Round One to the People — But the Government’s Pandora’s Box Isn’t Empty Yet

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA

BOARD EDITORIAL

Round One to the People — But the Government’s Pandora’s Box Isn’t Empty Yet

Georgetown, August, 2026

By: Hem Kumar, Editor

The Government of Guyana has, for the first time since the MV Barima went down on July 18, done something that looks like listening. On July 31, the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) issued a formal Invitation for Expressions of Interest for the salvage of the vessel — an implicit reversal of Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s earlier public position that “conditions” were not favourable for recovery, and that additional divers were unlikely to change the outcome.

That reversal did not arrive on its own. It arrived after the Amerindian Peoples Association picketed the Office of the President. After a Gen Z-led coalition held a silent vigil outside the same building. After Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed stood in front of grieving families and offered, publicly and repeatedly, to fund and facilitate the vessel’s recovery at no cost to the Guyanese taxpayer. After editorial pages — this one included — asked, in print, what the Government was afraid a floated MV Barima would show.

Round one belongs to the people of Guyana. Sustained public pressure, not government initiative, forced this outcome. That much should be said plainly, and credited to the families, the protesters, and the civil society organisations who refused to let the vessel — and the seventy-two lives lost with it, and the thirty still missing — disappear from the news cycle.

But round one is not the fight. The manner in which the Government has chosen to deliver on its own concession raises questions serious enough that the applause should be brief.

A Process Built for Delay, Not Urgency

The EOI MARAD issued is not an emergency mobilisation. It is a standard competitive procurement instrument, complete with a submission deadline of Friday, August 14 — more than two weeks after the notice was published, and a couple of weeks after the Opposition Leader first made his offer.

APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has laid out what comes after that deadline: evaluation of submissions for responsiveness, shortlisting, evaluation of bids, contract award, execution of the agreement, mobilisation of equipment and personnel, and only then the issuance of a commencement order. By his estimate — and it is difficult to dispute the arithmetic — actual salvage operations are unlikely to begin before late August, and quite possibly not until September.

We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) has made the same point in different words: the Government “buckled under pressure of the people,” but chose a procurement path that leaves grieving families waiting even longer for the answers they were promised.

“If there was ever a case that justified emergency procurement, surely the worst maritime disaster in modern Guyanese history is one.” — Ganesh Mahipaul, MP

Mr Mahipaul’s underlying argument deserves to be stated in full, because it is not an emotional appeal — it is an institutional one. Guyana’s procurement law permits emergency and sole-source procurement precisely for situations where the public interest demands immediate action.

The 592 Guardian has documented, repeatedly and on the record, this same Government’s comfort with emergency and sole-source procurement mechanisms for projects far less urgent than the recovery of a vessel that is now the final resting place of Guyanese citizens and the single most important piece of physical evidence in the country’s worst maritime disaster.

If the mechanism was available for lesser matters, its absence here is not an oversight. It is a choice. And the Government owes the country an answer as to why it made that choice.

Every Week Underwater Has a Cost

That choice carries a price measured in something other than money. Mr Mahipaul’s warning about evidentiary decay is not alarmist; it is basic marine forensics.

Salt water corrodes mechanical systems, degrades electronic equipment, and alters structural evidence over time. The Commission of Inquiry — whose composition and independence 592 Guardian has already had cause to question — cannot examine what has dissolved.

Every additional week the MV Barima spends on the seabed is a week in which the truth the country was promised becomes a little harder to recover, whether or not that is anyone’s intention.

 

The Offer the Government Never Answered

It bears repeating, because the timeline matters: Azruddin Mohamed’s offer to fund and facilitate the vessel’s salvage through a reputable international marine contractor, at no cost to the taxpayer, was public for days before MARAD’s EOI appeared.

The Government did not accept it. It did not formally decline it. It said nothing — until it produced its own process, on its own timeline, under its own name.

Whatever the merits of running a competitive procurement in the ordinary course of government business, this was not the ordinary course of business, and the silence in the interval invites a question 592 Guardian is not alone in asking: was the delay about due diligence, or was it about who gets to be seen taking Guyana’s dead out of the water?

We do not know. Multiple theories are circulating in Georgetown — that the delay serves to let compromised evidence lose its evidentiary value; that a competitive process opens room for financial arrangements a direct, funded offer would have foreclosed; that the Government could not tolerate handing the Opposition Leader a visible, unanswerable moment of moral authority ahead of the next election.

The 592 Guardian has not verified any of these as fact, and we will not print them as such. But their circulation is itself a symptom of a deeper illness: a Government that has, through its own conduct on this file and others, exhausted the public’s willingness to extend it the benefit of the doubt.

That erosion of trust is not the invention of a hostile press. It is the cumulative result of a commission sworn in behind closed doors, a memorial consent form circulated to families before any genuine consultation began, and a Prime Minister who told the country recovery was unlikely days before his own government opened a tender to attempt exactly that.

Do It Right, or Don’t Claim the Credit

If the Government insists on being the one to raise the MV Barima — rather than accepting an offer that would have put a salvage vessel over that wreck site weeks ago — then it owes the country a process that matches the gravity of what it is recovering.

That means emergency procurement, not routine tender. It means a public, dated commitment to when operations begin, not a rolling estimate. It means transparent chain-of-custody protocols for whatever the vessel yields, developed in consultation with the Commission of Inquiry rather than announced to it.

Anything less turns an act that should carry the dignity the victims are owed into one more exhibit in a pattern the 592 Guardian has now documented for two weeks running.

This is not business as usual. It cannot be treated as business as usual by a Government that spent the first two weeks after July 18 getting the basic facts of its own disaster wrong, correcting them days later, and asking the country to wait for a process it does not yet trust.

Round Two

The people won round one. The Government’s hand was forced, and the vessel will, in principle, come up. But a Pandora’s box of procedural discretion remains open in this Government’s hands — the pace of the tender, the composition of the evaluation, the handling of whatever the wreck yields, and the still-unresolved question of whether the Commission of Inquiry tasked with making sense of it all is itself independent and impartial, given what this Guardian has already documented about its own commissioners.

‘Round two is the accountability fight that does not end when the vessel breaks the surface. It ends when every official whose conduct — before, during, or after July 18 — bears on culpability has answered for it, and it does not end a moment before the Commission of Inquiry delivers findings the public has reason to trust.

The families of the MV Barima are still waiting for closure the Government has had the power to accelerate since the day Azruddin Mohamed made his offer. Every day of procedural delay from here is a day this Government chooses, and a day it will have to account for.

— The Board

Physician, Disclose Thyself

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 Physician, Disclose Thyself

A reply to Freddie Kissoon on TIGI, transparency, and who exactly is taking directives from whom

By the Editorial Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon has published a column accusing Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) of being an “opaque organisation” for withholding public support from the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima ferry disaster pending disclosure of commissioners’ conflicts of interest. He built his column on a geographic non-sequitur — conflating a Guyanese-registered, locally governed national chapter with the German location of the international movement’s secretariat, apparently missing the word “international” in the organisation’s own name — and he did it while asking TIGI to disclose things about itself that he has never disclosed about himself. We take up his invitation. Since Mr. Kissoon has made transparency about institutional affiliation the test of credibility, that test applies to him too.

THE TEST HE PROPOSES, APPLIED TO HIM

Mr. Kissoon writes for TBN Heat and previously for Kaieteur News. He asks who funds TIGI, who its executives are, and what connections its members hold. Fair questions for any institution operating in public life — including a columnist with a regular platform. So: has Mr. Kissoon ever disclosed, to his own readers, every institutional or personal connection that might bear on what he writes?

By his own standard, the absence of that disclosure is not evidence of innocence. It is exactly the opacity he condemns in others.

A DOCUMENTED HISTORY, NOT AN INSINUATION

On May 24, 2010, Mr. Kissoon was assaulted outside Nigel’s Supermarket on Robb Street, Georgetown, when a man threw faecal matter in his face. Kwame McCoy — at the time the PPP/C’s Press and Publicity Officer and a former Presidential Press Liaison Officer — was charged and tried alongside Jason Abdulla and Shawn Hinds in connection with that attack; one of the defence attorneys told the court his client was following the direction of his employer, McCoy, and that refusing would have cost him his job. This is not a claim we are advancing on hearsay. It was reported at the time by Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle, and it was still being invoked in print as recently as this month.

