$12 billion. This means that for every dollar earned by Guyana on its 50% share, the three companies earned about $5.5 in profit. Even more dramatic is that the income tax on the profits of the oil companies was G$474 billion, itself larger than the whole of the nation’s profit oil.

Source: Audited financial statements adapted for consistency

Since the first barrel

Step back to 2020 when production began. From then to the end of 2025 – six years – the three companies had combined revenue of G$12.30 trillion and a combined profit before tax of G$8.58 trillion, or approximately US$41 billion. After the tax they recorded, they kept some G$7.02 trillion. Guyana’s profit oil over the same period was G$1.58 trillion – about US$7.57 billion. Look at the Table above.

The proportion is more than just stark or steady. While the overall average is a “modest” 4.89 times, the oil companies averaged over five and a half times over the past two years. 2020 – the first year of production – was an outlier: the three together earned barely a quarter of Guyana’s opening profit oil. That now sounds like ancient history. Since that heady year, the ratio of oil companies to country has seen that number hover between five and six to one, reaching very nearly six in 2024.

The Natural Resource Fund – Nothing would be left 

There is one more figure, and it should stop the reader. Over the same six years the three companies recorded income tax of G$1.56 trillion – almost exactly the profit oil the nation received, G$1.58 trillion. Whatever numerologists might make of that, it is real – and it is troubling. Article 15.4 of the 2016 Agreement says the State pays the companies’ income tax, and that the appropriate portion of Government’s share of profit oil is “accepted as payment in full” of that tax liability. Contractually, and we know how sacred that is, the oil companies’ taxes are paid from profit oil. Subtract one from the other – G$1.56 trillion from G$1.58 trillion – and the NRF nation is left with G$22 billion. A drop. After it, the Fund holds only the two-per-cent royalty and the interest earned.

This must trouble every Guyanese, told by the politicians that the Fund is a patrimony – a store of wealth held in trust for the generations to come. The PPP/C Fund architecture was sold to us as superior to that of the Coalition established and supported by intelligible rules and ceiling on withdrawals, all protected by a self-reinforcing structure of committees, managers, advisors and Board. The underlying commitment to both present and future generations that there will be enough to transform our country and its patrimony into a cycle of wealth and wellbeing. Sadly, before the ink dries, before even the first generation attains maturity, that architecture has been debunked by the calculations above.

In fact, if the Agreement is applied as written, almost the entire Government’s share of profit oil would be exhausted in discharging the tax obligations of companies representing the two largest economies in the world. This is like an intellectual horror show, self-imposed in an utter surrender of the country’s sovereignty. What is left to set aside for the unborn is the two-per-cent royalty and the interest the balance earns: a thin remnant, not a patrimony. Six years into one of the fastest oil developments the world has ever witnessed, on the Agreement’s own arithmetic, there is nothing of substance to bequeath. An inter-generational fund with nothing to pass between the generations is a mirage, a fool’s hope.

Look at it: only one of two things is true. Either the Agreement has been honoured, in which case the entire profit oil of the country would be gone, or that the Agreement has been violated – big time. Not by the oil companies, but by a Government that claims that the Agreement is sacred, and that says it respects the rule of law. Let us look at the evidence. The audited financial statements of the Natural Resource Fund are there for all to see. The only withdrawal is used as general budgetary support, which itself is a violation of section 16 of the Natural Resource Fund Act.

This then leads to another mystery, itself concealed in another illegality. The mystery is that the oil companies have been issued with tax certificates even though the National Estimates show conclusively that no such payment was made to the GRA. What we are faced with is that a government which does not have the courage to invoke the renegotiation clause in the Agreement, is quite comfortable breaching another of the Agreement’s Articles – all to avoid an inconvenient truth.

Next week, we will look at how the oil companies have played their part – shamelessly and improperly – in this great, big falsehood.

