Category: Letters to the editor

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – Mr. John Colling’s commitment to “transparency and open, fact-based discussions” regarding ExxonMobil’s operations in Guyana is a welcome breath of fresh air. His July 2 letter provides an excellent opportunity to address fundamental questions about the 2024 financial statements of the Stabroek Block partners and several unresolved historical issues. He boldly asserts that ExxonMobil’s financial statements comply with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), which unlike US GAAP, is based on the substance over form principle.

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IFRS 15 requires disaggregation of revenue into categories that depict how the nature, amount, timing and uncertainty of revenue and cash flows are affected by economic factors. Why is there no breakdown showing what portion of reported revenue represents taxes paid by the Government, sales from 2024 Profit Oil, and prior year cost recovery? How can stakeholders assess true operational performance when the composition of revenue is deliberately obfuscated?

Even if cost oil was sold to customers, the proceeds represent recovery of past investments, not compensation for current-year services. The economic substance is reimbursement, not revenue generation. When 65% of reported “revenue” is actually cost recovery from prior years, this fundamentally misleads users about operational performance.

Basic accounting principles require expenditures with future economic benefits to be recognised as assets. The Petroleum Agreement creates contractual rights to cost recovery – guaranteed rights backed by legal force. Why do the 2024 financial statements fail to recognise these guaranteed recoverable costs as assets? This selective application – treating guaranteed recoveries as uncertain while booking deferred tax liabilities that Guyana pays – violates basic IFRS principles and accounting integrity.

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The 2024 statements show significant deferred tax liabilities that will never be paid since Guyana covers these through cost recovery mechanisms. Would Mr. Colling disclose to Guyanese which government agency issued the tax certificates under Article 15.4 of the 2016 Agreement and the total value of those certificates in 2024? The failure to explain that Guyana effectively subsidizes the companies’ tax burden while they book these as concrete liabilities represents a fundamental failure of disclosure.

What is the exact value of unrecovered costs carried forward as of December 31, 2024? As the operator, how soon does ExxonMobil expect to reach full cost recovery? These are material facts that stakeholders need to assess the duration and scale of cost recovery impacts on Guyana’s revenues.

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CNOOC’s 2024 financial statements reveal its involvement in the Gas-to-Energy project. Would Mr. Colling disclose the total expenditure of all Stabroek Block partners – ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC – on this project claimed as recoverable cost in 2024, the amount carried forward to 2025, and the total amount of expenditure on this project to which they are committed?

When reported profits bear no relationship to the actual profit oil received ($10.4 billion reported vs. $1.9 billion actual entitlement), how do these statements meet IFRS’s overriding requirement for true and fair presentation? The statements create more confusion than clarity about the companies’ actual financial relationship with Guyana.

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IAS 24 contains extensive requirements of disclosures concerning Related Parties. Does Mr. Colling honestly believe that the few lines in Note 14 to Exxon’s financial statements meet these requirements?

Mr. Colling’s commitment to fact-based engagement also provides an opportunity to address several historical irregularities that have gone unaddressed for years.

1. In 2018, I analysed the audited financial statements of all three companies and found their claimed US$460 million in pre-contract costs at year end 2015 exceeded by at least US$92 million the total investment shown in their own financial statements? Almost a decade later, this discrepancy remains unexplained.
2. Esso was the sole contractor under the 1999 Stabroek Agreement. Shell bought in and later exited before discovery. Can Mr. Colling explain whether the proceeds from that transaction and subsequent sales to Hess and CNOOC were brought into the books of the local branch or were paid offshore? If the latter, that would not only violate the 2016 Agreement but raise serious integrity issues.
3. Can Mr. Colling tell us whether as an external company, Exxon was granted a licence for the land on which its Head Office is being constructed and whether the company will recover those costs under the Agreement?