Kwame McCoy is now Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for Public Affairs — the portfolio that sits over government information and media affairs, the same ambit under which the state-owned Guyana Chronicle operates. We are not asserting a formal chain of command between a minister and every commentator who writes favourably of this government. We are asking the question Mr. Kissoon insists is fair game when applied to others: what is the relationship, and has it been disclosed?

“If an organisation wants to be taken seriously, then it has to be open about its leadership and membership.” — Freddie Kissoon, July 29, 2026

Mr. Kissoon wrote that sentence about TIGI. We are simply applying it.

ON THE SUBSTANCE TIGI ACTUALLY RAISED

Stripped of the German tangent, TIGI’s request was narrow: that commissioners named to inquire into the Barima disaster disclose, in advance, any commercial, financial, or institutional connection to the government, state agencies, the maritime sector, or any interested party.

This is a standard conflict-of-interest disclosure, the kind expected of judges, auditors, and inquiry panels in any functioning accountability system. Mr. Kissoon calls it “comical” and “insulting.” A commissioner asked to declare a financial interest before ruling on a matter that could touch that interest is not being insulted. That is the minimum architecture of a credible inquiry.

On TIGI’s absence from the 2020 election crisis and the Article 13 point, we note only that critiquing an organisation’s past record of engagement is a legitimate line of argument — unlike attributing to it a foreign ideology by way of a shared word in its name.

WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING

We are not asserting that Mr. Kissoon currently receives instruction from Minister McCoy, and we have not established that as fact. We are noting a documented history between the two men, McCoy’s current portfolio over government information, and the pattern Mr. Kissoon’s recent columns have taken — and we are asking him to apply to himself the disclosure standard he applied to TIGI.

If the answer is that no such relationship exists, that answer costs him nothing to give. Its absence so far is his choice, not ours.

The Board.

THE STRATEGIC NEGLECT THEORY

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The Strategic Neglect Theory:

A Pattern of Political Targeting in Guyana’s Local Governance

By :Staff Writer 

For months, a disturbing pattern has unfolded across Guyana’s opposition-controlled municipalities and communities. Towns like Linden and Georgetown, particularly in opposition strongholds, have been battered by avoidable flooding. Drains remain blocked. Waterways go unstilted. Local councils report being starved of funds needed for basic infrastructure maintenance. 

Then, when residents and businesses suffer catastrophic losses, government officials descend upon affected neighborhoods like knights in shining armor, photographing themselves amid the wreckage while offering sympathy and promises.

This is not merely bad governance. This is a calculated political strategy.

The Core Theory

The PPP government is deliberately allowing opposition strongholds to flood by systematically underfunding local councils, failing to desilt waterways, and permitting drains to become blocked. When disaster strikes, officials walk through affected communities staging political theater that transforms them from architects of neglect into apparent saviors.

One Georgetown resident told this publication that citizens should chase these officials out of their communities “in the same way Bharrat Jagdeo once urged his supporters to chase coalition leaders from their communities should they visit.”

This is a cruel and evil form of politics never before seen in Guyana, except during the immediate post-Emancipation period when colonial authorities allegedly used deliberate flooding of village backlands as economic sabotage—destroying farmers’ crops and livestock and undermining livelihoods.

Why This Is No Longer Just Perception

For some time, this has been my perception. Now it is being confirmed by others. The pattern is undeniable:

Region 10 has been without its elected leadership for eight months. The government-appointed Regional Executive Officer (REO) refuses to hold the required election to determine who becomes chair. The first election was orchestrated to create a deadlock—a 9–9 tie. No further voting was conducted, yet the REO has not reconvened the council. In a democracy, this would be considered dereliction of duty warranting removal. Yet the REO remains employed, and it is the government minister who must fire him.

Why hasn’t that occurred? Because the REO is a political appointee whose continued presence serves partisan interests.

The Strategic Agenda

This government is on an agenda to control all central pillars of power in Guyana. My theory is straightforward: they know they will not occupy the seat of political power forever.

Since their power is derived from the people, their mission is to retain control through economic power. No matter who occupies the seat of government, their position in Guyanese society would remain enshrined.

How is this achieved?

  • Strategic targeting of opposition communities and municipalities
  • Systematic underinvestment in drainage, infrastructure, and maintenance
  • Deliberate obstruction of local democratic processes
  • Political appointment of officials who can stall or sabotage opposition-controlled regions

This drives economically disempowered residents out of their comfort zones. It forces migration. This explains the ongoing mass exodus. This is no longer theory. I am watching it unfold.

The Mechanism of Control

The pattern operates through three interconnected mechanisms:

1. Infrastructure Neglect as Weaponization

Flooding in Georgetown and Linden is not accidental. It is the result of predictable, preventable failures: blocked drains, unstilted waterways, and councils denied funds for basic maintenance. When opposition municipalities request resources, the delays are endless. When PPP-controlled areas face similar challenges, funding flows more readily.

2.Disaster Theater

After citizens suffer property damage, business losses, and physical displacement, government officials appear. They walk through affected communities. They record video messages of sympathy. They promise action. They capture images that position them as compassionate leaders. The message is calculated: the government is not the cause of the suffering—it is the solution.

3.Administrative Strangulation

Region 10 demonstrates the most blatant form of this strategy. By keeping the REO in place despite repeated failures to convene the council and implement statutory duties, the central government maintains direct administrative control over a region where the opposition would otherwise control the elected chair. The minister does not fire the REO because the REO’s presence preserves central leverage.

The Economic Brain Drain Consequence

This strategy has a demographic consequence: economic exodus. When opposition communities are systematically disadvantaged, when infrastructure fails repeatedly, when property values stagnate or collapse due to flooding, when businesses cannot operate reliably—economically empowered residents leave. They migrate to regions with better infrastructure or leave Guyana entirely.

This is the long game. Even if the PPP loses the seat of political power, the opposition strongholds will have been economically weakened, the middle class will have migrated, and the central government’s economic control will remain entrenched.

Historical Echoes

The comparison to post-Emancipation colonial sabotage is not hyperbole. Colonial authorities allegedly used deliberate flooding of village backlands to destroy farmers’ crops and livestock, undermining freed people’s livelihoods. This was economic sabotage designed to maintain control through economic dependence.

The modern version operates through the same logic: weaponize infrastructure, weaponize bureaucracy, weaponize neglect. The goal remains the same: maintain power through economic domination regardless of electoral outcomes.

Why Mainstream Analysis Misses This

Mainstream political analysis treats these as isolated incidents: a flooding problem here, an administrative deadlock there, a funding dispute somewhere else. They are connected.

When you map the flooding incidents, the funding allocations, the infrastructure projects, the REO appointments, and the disaster response patterns, a coherent strategy emerges. Opposition communities are systematically disadvantaged. Opposition-controlled municipalities are administratively strangled. Opposition voters are economically squeezed.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is pattern recognition.

What Must Happen

Citizens must stop accepting this as unfortunate governance failure. This is deliberate political strategy.

Citizens must chase these officials out of communities when they arrive for photo opportunities. Citizens must demand accountability for the REO’s dereliction of duty. Citizens must demand that the minister fire the REO if he will not perform his statutory obligations.

Most importantly, citizens must understand that the goal is not just to win elections. The goal is to maintain economic and structural control regardless of who holds the seat of government.

The Bottom Line

This government knows it will not occupy political power forever. So, it is building economic and structural power that will endure beyond electoral cycles.

The strategy is working. Opposition communities are flooding. Region 10 has had no elected chair for eight months. The mass exodus continues.

This is no longer theory. It is unfolding in real time.

The question is not whether this is happening. The question is whether Guyanese citizens will recognize it, name it, and stop it before the structural damage becomes irreversible.

This analysis is based on documented patterns of municipal neglect, the eight-month leadership vacuum in Region 10, accusations against the REO for refusing statutory duties, and citizen testimony from affected communities. The strategic neglect theory provides a framework for understanding how these disparate incidents connect into a coherent political strategy.