Exxon’s 2025 Financial Statements – and What It Has Taken Out

Overview

ExxonMobil Guyana Limited this week filed its audited financial statements for the year ended 31^st December 2025. Once again, the numbers are staggering: from a 45% interest in one block, total comprehensive income of $982,476M – very nearly one trillion Guyana dollars – after charging income tax it does not pay. It took Guyana fifty-nine years to build its first trillion-dollar budget; Exxon’s minority slice approaches that in a single year, for foreign shareholders, in under a decade.

In the interest of brevity, I will not trouble readers with a detailed review of the company’s income statement and the balance sheet: they speak for themselves, jarring the ears of every self-respecting Guyanese. Instead, this column steps back to the larger picture they occupy – what the accounts and the Petroleum Agreement, read together, reveal about how much of this nation’s oil, and this nation’s money, leaves the country and how little stays. How we came to be imprisoned to such terms, and by whom, is another story.

The “50-50” that is not equal

At a press conference to share the financial statements, Vice President John A. Colling was asked why, in a “50-50” agreement, the oil companies take so much more than the Government. We know Colling. He was the same individual who in 2024 announced a “60%” revenue rise when it was 56% – volunteered that “75% of all revenues” currently go to cost recovery, that “you see that reflected in the IFRS financial statements,” and that the 50-50 falls on profit oil “after recovery of costs.”

Colling does not seek to confuse revenue with profit oil; he distinguishes them. Under the Agreement the 50-50 bites only on profit oil – what survives after the 2% royalty (Article 15.6) is set aside, and up to 75% of each month’s production lifted as cost oil (Article 11.2). On his own figure, 25 cents in the dollar reaches the profit-oil pool, and the State’s half of that, with its royalty, is about 14 cents. He explained, in the language of reassurance, why a “fifty-fifty” hand the nation one-seventh of its own oil. But then promised the media that improvement would come.

What is interesting is that Colling undermined the assertion in the financial statements about IFRS when he introduces the motion of petroleum accounting which was never before mentioned by him or his predecessors. In any case, all he did was confirm suspicions with this new information.

IFRS, and the cost that disappears

Never the less, his claim that “You see that reflected in the IFRS financial statements” is one that the accounts will not bear. Indeed, that statement undermines the audit report validating the financial statements. The Agreement suggests the recovery of costs as incurred, with no depreciation schedule for capital (Annex C); IFRS does the opposite, capitalising that sum and releasing it slowly as depreciation – $300,758M, about 18% of revenue, against total costs of just 29%. What is beyond doubt is that a 75% cash recovery is nowhere on the face of the accounts. The company plead “petroleum accounting”. The auditors certify full IFRS and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Guyana mandates it, and the public is confused. Either the cost recovery belongs in these statements and must be disclosed, or it is a separate computation that must be reconciled to them. Exxon does neither, offering no bridge from the Agreement’s waterfall to its published profit. The largest charge of all in the income statement – depreciation – has no note. I can think of no IFRS that supports recovery of a hugely substantial cost being undisclosed in the financial statements. This omission explains why and how the income statement of one of the three contractors discloses a 57% margin – completely out of line with the 12.5% earned by the country.

What Exxon has taken out, and what Guyana finances

Since first oil, on its 45% alone, Exxon has earned about $3.2 trillion – $607,186M by the end of 2022 with nothing paid out, and almost $2 trillion more since. It took nothing out until 2024; then it repatriated $1.14T in two years, untaxed. Set that against every dollar of capital the parent has ever contributed – $1,127,835M: the cash taken out has now overtaken the entire investment ever made. Exxon has been made whole, and $2,062,951 million of profit still sits undistributed, waiting to leave.

On top of all this we pay its taxes – some $630B in three years on the 45% alone – from our own profit oil. And this is Exxon’s 45%; add Hess and CNOOC and the take more than doubles.