The similarities between Mr. Colling’s letter and the Ministry of Natural Resources’ statement a few days earlier is cause for suspicion. While using identical talking points, they studiously avoid the actual compliance violations repeatedly raised. Mr. Colling now has a further opportunity to demonstrate his stated commitment to transparency. If ExxonMobil’s financial reporting truly provides the “consistency and transparency” claimed, addressing these questions should be straightforward.

While I sincerely wish to take Mr. Colling at his word, having considered his responses and for the reasons set out, I still hold that Exxon’s accounting is indefensibly lacking.  As a public interest company, Exxon shows no respect for the people of Guyana, weaponising accounting complexity to avoid informed public scrutiny. Just like the Government does.

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By 2057, when these companies depart with their profits, our children will inherit the bitter legacy of resource wealth managed through financial statements designed to confuse rather than illuminate.

Respectfully,

 Christopher Ram

Yesterday, Nathan Craig, a frail 80-year-old Linden man, barely able to stand, let alone walk, was brought into our office. Craig’s appeal for his pension was heard fourteen years after it was lodged in 2010. No sooner had he won, than the heartless NIS lodged an appeal to a non-existent Commissioner of National Insurance.

Here we have Mr. Craig, penniless and fragile, deprived of his rights by an NIS whose strategy is to wait pensioners out. His story is not dissimilar to Zainul’s, the carpenter whose success in court angered the NIS, the AG and the Government, all of whom have left him out to dry. Zainul is paying the price for his less than honest employer, the NIS and the AG’s chambers. Craig is paying the price for the failure of the President to perform the simple task of appointing the Commissioner of National Insurance and the refusal of the NIS to follow the law laid down in an earlier judgment of the Chief Justice.  

The whole purpose of the NIS was to provide financial relief for the elderly through the contributions of the workers and their employers. The duty of the NIS was to oversee the employers and to maintain accurate records of contributions. Partly because of political control, poor management and its failure to carry out its statutory functions, the NIS has caused grief and suffering to probably tens of thousands of contributors, many of whom departed this world without justice. 

For one thing: it is not currently for want of money. The NIS’ financial fortunes began to rise with the influx of highly paid persons in the expanding economy. The injection of the $10 Bn was like a bonus and could have been used to address many of the Scheme’s more fundamental problems. Instead, the staff of the NIS are bullying and blackmailing aggrieved persons into giving up their right to a pension in exchange for a one-off grant. 

An ailing octogenarian (Craig) must now wait for the appointment of a Commissioner of National Insurance for the NIS appeal to be heard! Zainul, a septuagenarian, has to wait for the opportunity to climb those high court stairs again. And let us not forget Julia Clarke who may have to wait another six months for the NIS to respond to her lawyer’s letter. 

That is the sad state of our NIS.

Thank you, President Ali.

Christopher Ram

Dear Editor,

The PNC is dead. Long live the PNC. As Hoyte did in 1992, Aubrey Norton repeated the show of its party’s resilience on Sunday evening with a huge turnout at its 2025 elections campaign launch at the Square of the Revolution. It must trouble the PPP/C that for all its confidence from endorsements from recent members of the APNU/PNC, from several cash grants with promises of more to come, from the convenient attendance of tens of thousands of part-time workers at its events, and the demonising of David Hinds, that the PNC-R, or APNU could attract such a crowd.   

Regardless of what many thought and still do of Norton, he is the leader of a huge segment of the population that the PPP/C sees as a commodity open to transaction, provided they stay in their place. Treat Norton with disrespect and you disrespect all the 217,920 persons who voted for the PNC and their young children who have now reached voting age. The word is that Norton has his own autocratic inclination but one thing for sure, the Government will not be run from Congress Place.  

Norton’s choice of Juretha Fernandes, a young Amerindian woman from Bartica, the holder of a BSc in Economics and MSc in Public Administration as his prime ministerial candidate, is an inspired choice for many reasons – gender, ethnicity, substance, competence, independence and integrity. By contrast, PM Mark Phillips is appointed with an unmountable dark-tinted glass ceiling placed before him, with its own shade of racism. In fact, even as the constitutionally prescribed first Vice President, the PM struggles to make it into the inner cabinet of five.  