 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 ,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮  𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖

𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Foundations of Doubt: The Wales Concrete Scandal and the Case for an Immediate Halt

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THE 592 GUARDIAN  ◊ Independent Accountability Journalism  ◊Guyana ◊ EDITORIAL / INVESTIGATIVE

Foundations of Doubt: The Wales Concrete Scandal and the Case for an Immediate Halt

Reports that turbine-supporting concrete at the Wales Gas-to-Energy site has failed to meet specification are not a footnote. They are a warning. Guyana has already paid once for ignoring the ground beneath this project — in arbitration, in silence, in blown deadlines. History offers a clear lesson about what happens when concrete failures under industrial structures are managed quietly instead of independently. The Guardian’s position: halt further pours and turbine-area works now, commission an independent forensic engineering audit, and bring in a firm with no stake in the outcome to verify what is actually in the ground.

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD

There is a particular kind of national silence that precedes disaster. It is not the silence of ignorance — someone always knows first. It is the silence that follows knowing: the quiet decision that a problem, once flagged, can be managed rather than disclosed. Kaieteur News reported on July 7 that project insiders and sub-contractors at the Wales Gas-to-Energy site have raised alarms over concrete piles and foundation pours for the 300-megawatt power plant and Natural Gas Liquids facility failing to meet required engineering specifications. Engineers consulted by that publication described what happens when turbine foundations do not hold: industrial gas and steam turbines operate at rotational speeds exceeding 3,000 RPM, and they are, in the words of one specialist, “incredibly delicate, highly engineered machines” utterly dependent on the integrity of what sits beneath them.

This is not a footnote to the Gas-to-Energy story. It may be its most consequential chapter yet — and the Guardian is treating it that way.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY KNOWN

Sources close to the project — described by Kaieteur as insiders and sub-contractors — say concerns center specifically on the concrete piles driven into the ground and the concrete poured for the foundations of both the NGL plant and the power plant itself. If accurate, this points toward failures in the Quality Assurance and Quality Control protocols of the lead Engineering, Procurement and Construction contractor, Lindsayca Guyana Inc., and raises an unavoidable question about the US$22 million Owner’s Engineer contract held by Engineers India Limited (EIL) — a mandate that explicitly includes reviewing designs, supervising construction quality, and flagging structural anomalies to the Government of Guyana.

It remains unclear whether EIL formally documented and escalated these testing failures. What is clear is that no government update to date — through the Office of the President, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Natural Resources, or the project Taskforce — has acknowledged any concrete strength or foundation issue at Wales. The public messaging has remained entirely promotional

This is a project that has already shown Guyanese taxpayers what opacity costs. The 592 Guardian’s readers will recall that Lindsayca-CH4 took the Government of Guyana to arbitration over delays and soil-condition disputes at this same site — and won, forcing a quiet payout of approximately US$82 million that the government did not disclose to the public.

   

This is a project that has already shown Guyanese taxpayers what opacity costs. The 592 Guardian’s readers will recall that Lindsayca-CH4 took the Government of Guyana to arbitration over delays and soil-condition disputes at this same site — and won, forcing a quiet payout of approximately US$82 million that the government did not disclose to the public. Soil and foundation problems at Wales are not new; they are, in fact, the one recurring technical thread that has followed this project since early construction. A concrete-quality failure emerging now, on top of that history, is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

THE PRECEDENT GUYANA SHOULD BE STUDYING

There is a comparison that fits precisely what has been alleged at Wales, drawn not from speculation but from engineering-failure literature: concrete that does not hold under an industrial power structure.

On November 24, 2016, a concrete cooling-tower platform under construction at the Fengcheng power station in Jiangxi, China, collapsed, killing at least 74 workers. Investigators later attributed the collapse to premature removal of formwork from concrete that had not been given adequate time to cure — a corner cut under schedule pressure, on a project racing to hit a completion deadline.

A near-identical failure occurred decades earlier and an ocean away: the 1978 Willow Island disaster in West Virginia, United States, where a cooling tower scaffold gave way because concrete poured the night before had not cured sufficiently to bear the load being placed on it. Fifty-one construction workers died. Both cases share the same root cause pattern now being alleged at Wales — concrete rushed, under-cured, or under-specified in service of a schedule — and both are studied today in engineering-failure literature precisely because they demonstrate how a QA/QC lapse that seems containable on paper becomes a mass-casualty event in practice.

Wales is not a cooling-tower scaffold. It is a combined-cycle power plant and NGL facility carrying rotating turbine machinery, pressurized gas systems, and per the government’s own stated plans for a subsequent phase, ammonia and urea production facilities proposed for the same industrial estate. A foundation that cannot bear its designed load does not merely risk cost overruns. It risks catastrophic mechanical failure in equipment spinning at speeds that convert a structural fault into flying debris, ruptured piping, and potential fire or explosion in a facility handling pressurized hydrocarbons. This is the trajectory the Fengcheng and Willow Island precedents warn against: not whether an accident is possible, but what it costs, in lives, when a known concrete concern is managed quietly instead of investigated openly.

THE FINANCIAL EXPOSURE GUYANA IS ALREADY CARRYING

Even setting aside the safety dimension, the fiscal case for a halt is straightforward. Guyana is the guarantor on a US$526 million EXIM Bank loan tied to this project, on top of a headline cost that has already climbed from a contracted US$759 million toward a total project figure north of US$2 billion. The country has already absorbed one arbitration loss tied to site conditions. Foundation remediation on a site of this scale — repiling, demolition and re-pour of turbine plinths, forensic testing of the roughly 9,300 piles reportedly driven and the 25,000 cubic metres of concrete required across the site — is not a rounding error. It is a multi-month, potentially multi-year exposure layered on top of a project already defined by delay and cost dispute. The public deserves to know that exposure now, not after equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars has been mounted on foundations no independent party has verified.

A SHARED CALL FOR INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION

The Guardian is not alone in this call. Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI), which has separately pressed for procurement and oversight accountability across Guyana’s major infrastructure and extractive-sector projects, has joined in urging that this matter be resolved through independent, verifiable means rather than internal assurance.

TIGI’s position is straightforward and consistent with its broader institutional mandate: where credible, sourced allegations touch on public safety and public money at this scale, the public interest is served only by a transparent process — an audit conducted by parties with no commercial or contractual stake in the outcome, with findings published in full, followed by whatever remedial action the findings require. TIGI has endorsed the pursuit of a definitive, independently verified answer on the condition of the Wales foundations, and has called on the Government of Guyana to treat that verification, and the solution that follows from it, as a public accountability obligation rather than an internal project matter.

THE GUARDIAN’S AND TIGI’S POSITION

Investigative journalism and transparent accountability does not exist to generate alarm for its own sake. It exists to force disclosure before disclosure becomes unavoidable — before an accident makes the public record for us. On the basis of the reporting to date, the documented history of soil and foundation disputes at this site, and the recurring pattern of non-disclosure that has characterized this project’s governance, the Guardian and TIGI are jointly calling for the following:

♦An immediate halt to further concrete pours and turbine-area construction works at the Wales site, pending independent verification of the structural integrity of foundations already in place
♦A full, independent forensic engineering audit of every concrete pile and foundation pour completed to date at Wales, covering both the power plant and NGL facility, with results published in full — not summarized — to the Guyanese public
♦Public disclosure of whether Engineers India Limited, as Owner’s Engineer, identified and formally reported any concrete testing failures to the Government of Guyana, and if so, when, and what action followed
♦That the Government of Guyana engage Bechtel Corporation — a firm with no prior contractual stake in this project and a global record in large-scale power and industrial construction — to conduct or independently verify the final structural analysis and to oversee any required remedial works, insulating the audit from the commercial and legal interests already entangled in this project through Lindsayca and EIL.
♦Full public accounting of the financial exposure created by any required remediation, including its impact on the EXIM Bank loan terms and the project’s already-inflated total cost
♦Parliamentary oversight of this matter through the Public Accounts Committee, given the Committee’s existing — and thus far obstructed — mandate to examine this project’s spending.

None of this requires proof of catastrophe. It requires only what any responsible government does when credible, sourced allegations about structural integrity emerge on a project of this scale: it stops, it checks, and it tells the public what it finds. The alternative — proceeding on the assumption that the allegations are wrong, without verifying that they are — is the exact posture that preceded Fengcheng and Willow Island. Guyana has the chance to choose differently. The Citizens will be watching whether it does.