What Exxon has taken out – EMGL’s 45% interest only (G$ millions)

EMGL – 45% interest (G$ millions)	Amount
Total profit earned since first oil	3,199,407
Repatriated to head office (2024–2025)	(1,136,455)
Undistributed profit at 31 December 2025	2,062,951
Capital contributed by the parent	1,127,835
Article 15.4 tax borne by Guyana, 2023–2025	629,929

Conclusion

Exxon has not changed its strategy, nor even the man who reads the script: the same Mr. Colling, merely promoted. The architecture stands exactly where the Coalition built it and the PPP/C maintains it – a 2% royalty, up to 75% cost recovery, a 50-50 on the crumbs, no ring-fencing, a Tax Order that pays the contractor’s taxes from our own oil, and a cleanup bill that Guyana partly funds. The oil is leaving by the tanker-load, the profit by the trillion, and the money we pay to keep it sweet leaves dressed up as the company’s own income. Our patrimony, the profit it yields, and our own treasury – three things not taken from Guyana but given away, and counting.

Walter Rodney, assassinated 46 years ago, and whose memory we recall today, must be wondering how we got here. We will try to answer that question next week as we close the round-up of the Contractors’ 2025 financial statements.

From Upper Mazaruni to Gas-to-Energy: A history of failures

For almost every decade since Independence, Guyana has produced a project that promised transformation and delivered disappointment, and sometimes disaster. The 1970s had the Upper Mazaruni hydroelectric scheme and the Feed, Clothe and House programme. Later came nationalisation followed by Skeldon, Amaila Falls, the Specialty Hospital and a succession of initiatives that were supposed to alter the country’s economic future. Different leaders conceived them. Different ideologies inspired them. Different circumstances surrounded them. Yet they shared a common characteristic. They all promised transformation only to founder on the rocks of poor planning, weak financial management and inadequate execution.

The problem was seldom ambition. Guyana has never lacked ambition. Governments of every political persuasion have demonstrated a willingness to think big, spend big and promise big. The recurring weakness has been the inability to convert these into results. Costs exceed estimates. Timelines slip. Financing arrangements change. Assumptions prove unrealistic. Expectations outrun capacity. Some projects fail outright. Others survive but deliver substantially less than promised. The lesson from half a century of experience is not that Guyana should stop thinking big. It is that vision without planning, discipline and execution is often an expensive illusion.

That history deserves attention as the Government returned to Parliament this week seeking an additional $54.9 billion, including approximately $19 billion for the Gas-to-Energy Project. The issue is not the legality of supplementary appropriations. Governments sometimes require additional resources during the course of a fiscal year. The issue is competence. Four months after Parliament approved a budget of $1.558 trillion, one of the most important projects in the country’s history requires another substantial injection of public money.

If there is one project in Guyana whose financing requirements and implementation timetable ought to be known with a high degree of certainty, it is this one. It is expected to come on stream this year. As projects move towards completion, uncertainty should diminish rather than increase. Contracts are in execution. Costs should be clearer. Financing requirements should be better understood. Mature projects should become easier to forecast.

What makes the situation particularly troubling is that no project in Guyana’s history has enjoyed greater advantages, and limitless resources. President Ali retains responsibility for finance and remains the ultimate custodian of the country’s fiscal architecture. Vice President Jagdeo owns the policy dimensions of the project and has been its most visible advocate. Prime Minister Phillips is responsible for its execution and implementation. Dr Ashni Singh is responsible for financing, budgeting and appropriations. Few projects have enjoyed such concentrated political oversight. Few projects have had access to so much expertise, authority and information. If any project should have benefited from rigorous forecasting, disciplined budgeting and careful financial management, it is this one.

Yet four months after Parliament approved the budget, the Government is seeking another $19 billion for the project. The significance of that request lies not in the amount itself. Guyana has the money. Oil revenues have altered that reality. The significance lies in what the request reveals about the systems responsible for planning, forecasting and managing public expenditure.

Dr Ashni Singh has built his public reputation on competence in fiscal management. Few ministers have projected greater confidence in their command of public finance, budgeting and macroeconomic management. Guyanese have repeatedly been invited to judge the Government’s stewardship by the quality of its management of the public finances. The supplementary request therefore raises an unavoidable question. Were the original estimates wrong, or was Parliament presented with figures that should never have inspired confidence in the first place? Neither answer reflects well on those responsible for preparing and defending the numbers.

In any serious organisation, a variance of this magnitude on a flagship investment would trigger difficult questions. How were the original estimates prepared? What assumptions proved wrong? Why were the financing requirements not foreseen? What controls failed? Yet in Guyana’s public sector, departures from approved estimates increasingly risk becoming normalised. The danger is not the additional expenditure itself. The danger is the gradual acceptance of lower standards of planning and accountability, at the highest levels of the Administration.

The implications extend far beyond Gas-to-Energy. If the State encounters difficulties forecasting the financing requirements of a project receiving direct attention from the President, the Vice President, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, what should citizens expect elsewhere? Should anyone be surprised when problems emerge at NDIA, CHPA, GPL, GWI, Public Works or the regional administrations? Those agencies operate with fewer resources, less political attention and weaker technical capacity. Gas-to-Energy should represent the gold standard of public administration. If the gold standard itself is revealing weaknesses in planning and execution, then the deficiencies evident elsewhere in the public sector do not surprise.

For decades governments explained failure by reference to a shortage of resources. That excuse has disappeared. Guyana now has money. It has access to technical expertise and advice. It has political stability. Most importantly, it has a project that enjoys the direct attention of the President, the Vice President, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance.

If under those circumstances one of the country’s most important projects still requires an additional $19 billion only months after the budget was approved, then Parliament and the public are entitled to ask difficult questions. Not about the project alone, but about the quality of the planning, budgeting and financial management that underpin it. And they expect answers from those responsible.

The Government has assembled what it should regard as its strongest team. The project has enjoyed every conceivable advantage. If this is the outcome, then the problem lies beyond money and resources. That is the ultimate disaster.

This column first appeared on chrisram.net. It is reproduced with the courtesy of its author.

CNOOC Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

Part 2: Hess in context — and CNOOC joins the party

Introduction

Last week’s column closed on a single fact: Hess Guyana’s accumulated surplus at 31 December 2025 of GY$1.741 trillion was almost equal to all NRF deposits since first oil and larger than Guyana’s 2026 National Budget. Today’s column completes the Hess review and introduces CNOOC Petroleum Guyana Limited (CNOOC) which filed its 2025 audited statements at the Commercial Registry earlier this week. Exxon, the ultimate game player, will continue to be the last of the three Stabroek Block concession holders to release its financial statements.

Completing the Hess Picture

Three further features of the 2025 Hess accounts deserve attention:

• Hess shows revenue of GY$1,098.9 Bn. That figure must — under the 2016 Agreement and IFRS — include the income tax paid on Hess’s behalf by the Government. If it does not, the audited statements are wrong. If it does, true cash revenue is approximately GY$897 Bn, against profit after tax of GY$605 Bn — a 67 percent net margin.
• Depreciation, depletion and amortisation (DDA) of GY$183.1 billion in 2025. DD&A is a non-cash charge representing capital already recovered from cost oil — a closed loop in which the only outflow is to shareholders abroad. Worse, because DD&A is itself a recoverable cost under the Agreement, Guyana bears half of it through foregone profit oil, while the contractor treats it as a source to fund its investment.    
• Payments to the mystical “head office” of GY$408.3 billion. $126.3 Bn to pay off what was left of the advances from “head office”, and $282.0 Bn in distribution from surplus. Since all such payments are exempt from the 20% withholding tax, they are just lumped together. A manifestation of a government which favours borrowings to be repaid by taxpayers over taxing the foreign oil companies.  