Fernandes immediately placed on the front burner the relentless rise in the cost of living over the past four years to which the Government’s only response were periodic cash grants rather than adequate management. It appears that the PPP/C fails to realise that without other measures, cash grants drive the cost of living higher still. 

It was also good to hear that the Ticket will act on the Access to Information Act, a fundamental pillar of democracy and good governance, another guardrail torn down by the PPP/C. Addressing this pillar will make the society more open, more democratic and more vibrant.

The Ticket made some expansive promises on Sunday night, premised on higher petroleum revenues. The Ticket will need to rely on more than production. Guyanese need to hear from Norton and Fernandes whether they are committed to holding a commission of inquiry into the 2016 Agreement as a prelude to its renegotiation.

The PPP/C might be glad that the two main speakers did not raise the issue of the 2016 Agreement for which Bharrat Jagdeo before the PPP/C took office in 2020 had used the words “they sold us out”. The only thing that has changed is that Jagdeo has gone from being a critic of the Agreement, which lasts until the late 2050’s, to being an enabler. Yet, Exxon, Hess and CNOOC have begun taking money out of Guyana. Jagdeo and Ali no longer seem to care that the so-called profit share from oil is barely enough to pay the very taxes owed by the oil companies themselves, and to build the roads and infrastructure needed for those same companies to extract our most precious economic asset.

However, the PPP/C might care to respond to the Launch, it showed that Norton leads a party and a Ticket that has the capacity to organise, mobilise and galvanise its support base. The consolidation of those constituencies represented by Norton, Fernandes, Hinds and others will pose a serious headache for the PPP/C. It might even have to wonder about the point about all those handouts, cash grants and ribbons cutting.  

Then it faces a challenge from Azruddin Mohammed, scion of a wealthy Muslim family. From financier to political competitor and rival for the presidency, young Mohammed has created a buzz – which maybe only Walter Rodney ever matched – potentially shaving votes from two historically solid PPP constituencies disillusioned by the status quo – the Muslims and the Amerindians. 

That is a headache which the PPP can ill afford. Its response in having its supporters and part-time workers disrupt Mohamed’s meetings in the presence of an unresponsive Police is counter-productive and dangerous. The last thing Guyana needs now is even the suspicion implicating the PPP/C in political violence, such as the Mon Repos market incident.

As other issues regarding the PPP/C’s management are placed under the microscope, such corruption, the gas to energy project, its treatment of NIS retirees, and landowners whose property has been acquired at well below market price, the political tide will ebb and flow.

In Guyana we always think that our politics is unique. Yet, the words of former British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that “A week is a long time in politics”, seem to apply with dramatic force to Guyana. 

Sincerely,

Christopher Ram

Christopher Ram Responds to AG Nandlall’s unsubstantiated allegation

I recently viewed a video of Attorney General Anil Nandlall (AG) responding to a column written by Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, SC, who heads Cameron and Shepherd, arguably Guyana’s oldest law firm. I retained Mr. Kamal Ramkarran, the son of Ralph Ramkarran, as my attorney to challenge Article 160 (2) (a) of Guyana’s Constitution, which I believe permits individuals to contest parliamentary elections in geographical constituencies. Readers might recall that Kamal was also my Counsel — right up to the CCJ – in the case he successfully filed over the 2018 no-confidence motion in the National Assembly.

In the video, the AG made the grave allegation that Mr. Ramkarran Senior’s column was “an attempt by him to distance his law firm from a statement that I (AG) made… from a contention that I (AG) advanced.” The AG went on: “And the contention that I advanced was that based upon the information that I have received, information that I have no reason to doubt, the legal proceedings are being financed by a political presidential aspirant.”

After reviewing the video, I contacted the AG to inform him that his allegation about the financing of the proceedings was false and challenged him to provide us with the information or issue a retraction and apology. The AG subsequently issued what can only be described as a non-statement. Rather than providing evidence or retracting his defamatory claims, he now attempts to justify his conduct by claiming he was merely “sharing information already being publicly peddled” and that such information was “published on social media.”