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on the Wales Gas-to-Energy project as further information becomes available. Sources with direct knowledge of testing results, EIL correspondence, or QA/QC documentation from the Wales site are invited to contact the editorial desk in confidence.

The Abandonment Gamble: Who Pays When Exxon Walks Away?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Independent Accountability Journalism ♦Guyana

EDITORIAL♦THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part III of IV.The Abandonment Gamble

The Abandonment Gamble: Who Pays When Exxon Walks Away?

Guyana is advancing billions of dollars to ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to fund decommissioning decades before a single well is capped — with no trust account, no escrow, and no enforceable guarantee the money will still exist when the bill comes due.

Part I of this series examined the arithmetic of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement (PSA); Part II examined how Article 32’s stability clause froze that arithmetic beyond the reach of any future Guyanese government.                                        Part III turns to a liability few Guyanese have been told to think about at all: what happens to the Stabroek Block’s platforms, pipelines and wellheads once the oil runs out, who pays to remove them, and whether the money set aside for that purpose will actually be there when it is needed.

The industry term is decommissioning, or abandonment: the process of safely plugging wells, dismantling platforms, and removing subsea infrastructure once a field stops producing. For an operation the size of the Stabroek Block — four FPSOs and counting, with more under construction — specialists estimate the eventual cost in the hundreds of millions to billions of US dollars. Under the 2016 PSA, Guyana is already paying for it. The question this editorial puts on the record is where that money is going, and whether it will still be there in twenty years.

How the Mechanism Works

Under Section 20.1(d)(gg) of the PSA and Section 3.1 of Annex C, the Accounting Procedure, ExxonMobil and its partners are permitted to tabulate a projected abandonment budget and begin recovering a portion of that budget through cost oil years — potentially decades — before decommissioning actually takes place. In other words, the Contractor does not wait until the wells are exhausted to start being repaid for the cost of eventually plugging them. It bills Guyana’s oil now, against a bill that may not come due until the 2040s or later.

PSA Section 20.1(d)(gg) and Annex C, Section 3.1 (as publicly reported)

The Contractor may establish a budget for abandonment costs and recover a portion of that budget as Recoverable Contract Costs in advance of the Petroleum Operations to which it relates, without a requirement that the recovered funds be set aside in a dedicated account for that purpose.

That last clause is the crux of the problem. Advance cost recovery for decommissioning is not, on its own, unusual in the international oil and gas industry. What is unusual — described by one American petroleum industry veteran as the most unusual provision he had encountered in any PSA he had reviewed — is that Guyana’s agreement contains no requirement that the money recovered for abandonment be placed in a trust account, an escrow, or any other ring-fenced instrument earmarked exclusively for decommissioning. The cash simply flows to the Contractor, indistinguishable from any other recovered cost, with nothing in the Agreement compelling ExxonMobil, Hess or CNOOC to preserve it for the purpose it was billed for.

What Independent Analysts Have Found

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), in a report authored by its then-director of financial analysis, Tom Sanzillo, quantified the exposure: Guyana is projected to advance more than G$666.1 billion — approximately US$3.2 billion — in cash to the oil companies, purportedly to cover future decommissioning costs, with no requirement that the companies set the money aside to guarantee it will be there when abandonment work actually begins.

Standard industry practice establishes that a trust account should be set up for a fossil fuel drilling and extraction project of this kind, one that can only be drawn upon to pay abandonment costs when they occur. Guyana’s agreement does not require that any such account be established.

— IEEFA, summarizing the Sanzillo decommissioning report

IEEFA’s warning was blunt: absent independent oversight of how the advanced funds are used, ExxonMobil and its partners have, in the organization’s words, a real opportunity to pocket the money — and if the companies were to sell their interests in the block before decommissioning is complete, passing the liability to a smaller, less capitalized successor, Guyanese taxpayers could be left to cover the shortfall themselves.

A University of Houston petroleum-accounting instructor, reviewing the same provisions for a separate analysis, reached a similar conclusion, noting that allowing cost recovery for abandonment twenty to thirty years before the funds are actually spent represents a significant financial benefit to the companies from a cash-flow and net-present-value standpoint, and stated plainly that it was the most unusual provision of its kind he had encountered in any production sharing agreement.

Guyana is paying today for a bill that will not come due for a generation — and trusting, on nothing but the word of three multinational companies, that the money will still be there.

The Change-of-Control Risk

This is not an abstract worry. The Stabroek consortium has already changed hands once at the corporate level: Chevron’s acquisition of Hess closed in 2025 only after an International Chamber of Commerce tribunal resolved a dispute between Exxon and CNOOC over rights of first refusal under the Joint Operating Agreement governing the block. Ownership of Guyana’s most consequential offshore asset is not static, and nothing in the publicly known terms of the PSA prevents a future sale of any partner’s interest to a smaller, thinner-capitalized operator less equipped to fund a multi-billion-dollar abandonment programme when the time comes.

Guyana’s Oil Czars.

Should that happen after the advanced decommissioning funds have already been recovered as cost oil, Guyana would be left in the position IEEFA warned of: having paid in advance for a service that a departed or under-capitalized operator may no longer be able to deliver, with no trust account to fall back on and no statutory lien to enforce.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Clause

Read alongside Part II of this series, the abandonment provisions complete a picture of a Government that structured away not only its fiscal upside but its long-term protections. Article 32’s stability clause means Guyana cannot unilaterally impose a decommissioning trust requirement after the fact without the Contractor’s consent and, per the logic already established, without potentially triggering a compensation claim for interfering with the Contractor’s position under the Agreement. The absence of ring-fencing was not an oversight later correctable by ordinary legislation — it was locked in alongside everything else in 2016, and it remains locked in today.

Guyana’s own 2023 Model Production Sharing Agreement for future deepwater licences includes a dedicated Article 41 on Abandonment, evidence that the Ministry of Natural Resources has since recognized the need for clearer decommissioning terms in contracts going forward. But that model applies only to new acreage. It does nothing to retrofit protection into the Stabroek Block, where the overwhelming majority of Guyana’s current and projected oil revenue — and liability — resides.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

We are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Department of Energy, and the Guyana Revenue Authority:

What is the current cumulative sum recovered by ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC as abandonment-related Recoverable Contract Costs under Section 20.1(d)(gg) and Annex C, Section 3.1, to date?
Has any portion of those recovered funds been placed in a trust account, escrow, or any instrument segregated from the Contractor’s general corporate assets? If not, why not, and does the Government intend to negotiate one?
In the event of a future sale of any partner’s interest in the Stabroek Block, what contractual mechanism, if any, requires the incoming party to assume full decommissioning liability and demonstrate the financial capacity to meet it?
Does the Government consider the absence of a decommissioning trust requirement in the 2016 PSA to be a defect correctable through negotiation with the Contractor, or does it consider Article 32 to place that correction permanently out of reach absent the Contractor’s consent

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial.

Part IV of The Stabroek Surrender will examine the flaring record at the Stabroek Block against the environmental standards the Government and the Contractor agreed to in 2016, and the enforcement gap between violation and consequence.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Long Creek Arithmetic

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism · Georgetown, Guyana

The Long Creek Arithmetic: Satellite Measurement Puts Ali’s Estate at 155 Acres — More Than Double What He Claimed on Facebook Live

President’s denial rests on assertion, not documents. Ours rests on Geospatial  Vector Data                                                      By the 592 Guardian Editorial Board · Georgetown · July 2026

President Irfaan Ali went on Facebook Live Thursday to dismiss questions about his Long Creek estate as settled business. He offered no acreage figure of his own beyond a denial — insisting only that the property is “not even half” the roughly 150 acres Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly claimed, which would place it under 75 acres. He offered no title, no survey, no lease schedule, and no answer to the one question that actually matters: how large is this operation, in fact?

We decided to answer it ourselves. Using satellite imagery centred on the estate’s coordinates — approximately 6°20’44″N, 58°1’W, off the Linden-Soesdyke Highway — this newsroom traced the visible cleared and developed footprint of the property: the poultry houses, shade houses, feedlots, access roads, ponds, and cultivated blocks that are plainly discernible from above. The resulting polygon measures 627,128.62 square metres, with a perimeter of 3,502.71 metres. That converts to 155.0 acres — a figure derived from a reproducible measurement tool, not from a press conference.

WHAT DEMERARA WAVES REPORTING ESTABLISHED

In reporting published Thursday afternoon, Denis Chabrol recorded Dr Ali maintaining that his farm was “not a discovery” and that Mr Mohamed had long known of its existence. The President disputed the size Mr Mohamed has claimed, saying it was “not even half” of that figure, but at no point in the remarks Chabrol reported did Dr Ali state what the actual acreage is. He also did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure Mr Mohamed has put forward, and he did not address the opposition’s calls — from WIN, APNU, and the AFC alike — for full public disclosure of his assets.

That combination is worth sitting with. A sitting president disputed a specific number without supplying an alternative one, declined to engage the disclosure question entirely, and asked the public to accept his account of scale on his word alone. This newsroom does not accept assertions in place of documentation, from any official, on any file.

THE MEASUREMENT

Our trace was conservative by design. We bounded only the cleared and operational area visible on current satellite imagery — the developed core of the estate — using Google Earth’s polygon-area tool rather than manual point-to-point distance estimates, which we tested first and discarded precisely because they cannot be defended without known bearings between measurement points. The polygon method requires no such assumption: it computes area directly from a traced boundary anchored to visible terrain features, and it is independently reproducible by anyone with access to the same imagery and coordinates.

Geospatial Vector Data points

Source

 Claimed Acreage

 Basis
President Ali (FB Live, July 9)

 Under 75 acres

 Verbal assertion; no figure, no documentation offered
Azruddin Mohamed

 ~150 acres

 Public statement to Demerara Waves
The 592 Guardian (satellite trace)

 155.0 acres

 Polygon-area measurement, cleared footprint, coord. ~6°20’44″N 58°1’W

Two things follow from this table. First, our independently measured figure is more than double the ceiling implied by the President’s own words — he said the property was under half of 150 acres, and our trace shows a developed footprint slightly above 150. Second, and more strikingly, our number essentially corroborates Mr Mohamed’s public figure, landing within roughly three percent of his ~150-acre estimate — a variance well inside the ordinary margin of tracing a cleared-field boundary by eye on satellite imagery. The President did not just understate the acreage. He understated it in the direction that happens to contradict the one figure already in the public record, while declining to offer any figure of his own that could be checked.

Exact measurements totalling 155 acres

WHAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

— The President did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure, but he also did not explain, beyond stating that loans were taken and profits reinvested, how that scale of financing and operation was assembled or documented.

— He did not address the calls by WIN, APNU, and the AFC for public disclosure of his full asset holdings — a call this newsroom regards as the more consequential of the two questions on the table.

— He referenced disclosures made to the Integrity Commission “in and out of government” without releasing those disclosures, or any documentation of them, to the public.

— He threatened to release the contents of a private text message from Mr Mohamed that he characterised as blackmail, but did not do so — a threat that itself belongs in the disclosure conversation, not as a substitute for it.

WHY THIS MATTERS

This is not a dispute over a rounding error. The gap between “under 75 acres” and a measured 155 is not the kind of gap that survives good-faith imprecision — it is the kind of gap that exists when a public official prefers a smaller number be believed than the one the land itself will show. Guyana’s citizens are entitled to know the scale of wealth accumulated by those who hold executive office, particularly when that wealth is accumulated contemporaneously with decisions over state land, leases, and the very highway corridor on which this estate sits. A verbal denial, however forcefully delivered on a livestream, is not disclosure. A traceable satellite measurement, published with its method and coordinates so that any reader can check it, is a starting point for one.

We invite the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, or any competent authority to publish the actual lease schedule and surveyed acreage for this property. Until that happens, the public record now includes a reproducible independent measurement — and it does not support the President’s account.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Show Us the Receipts

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

EDITORIAL

Show Us the Receipts

The Long Creek estate, the financing gap, and a blackmail disclosure that came a day too late

July, 2026

The issue is no longer whether President Irfaan Ali owns the sprawling agricultural estate at Long Creek, along the Linden-Soesdyke Highway. He has acknowledged that he does. The real question, the only question that now matters, is how such a massive investment was financed.

A project reportedly featuring extensive livestock operations, aquaculture, poultry tunnels, greenhouses, orchards, heavy equipment and a 2.2-kilometre private access road inevitably invites public scrutiny. The President insists the farm was acquired before he took office, that his assets were declared to the Integrity Commission, and that no state resources were used in its development.

Those assurances, while procedurally important, are insufficient to settle growing public concern. In a democracy, transparency is the strongest antidote to suspicion, and it is the President himself who has now invited the comparison, pointing to what he has described as “a slew of loans” that financed the enterprise.

 The President should therefore voluntarily publish the documentary evidence: bank records ,loan agreements, receipts, and other financial instruments supporting the development of this enterprise. If everything was lawfully financed, full disclosure would silence speculation and reinforce public confidence in the integrity of the nation’s highest office. Declarations filed privately with the Integrity Commission are not a substitute for that disclosure; they are, by design, not open to public verification, and it is precisely that verification the public is now owed.

A FIASCO THAT HAS OUTGROWN ITS DENIALS

This is no longer a containable news cycle. It is morphing into a national controversy of  epic proportions. The Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, has called for the President’s resignation. Transparency International Guyana has taken the extraordinary step of issuing a formal statement, ceding control of any inquiry into the matter to external bodies to preserve its impartiality, and calling for an independent international probe into what it has described as potential conflicts of interest, misuse of public resources, and violations of the Public Integrity Act. That is not the language of a watchdog satisfied by a Facebook statement.

“Living high on the hog.”…..Cheddie Jagan

The President and his party, deploying tax-funded state media in the process, have responded largely by redirecting attention toward the Leader of the Opposition and his sources of income. That deflection overlooks an elementary distinction: the Leader of the Opposition was born into a business that grew, over decades, into a private commercial empire. He has never drawn a salary as a public employee, and by his own account donates his parliamentary earnings to those in need.

Whatever scrutiny his business affairs may separately deserve, it is not an answer to a question about how a sitting President financed a multi-billion-dollar agricultural estate on a public servant’s income. The two questions do not cancel each other out, and treating them as though they do is itself a form of evasion.

“If everything was lawfully financed, full disclosure would silence speculation and reinforce public confidence in the integrity of the nation’s highest office.”

THE TIMELINES DO NOT ALIGN

Several anomalies have surfaced around the question of when, precisely, this estate came into being. The President maintains the farm predates his elevation to office in 2020, though he has not named a year. As a student of agriculture, that claim invites a discerning eye. A farm operating for the better part of a decade, as the President’s defenders imply, would show it: established fruit trees with real canopy, mature root systems, orchards with visible age structure. Instead, footage and photographs circulating publicly show planting that appears, in several instances, to be under a year old — young trees, seedlings, and orchard rows still in early establishment.

Copy of original lease for 20 acs.-2011.A mere 14 % of what currently is now shown

The infrastructure tells a similar story. The access road serving the property is newly constructed, cleared and maintained, in visible contrast to neighbouring roads in the same vicinity that remain overgrown with weeds. Newly poured, weed-free roadway does not sit well beside a claim of decade-old provenance. So what, precisely, is being represented to the public? The statements and the visible evidence do not align, and that gap is now the substance of the story, not a footnote to it.

THE BLACKMAIL CLAIM THAT SURFACED TOO LATE

A further anomaly deserves its own scrutiny, separate from the financing question but no less serious. The President has stated that he was contacted with a threat — that recordings implicating him would be released unless the Government eased extradition proceedings sought by the United States against members of the Mohamed family — and that this contact came as early as Friday, July 3rd, days before the farm story broke publicly. If that account is accurate, it describes an attempt to interfere with a live extradition matter through coercion of a sitting Head of State. That is not a grievance to be aired on Facebook after the fact. It is a matter for law enforcement, and it should have been documented and reported as such at the time it occurred.

The public is owed an answer to a straightforward question:

was this alleged blackmail attempt reported to the Guyana Police Force when it was received, or at any point before it was disclosed publicly this week?

If it was reported, the President should say so, and say when. If it was not, Guyanese are entitled to ask why a sitting President sat on what he now describes as an attempt to corrupt a matter that is sub judice, disclosing it only once his own farm became the subject of public exposure. A blackmail threat reported to police upon receipt is evidence. A blackmail threat disclosed on Facebook, days later, once one’s own conduct is under fire, reads instead as a counter-narrative deployed on convenient timing.

The President cannot have it both ways: he cannot treat the matter as serious enough to invoke sub judice sensitivity around an active extradition case while simultaneously litigating it himself, unfiled and unevidenced beyond his own account, in a public statement.

Whichever it is, the sequence itself is now part of the record the public is entitled to interrogate.

THE STANDARD THE PRESIDENT SET HIMSELF

Transparency International Guyana was right to flag that timing matters here, and the pattern reinforces the concern rather than dispelling it. Each new disclosure — the scale of the estate, the age of its infrastructure, the existence of loans left unspecified, and now a law-enforcement question left unanswered — has surfaced reactively, under public pressure, rather than proactively, as the President’s own stated commitment to disclosure would require.

World –class indeed.

That pattern is, on its own, a matter of legitimate public interest, independent of whatever the underlying facts about financing eventually show.

 

The President has said the facts are capable of independent verification. The Guardian takes him at his word and renews the request made across this newsroom and beyond it: publish the loan agreements. Publish the bank records. Publish the capital and operating costs of the enterprise, exactly as he has indicated he is willing to do. Confirm, with dates, whether the alleged blackmail contact was reported to police when it was received. Anything short of that will not silence this story. It will confirm precisely what the silence has already begun to suggest.

— The Board

Unlimited Again: The Third Attempt to Uncap State Benefits for Former Presidents.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ Independent Accountability Journalism◊EDITORIAL –July, 2026

Unlimited Again: The Third Attempt to Uncap State Benefits for Former Presidents, and What It Costs the Rest of Guyana

The Former Presidents (Benefits and Other Facilities) Bill 2026 does one thing, precisely: it repeals a 2015 law that capped what the State pays retired heads of state, and restores the open-ended 2009 framework in full. It is the third time in a decade this exact fight has come before the National Assembly. What has changed is the moment it arrives in — a cost-of-living crisis the government itself acknowledges, a parliamentary majority large enough to pass it without compromise, and a citizenry now testing whether the street, rather than the chamber, is where this argument gets settled.

WHAT THE BILL ACTUALLY DOES

Bill No. 10 of 2026 was tabled for its first reading in the National Assembly on Friday, June 5, 2026, by Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh. Its public defense has been led by Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall SC, who previewed the legislation days earlier on his programme “Issues in the News.” The mechanism is narrow and specific: repeal the Former Presidents (Benefits and Other Facilities) Act 2015, and restore in its place the framework originally enacted in 2009 under the Bharrat Jagdeo administration — the same framework the APNU+AFC coalition capped within weeks of taking office in July 2015.

Under the 2015 Act currently in force, a former president’s household benefits are itemized and bounded: utility allowances up to $25,000 per month each for water, electricity, and telephone; one attendant and one gardener; medical reimbursement capped at $200,000 annually for the former president, spouse, and children under 18, payable only for treatment unavailable in Guyana; up to two state-owned vehicles; toll-free transportation; and an annual vacation allowance equal to two first-class return airfares, mirroring the terms afforded to judges of the Supreme Court. Former presidents also currently draw a monthly pension of approximately $2.2 million.

The 2026 Bill removes every one of those ceilings. Under the restored 2009/2010 standard, the State would resume paying all utility bills at a former president’s residence in full, with no monthly cap; covering medical treatment and reimbursement without the current cost or overseas-treatment restrictions; and maintaining the household staff, security, and transport provisions without a defined ceiling on their cost to the Treasury. Nandlall has argued this is not an expansion but a correction — that the 2009 law was never controversial in principle, that President Granger already benefited from its terms since the 2015 caps did not apply retroactively to him, and that “the same standard should apply to all former presidents, including future office holders.”

HOW WE GOT HERE: 2009 TO 2026

This is not a new argument. It is the same statute, contested for the third time in seventeen years, each version reflecting who held the majority when it was written.

2009

 The Original Act (PPP/C)

The Jagdeo administration codifies former-presidential benefits into law for the first time, establishing an open-ended framework covering utilities, staff, security, vehicles, and medical care with no fixed monetary ceilings.
2015

 The Cap (APNU+AFC)

Weeks after taking office, the Granger-led coalition repeals the 2009 Act and replaces it with capped, itemized benefits — the $25,000 monthly utility ceilings, the $200,000 annual medical limit, and the two-vehicle, two-security-officer restrictions that remain law today. President Granger himself continues to draw benefits under the pre-2015 standard, since the cap was not made retroactive.
2026

 The Restoration (PPP/C)

Bill No. 10 of 2026 repeals the 2015 caps outright and restores the 2009 framework without amendment to its open-ended character. Finance Minister Singh tables it; AG Nandlall becomes its chief public advocate, framing it as a return to “normalcy” rather than an increase in entitlement.

THE OPPOSITION AND THE STREET

APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has been the most detailed legislative critic, noting that the 2015 Act did not deny former presidents reasonable benefits — it bounded them. He has called for the Bill to be routed to a Special Select Committee for cross-party consultation rather than passed on the government’s majority alone, arguing that if the caps require revision for inflation, that conversation can happen in the open. “What we cannot support,” he has said, “is a return to unlimited benefits funded by the taxpayers of Guyana.”

The sharper public reaction has come from outside Parliament. The Working People’s Alliance called on citizens to stage peaceful protests on July 6 — CARICOM Day — under WPA executive member Kidackie Amsterdam, who framed the Bill as an abuse of parliamentary majority timed against a backdrop of unemployment, low wages, and strained public services. Amsterdam has estimated that restoring uncapped benefits could add $100 million to $200 million annually to state expenditure on four living former presidents, and has argued the money would do more good directed at teachers’, nurses’, and police salaries, healthcare, pensions, youth employment, and support for agriculture and small business.

“The issue before Guyana is one of priorities.” — Kidackie Amsterdam, WPA

Commentary in the independent press has been unsparing. Kaieteur News columnist GHK Lall, writing a multi-part series tracking what he calls the government’s “third go” at unlimited benefits, has drawn a direct comparison between the household staff allowances of four former presidents and the debt-and-barter conditions many ordinary Guyanese households report navigating month to month — while stopping short of objecting to medical or security provisions specifically, which he has said he would not contest even if uncapped.

WHY THIS VOTE MATTERS BEYOND THE CHAMBER

Every government in Guyana’s post-independence history has written the former-presidents’ benefits law to reflect its own moment in office, and every government has cast its version as principled while calling its predecessor’s version political. That pattern is itself part of the story: neither the 2009 nor the 2015 nor the 2026 version has been the product of the kind of standing, depoliticized formula — indexed to a defined cost basis, reviewed by an independent body, insulated from whichever party holds the majority — that would settle this argument permanently rather than reopening it every time power changes hands.

What distinguishes 2026 from 2015 is not the legal mechanism but the arithmetic of the moment it lands in. Guyana’s GNI per capita now places it among the world’s high-income economies by World Bank classification, a figure the government cites as evidence of transformative progress. That classification sits uneasily beside a WPA-cited annual cost estimate for this Bill alone, and beside a citizenry the government’s own critics describe as bartering and borrowing to get through ordinary months. A country can be statistically wealthy and still contain a population for whom an uncapped medical or utility allowance for four private citizens reads as an insult rather than a technicality. Whether that gap is closing or widening is a legitimate news question independent of this Bill, and one this publication intends to keep asking.

The National Assembly retains procedural room to change course: a referral to Special Select Committee, as Mahipaul has proposed, would allow public and cross-party input before a final vote, and would cost the government nothing but time it has shown no urgency to spend. Passing the Bill unamended, on a comfortable majority, without that consultation, would confirm the WPA’s central charge — that this is a majority exercising its numbers rather than testing its judgment. Guyanese watching this vote are entitled to know which government is on record.

WHERE THIS STANDS

As of this writing, the Bill has passed only its first reading. No date for a second reading or a vote has been confirmed in the parliamentary record available to this publication, and no Special Select Committee referral has been reported. The 592 Guardian will track the Bill through committee stage, if any, and through any recorded division when it reaches a vote, and will publish the voting record by name, as we have done with prior contested legislation. Citizens deserve a Bill they can read before it becomes a burden they cannot refuse.

— The Board

Sourcing note: This editorial draws on public statements by AG Anil Nandlall (“Issues in the News”), reporting by Kaieteur News, INews Guyana, HGPTV, and Guyana Chronicle on Bill No. 10 of 2026, and the text of the Former Presidents (Benefits and Other Facilities) Act 2015 as referenced in parliamentary and press coverage. Figures on benefit values and cost estimates are attributed to their named sources (AG Nandlall; MP Mahipaul; WPA’s Kidackie Amsterdam) and have not been independently re-derived by this publication from Treasury disbursement records. A separate, unverified line of reporting alleges a connection between this Bill and a private agricultural investment belonging to President Ali; that claim is not supported by any sourcing found in preparing this editorial and has been deliberately excluded pending independent verification.

THE CRIME SCENE : HOW GUYANA GAVE AWAY THE NATIONS OIL

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        EDITORIAL♦ INVESTIGATIVE SERIES: THE STABROEK SURRENDER · PART I OF IV

THE CRIME SCENE: How Guyana Gave Away the Nation’s Oil Before a Single Barrel Was Lifted

Abetween the Government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited, and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited reveals a fiscal architecture engineered not to share the nation’s resource wealth, but to systematically transfer it. The numbers are damning. The provisions are deliberate. The consequences are generational.

The Editorial Board | The 592 Guardian | July 2026

I. SETTING THE SCENE
On 27 June 2016 — exactly ten years before the publication of this editorial — a minister of the Government of Guyana sat across from representatives of some of the most powerful oil corporations on earth and signed a document. That document, registered at the Deeds Registry as instrument 1794/2016, is the 2016 Petroleum Agreement between the Government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (‘Esso’), CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited (‘Nexen’), and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited (‘Hess’) — collectively referred to in the agreement as ‘the Contractor.’
The minister who signed was Hon. Raphael Trotman, then Minister of Natural Resources. The operator designated to conduct the day-to-day activities on behalf of the Contractor was Esso — the Guyanese subsidiary of ExxonMobil, incorporated in the Bahamas.
This editorial is not an opinion. It is a reckoning based entirely on the text of the agreement itself, read article by article, clause by clause. What follows is what the contract actually says — and what it means for every Guyanese citizen whose birthright was placed on the table that day.
The 2016 Petroleum Agreement is the foundational document of Guyana’s oil economy. It is also the foundational document of Guyana’s dispossession.

II. THE PRODUCTION SHARING ILLUSION
The agreement is structured as a Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) — a model that, on its surface, appears equitable. The State retains ownership of the resource; the contractor extracts it and shares the proceeds. In theory, this protects national sovereignty while attracting the technical expertise and capital that frontier exploration demands.
In practice, the 2016 agreement inverts this logic through three interlocking mechanisms: a cost recovery ceiling so generous it effectively defers the Government’s share indefinitely; a profit oil split that hands the Contractor an equal stake from the first barrel of net production; and a royalty rate so low it constitutes an afterthought.
Understand these three mechanisms and you understand the architecture of the dispossession.

III. THE 75% COST RECOVERY WALL
Article 11.2 of the agreement establishes that the Contractor shall recover its costs from production. This is standard in PSA structures — what is not standard is the ceiling.
[Article 11.2] All Recoverable Contract Costs incurred by the Contractor shall… be recovered from the value… of a volume of Crude Oil… and limited in any Month to an amount which equals seventy-five percent (75%) of the total production from the Contract Area for such Month…
In plain terms: in any given month, the Contractor is entitled to take 75 cents of every dollar of production value solely to recover its costs before the Government sees a single dollar of profit oil. This ceiling is not a cap on what the Contractor can eventually recover — unrecovered costs carry forward indefinitely under Article 11.3. It is a ceiling on how quickly the Government begins receiving its share of the profits.
The practical effect is that during periods of high capital expenditure — drilling campaigns, FPSO construction, subsea infrastructure — the Contractor can legitimately consume the entirety of its 75% cost recovery entitlement every month, leaving the Government with its 50% share of the remaining 25% — or 12.5 cents on every dollar of production value — until costs are fully recovered.

For context: industry analysts examining the agreement’s predecessor architecture have consistently identified the 75% cost recovery ceiling as an outlier in comparative PSA benchmarking. Most producing nations in similar negotiating positions in the 2010s secured cost recovery ceilings of 50% to 60%. Guyana accepted 75%.
In any given month, the Contractor may take 75 cents of every dollar produced before the Government receives its share. Unrecovered costs carry forward. There is no time limit.

IV. THE 50/50 SPLIT THAT IS NOT EQUAL
Article 11.4 addresses what happens after cost recovery is satisfied. The remainder — Profit Oil — is split between the Government and the Contractor:
[Article 11.4] The balance of Crude Oil and/or Natural Gas available in any Month after Recoverable Contract Costs have been satisfied… shall be shared between the Government and the Contractor for each Field in the following proportions: Contractor fifty percent (50%) and Minister fifty percent (50%).
A 50/50 profit split may appear balanced in isolation. It is not. In a resource-rich PSA where the host nation provides the resource, assumes all sovereign risk, and bears the social and environmental costs of extraction, international best practice — as reflected in agreements signed by Ghana, Angola, and pre-2016 Trinidad — places the government take at 60% to 80% of profit oil, particularly as production volumes increase. Sliding-scale provisions, which increase the government’s share as field profitability rises, are standard in modern PSAs.

The 2016 agreement contains no sliding scale. The Contractor’s share of profit oil does not decrease as the Stabroek Block’s extraordinary productivity — now confirmed at over 11 billion barrels of recoverable resources — became evident. The Government receives 50% of profit oil whether production is 100,000 barrels per day or 1,000,000 barrels per day.

This is not an oversight. A sliding scale provision would have been among the first items any competent negotiating team would have demanded.

Its absence from the 2016 agreement is a structural choice, and that choice has cost Guyana hundreds of millions of dollars in forgone revenue annually.
V. THE 2% ROYALTY: A FLOOR BUILT FOR THE CONTRACTOR’S BENEFIT
Article 15.6 establishes the royalty — the most basic instrument of resource sovereignty, the first charge on production that the host nation takes before any cost recovery calculation begins:
[Article 15.6] The Contractor shall pay… a royalty of two percent (2%) of all Petroleum produced and sold, less the quantities of Petroleum used for fuel or transportation in Petroleum Operations, from all production licenses subject to this Agreement.
Two percent. On a field that is now producing over 900,000 barrels of oil per day, at a price of approximately USD $75 per barrel, a 2% royalty yields approximately USD $900,000 per day — or roughly USD $328 million per year — before the royalty is subjected to the cost recovery and profit oil mechanics described above.
For comparison: Trinidad and Tobago’s royalty rates range from 10% to 12.5% depending on production level. Nigeria’s deepwater royalty is 10%. Angola’s ranges from 5% to 20%. Guyana accepted 2% — the same rate that was in the original 1999 Petroleum Agreement, signed in an era when the Stabroek Block was unproven frontier acreage and ExxonMobil was absorbing the full exploration risk.

By 2016, that risk had been substantially reduced. The 1999 agreement’s exploration terms should have been renegotiated on materially different terms reflecting the confirmed prospectivity of the block. They were not. The 2% royalty was carried forward intact.
Trinidad charges 12.5%. Nigeria charges 10%. Guyana charges 2%. The rate was set in 1999 when the block was unproven. By 2016, it was among the world’s most significant oil discoveries. The rate did not change.

VI. THE GOVERNMENT PAYS THE CONTRACTOR’S TAXES
This provision is the one that stops most readers when they encounter it for the first time. It is so extraordinary in its implications that it warrants exact quotation of the operative mechanism.

 Article 15.4 of the agreement establishes that the Minister — meaning the Government of Guyana — agrees to pay the Contractor’s income tax and corporation tax obligations to the Guyana Revenue Authority on behalf of the Contractor. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is as follows: the Government accepts the Contractor’s portion of Profit Oil as payment in kind for the Contractor’s tax liability, then uses that Profit Oil to pay the tax authority.

     [Article 15.4(a)]  …a sum equivalent to the tax assessed pursuant to Article 15.2 and 15.3 will be paid by the Minister to the Commissioner General, Guyana Revenue Authority on behalf of the Contractor and that the amount of such sum will be considered income of the Contractor…

     [Article 15.4(b)]  …the appropriate portion of the Government’s share of Profit Oil delivered in accordance with the provisions of this Agreement shall be accepted by the Minister as payment in full by the Contractor of each of the following levies, whatsoever the applicable rate of such levies may be, which the Minister shall then pay on behalf of the Contractor…

Translated into plain language: ExxonMobil and its partners do not pay their own taxes. The Government of Guyana takes a portion of its own Profit Oil share and uses it to settle the Contractor’s tax bill at the Guyana Revenue Authority. The net effect is that the Contractor’s effective tax rate on Petroleum Operations income is zero — or rather, it is paid by the Guyanese people from their own resource share.

This provision was not hidden. It is in Article 15 of a publicly registered document. It has been in force since 2016. The Government has not moved to renegotiate it. It continues to operate today, on every barrel of oil produced from the Stabroek Block.
ExxonMobil does not pay its own taxes. The Government of Guyana pays them — from its own share of the nation’s oil. This is not an allegation. It is Article 15.4 of the signed agreement.

VII. THE SIGNATURE BONUS: WHAT USD $18 MILLION ACTUALLY MEANS
Article 33.1 records the signature bonus paid by the Contractor to the Government upon execution of the agreement:
[Article 33.1] The Contractor shall pay the Government a signature bonus of eighteen million United States Dollars (US$18,000,000.00). Such payment will be made within a period of fifteen (15) Business Days after the Effective Date…
Eighteen million dollars. On a block that now produces revenues of approximately USD $5 to $6 billion per year, the signature bonus paid to secure the world’s most significant deepwater oil discovery of the 21st century was USD $18 million — less than the cost of a single deepwater exploration well, and less than three days of current production revenue.
The signature bonus is not a measure of the deal’s fairness in isolation — bonuses are sunk cost payments and do not affect ongoing economics. But as a signal of the negotiating posture and the premium the Contractor paid for the extraordinary rights it secured under the 2016 agreement, USD $18 million is a historical indictment.

VIII. THE BOTTOM LINE
The 2016 Petroleum Agreement was not the product of hard bargaining in the interest of the Guyanese people. It was the product of a negotiating process in which the Government of Guyana — advised by GGMC, authorised by the Minister, and executed as a deed before witnesses — accepted terms that systematically subordinated the national interest to the financial interests of ExxonMobil and its partners.
The agreement allows the Contractor to recover up to 75% of monthly production as costs with no time limit. It fixes the Government’s profit oil share at 50% with no sliding scale regardless of production volume. It sets a royalty of 2% — unchanged from 1999. And it requires the Government to pay the Contractor’s tax obligations from its own resource share.

None of this is the result of fraud in the legal sense. It is the result of a negotiation in which one side had superior technical knowledge, superior legal resources, and — the evidence suggests — a counterpart that was either unwilling or unable to push back on terms that would have been rejected by any competent resource ministry in the developing world.
The crime scene is the contract itself. The evidence is in plain sight. And as this series will demonstrate, the damage does not end here.

NEXT IN THE SERIES:
Part II: The Stability Trap
In Part II of The Stabroek Surrender, The 592 Guardian examines Article 32 — the Stability of Agreement clause — and its extraordinary consequence: that the Government of Guyana has contractually surrendered its sovereign right to change its own tax laws, enact new regulations, or alter the fiscal regime without compensating ExxonMobil for any adverse economic impact. We examine what this means for Guyana’s democratic governance, how international arbitration at ICSID in Washington DC replaces Guyanese courts as the final arbiter of disputes, and how the Government irrevocably waived state immunity in signing this agreement. The money was bad. The stability clause made it permanent.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian
Georgetown, Guyana | July 2026

BUILD IS A WORD NOT A FACT:WHAT THERIOT DIDN’T SAY

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

“Build” Is a Word, Not a Fact: What Theriot Didn’t Say

United States Ambassador Nicole Theriot told a room at the Four Points by Sheraton on Thursday that American companies “are not just here to extract and leave like some other countries.” President Ali, following her to the podium, called the relationship one of “conviction rather than convenience.” Neither statement came attached to a single verifiable metric. That absence is the story.       Build what? Ambassador Theriot’s own remarks answered the question for her: sustainability, capacity-building, and institutional investment were named as design principles, not delivered outcomes.

The concrete example offered — a reorganisation of emergency medical infrastructure with Mount Sinai and Northwell Health — is a technical assistance arrangement, not capital investment. It costs relatively little and buys enormous goodwill. It is not a hospital. It is not a factory. It is not a refinery. Where is the physical plant that “build” is supposed to describe?
What 2% actually buys

Start with the number the government itself doesn’t dispute. Under the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement, Guyana receives a flat 2% royalty on gross oil production, on top of a 50/50 split of whatever remains after ExxonMobil recovers costs — and that cost recovery can consume up to 75% of annual production before any profit is split at all. In 2025, with production averaging roughly 900,000 barrels a day, that structure translated into Exxon booking approximately US$6 billion in pre-tax profit, Chevron (via Hess) US$4 billion, and CNOOC US$2.5 billion — a combined take running roughly five times what flowed into Guyana’s own accounts that year, which totaled about US$2.5 billion.

So: what can Guyana build with 2%? Two percent of gross production, before a single cost-recovery dollar is deducted, does not fund a domestic refining industry, does not fund a manufacturing base, does not fund the kind of productive, export-diversified economy that would let the country stop depending on oil revenue to prop up its own currency. It funds line items in a budget still overwhelmingly reliant on the other 98% flowing through a cost-recovery mechanism controlled by the operator’s own accounting, with full recovery of the consortium’s roughly $40 billion in cumulative costs not expected until the end of 2027.
Every year before that is a year in which the overwhelming share of “Guyana’s oil” is contractually earmarked to reimburse the extractor first.

The forex question is the tell
If U.S. capital were flowing into Guyana the way Thursday’s rhetoric implied, the country would not need the nine-point foreign exchange control regime the government imposed in September 2025 to manage what the U.S. Commerce Department’s own market report calls a chronic local shortage of U.S. dollars.
Local banks now require government verification of foreign invoices and shipping documents before releasing hard currency. Importers report two-week-minimum waits for basic forex access.
Here is the detail that should embarrass anyone repeating “build, not extract” without scrutiny: that same U.S. government report notes American companies themselves have had difficulty and delays accessing the dollars needed to repatriate profits, pay royalties, and service debt out of Guyana. The scarcity isn’t only squeezing Guyanese importers — it’s squeezing the outflow of American profit. The dollars aren’t circulating and multiplying inside the domestic economy; they’re being extracted in volumes large enough that the central bank can’t supply currency fast enough for the extractors to take their winnings home cleanly, let alone for a rice importer to clear a container at the port.
History supplied the frame Theriot used against herself
“Not here to extract and leave like some other countries” is a rhetorical move as old as the extraction relationship itself: point at a rival’s sins to obscure the pattern in your own conduct. But a pattern doesn’t move because the accent changes.
A 2% royalty. A cost-recovery ceiling that lets the operator claim three-quarters of production before profit-sharing starts. A forex shortage severe enough to constrain even the extractors’ own repatriation. This is the architecture of a relationship built to take a position, not to build a base — and it was designed that way in 2016, years before anyone stood at a podium in a U.S.-branded hotel to insist otherwise.

If the Ambassador wants “build” to mean something other than a hotel gala and a hospital consulting contract, the test is simple and falsifiable: show manufacturing capacity added, show export diversification away from crude, show the forex shortage easing as a direct, traceable result of U.S. investment rather than in spite of it.                                                                               Absent that, “build, not extract” is a phrase for the toast, not a description of the balance sheet.

Until one of those three shows up in the data, 2% is not a foundation. It’s a royalty.