CNOOC 2025 — Quietly Spectacular

CNOOC is the local branch of a British Virgin Islands intermediate of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, ultimately owned by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. As Oil and Gas Column 132 (June 8, 2024) noted, the intermediate parent of the Guyana Branch has a permanent capital of US$200,000. From that base, the 25 percent stakeholder reported for 2025:

• Net Sales of GY$778.4 billion, down 5 percent from 2024 — the first revenue decline of the production era. Under the 2016 Agreement and IFRS, that figure must include the income tax payable by Government on CNOOC’s behalf. If it does not, the audited statements are wrong. If it does, true cash revenue is GY$738.1 billion, profit after tax GY$463.1 billion – a 63 percent net margin. Hess on the same basis: 67 percent. The Agreement, not management, generates the number. 
• Net income before tax of GY$503.4 billion (2024: GY$553.7 billion), reduced by a deferred income tax expense of GY$40.3 billion – a non-cash charge representing future tax which under the 2016 Agreement, it will never pay.  
• Dividend to head office of GY$104.25 billion – identical to 2024, suggesting an internal distribution policy rather than a response to results.
• Retained earnings at 31 December 2025 of GY$1.434 trillion – up from GY$1.075 trillion at end-2024 and GY$648 billion at end-2023.
• Repayment of US$886 million on the parent’s US$3.5 billion credit facility, reducing the drawn balance from US$1,129 million at end-2024 to US$243 million at end-2025.

CNOOC, holder of the smallest interest in the Block – 25% – is practically debt-free. It discloses total assets of GY$1.88 trillion, while its only conventional liability is GY$72.8 Bn of trade payables. A “deferred income tax liability” of GY$174.8 Bn sits on the books, which under the 2016 Agreement it is a tax CNOOC will never pay. So too, does a decommissioning provision of GY$197.6 Bn, all of it recoverable as cost oil borne 50% by Guyana. In substance the “provision” functions as a long-dated, interest-free pool of cash that CNOOC has the use of in the meantime. The contractor has the funding mechanism; the country bears the cost.

One further comment. Hess remits its surplus principally as branch distributions; CNOOC “distributes” a fixed annual dividend and uses cash flow additionally to repay an internal parent credit facility. It does not seem to bother the Branch’s directors or auditors that Branches do not pay dividends.

Now we await the financials of Exxon, an entity with a poor record of accounting: overstatement of pre-contract costs by close to US$100 Mn; improperly and secretly negotiating away US$211 million of audit-disallowed expenditure; failure to account for money paid by Shell for its share in the Block; and by Hess and CNOOC for theirs. It has masterminded an opacity around the share of profit oil beyond the comprehension of every Guyanese, professionals included. One looks forward to its financials with the same confidence as the initiate at a three-card-trick table.

Conclusion

A few days from now, Guyana will be “celebrating” the 60th anniversary of its Independence. Sixty years on, this is where we stand. Demba, Alcan, Bookers and Jessel swapped for Esso, Hess and CNOOC. In place of beads and trinkets, they bring jerseys and hats with their logos; they loot our resources and give us peanuts; they buy us with school sponsorship while massaging the numbers.

Burnham warned in 1971: a flag without an economy is no independence. Jagan warned in 1986: the Petroleum Bill was a blank cheque to the transnationals. Ignored by their parties, these patriotic leaders have both been vindicated by subsequent events. We have been taken not back to 1966 but to 1833 – the wealth of the land seized, the people receiving crumbs and their offspring bearing the cost.  

No patriotic leader would allow this travesty and shame to continue. For all their faults, neither Jagan nor Burnham would have allowed this. Yet, President Ali sees it as a badge of honour that the most recent US diplomat to visit our shores boasted that he found nothing separates Ali from Routledge. A President indistinguishable from the country manager of a company pillaging our patrimony is the antithesis of independence, a shame on the otherwise proud Golden Arrowhead.

This column first appeared on chrisram.net and is reproduced with the kind courtesy of the author