His feeble justification raises even more serious concerns. If he is basing official statements on unverified social media posts and rumors, this speaks to a fundamental failure in his duties as the nation’s chief legal officer. Social media gossip and speculation do not constitute the reliable information he initially claimed to possess. It is profoundly disappointing that our nation’s chief legal officer would conduct himself in this reckless manner. His refusal to accept accountability when challenged sets a dangerous example that undermines the integrity of his office and erodes public confidence in our legal institutions.

I also take this opportunity to apologise to Ralph and Kamal Ramkarran and their families for the embarrassment and pain that the AG’s wild accusations and his subsequent refusal to retract them would have caused. The best vindication is honour, truth and justice. It will come their way.

Christopher Ram

Dear Editor,

The southern American expression “A hit dog will holler” was brought to Guyana in a coordinated response across the controlled media to my letter appearing last week under the caption `Presidency has been diminished by Mr Ali and he ought not to be re-elected’. Featuring media houses closely connected with the State and roleplaying by varying persona large and small, they have cast me in the memorable role of the Brave Little Tailor of “Seven at One Blow” fame, their combined failure allowing me to entertain the thought that Guyana has more unfeathered than feathered parrots, that we are one big soup kitchen. What emerges from their collective effort is not a defence of presidential conduct, but pseudo intellectualism and cowardly attacks from individuals whose supper depends on how often and how they mix up the pot.

Notably, not one respondent addressed the substantive issues I raised concerning President Ali’s conduct: concealing the expenses on Silica City, his vanity project; the documented WhatsApp evidence of a President engaging in communication on taxes; abandoning a public pledge to rebalance a most lopsided contract; the hidden Clyde & Company report; and the systematic undermining of constitutional and statutory bodies. Having documented numerous cases of tax concessions and benefits granted outside of the law, I can attest that such irregular practices are far from isolated incidents.

Most telling is President Ali’s refusal to establish a Commission of Inquiry to examine these matters – the one action that could definitively clear his name. And is there another way to describe a government that goes to court to challenge the award of a meagre pension equivalent to two hundred United States dollars per month to Zainul, a poor but dignified former carpenter while channeling hundreds of millions to friends and supporters than morally bankrupt and devoid of basic human decency?

To the first respondent, who refers to me as a friend, I am reminded of Caesar’s final words: “Et tu, Brute?” There is something particularly damning about betrayal couched in friendship’s language when all is done in the name of opportunism.  Regarding questions about electoral preferences, my answer is simple: NOTA – None of the Above. When choices are between persons who are seriously compromised, including a president who has diminished my country’s highest office for party and supporters’ profits, the principled position is rejection.

To another, your transformation from closet critic to fervent defender illustrates how lucrative appointments alter perspectives -a la Martin Carter. To anyone who thinks that embracing facts is engaging in extremities, and who possesses that rare and unprecedented wisdom to equate a simple accountant with billionaire and liberal democrat George Soros, I say, thanks but no thanks. To them both, I say, some knives cut three ways – toward enemy, friend and, ultimately, oneself. Their blade has found all three targets.

As for those respondents vying for bit parts (extras in the film business), they constitute the “et al” of the government dependency support cast whose feeble attacks are unworthy of any response, or respectability. Among these is one who substitutes fantasy and creativity – embellished with racist undertones –  for truth and accuracy, qualities identified with the fiction shelves in the library. 

But they all have one thing in common. Their very existence depends on the electoral success of their party, are probably otherwise unemployable, and therefore deserve some understanding, but not respect.

I reserve my final words for the President himself. As a practicing Muslim, he knows that the Prophet (peace be upon him) declared that “a word of truth before a ruler” is among the highest forms of jihad. Hurtful they might be, they are the unblemished truth while his defenders swear that the emperor’s clothes are made of the finest silk when honest men, women and children can see that he stands naked.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram