OIL & GAS GOVERNANCE  ·  STABROEK BLOCK

A $5 Billion Question the Government Won’t Ask

Exxon says the cost bank is clear. Guyana’s own audit trail suggests the company was already over its contractual limit before that announcement — and the state has not said a word about it.

On July 31, ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods told shareholders on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that the Stabroek Block consortium had recovered its full US$55 billion in investment and operating costs — nearly two years ahead of schedule. Chief Financial Officer Neil Hansen confirmed the figure. Guyana’s government said nothing for ten days. When it finally spoke, through Head of the Local Content Secretariat Michael Munroe, standing in for Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat, the message was that the country’s 50 percent profit-oil share had “already taken effect.”

That statement is technically defensible and functionally misleading, and the distinction matters more than the silence that preceded it.

WHAT THE CONTRACT ACTUALLY SAYS

The 2016 Stabroek Production Sharing Agreement does not grant Guyana 50 percent of oil produced. It grants 50 percent of profit oil — whatever remains after royalty and cost recovery are deducted from gross production. Article 11.2 caps that cost-recovery deduction at 75 percent of production in any given month. Whatever survives that monthly cap is split: 2 percent royalty to Guyana off the top, then the remaining profit oil divided 50/50 between the state and the Stabroek consortium.

Run the arithmetic on a single month of production and Guyana’s realized share of gross revenue has never been 50 percent, and it has rarely been the 14.5 percent commonly cited in public commentary. It has been closer to 12.5 percent — 2 percent royalty plus half of the 25 percent left over once the contractor takes its full 75 percent allowance. That is the figure Kaieteur News itself has used in describing the fund’s own quarterly disclosures.

Recovering the historical $55 billion cost bank does not change that formula. It does not convert the arrangement into a flat 50/50 split of everything produced from August onward. It means the specific pool of past expenditure that was consuming space inside the 75 percent monthly ceiling has been paid down. The ceiling itself does not disappear. It refills — with current operating costs, and with whatever the consortium spends developing the two additional projects it is already eyeing, an eighth and ninth phase, on top of the seven already approved.

The opposition’s own position, delivered through APNU, is that no further project should be sanctioned without a ring-fencing provision, precisely because new project costs will re-enter the same 75 percent bucket and suppress Guyana’s take exactly as the original seven did.

Munroe’s statement that the 50 percent share “has already taken effect” is true only in the narrowest sense: for the moment, and only for the moment, the historical bank is empty. Whether that translates into a sustained higher share depends on a variable the government did not mention and has not committed to disclosing: how much of the freed-up 75 percent capacity gets absorbed again by new sanctioned development.

THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD HAVE LED THE STORY

Buried beneath the recovery announcement is a finding that did not originate with this publication, but deserved far more scrutiny than it received. The Oil and Gas Governance Network, an overseas technical monitoring group, compared ExxonMobil’s disclosed cost-recovery totals against the Bank of Guyana’s own published figures for total Stabroek Block revenue between 2020 and 2025.

The Bank of Guyana reported gross block revenue of US$61.3 billion over that period. Under Article 11.2’s 75 percent ceiling, the maximum the consortium was contractually entitled to recover was approximately US$46.0 billion. ExxonMobil’s own disclosures show it recovered US$51.0 billion — roughly US$5 billion beyond what the contract permits, equivalent to 83.2 percent of gross revenue rather than the 75 percent ceiling written into the agreement.

If that figure holds up, it means the premise of the entire “Guyana has now arrived at its 50 percent share” narrative is built on a cost bank that may itself have been overstated relative to the PSA’s own terms. A government that had been rigorously enforcing the 75 percent ceiling all along would have caught a US$5 billion overage well before Exxon announced full recovery on its own earnings call.

Nothing in the public record indicates that happened.

WHAT THE DEPOSITS ACTUALLY SHOW, SO FAR

Independent of OGGN’s overage finding, the receipts flowing into the Natural Resource Fund this year do not yet show the step-change some commentators have projected. Bank of Guyana disclosures show the Natural Resource Fund received approximately US$761 million in the first quarter of 2026 and a further US$1.235 billion in the second quarter — a combined US$2.0 billion for the first half of the year. That tracks close to Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh’s own full-year budget projection of roughly US$2.78 billion, not a trajectory toward the US$8–10 billion in annual revenue some public estimates have floated as the ceiling of what full cost-bank clearance could eventually deliver.

That does not mean those higher projections are wrong. It means they have not shown up in the money yet, and government’s ten-day silence — followed by a single unscripted remark from a deputy at an energy conference — has left no official account of why, or what changes going forward.

THE ACTUAL FAILURE OF GOVERNANCE

The comparison worth drawing is not that ExxonMobil conducts itself professionally while the Guyanese state does not. Exxon’s obligation is to its shareholders, and by that measure, Woods’ description of the recovery as exceeding the company’s own expectations is unremarkable — that is what a well-run extraction company does.

The state’s obligation is different in kind. Under a production-sharing agreement, the government is not merely a passive recipient of a royalty check. It is the counterparty responsible for verifying that cost recovery stays inside the ceiling the contract sets, because every dollar the consortium recovers beyond that ceiling is a dollar that does not become profit oil subject to the 50/50 split. On OGGN’s numbers, that verification function did not hold for the five years leading up to this announcement.

The Ministry of Natural Resources has not disputed the US$5 billion figure. It has not confirmed it either. It has said nothing about it at all — the same silence that met the recovery announcement itself, now extended to the audit finding that should have prompted the announcement in the first place.

Two weeks elapsed between Exxon’s disclosure and any government acknowledgment. In that window, citizens learned the state of their principal natural resource asset from a shareholder call in Texas before they learned it from Georgetown.

That sequencing is the actual scandal — not that a private company defends its shareholders’ interests capably, but that the public authority charged with checking that company’s arithmetic against a specific, numerical, contractual ceiling appears not to have been checking it, and still has not said whether it now will.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from the Ministry of Natural Resources on the OGGN cost-recovery overage finding. This article will be updated with any response received.

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Missing US$1.6 Billion: Exxon’s Local Content Claims Don’t Match the Ministry of Finance’s Own Books

ExxonMobil told an industry audience this month it has spent US$3.6 billion in local companies since 2019, pointing ahead to the 2027 Guyana Energy Conference. Finance Minister Ashni Singh’s own Budget figures put cumulative local content spending at just over US$2 billion since December 2021 — and even that number is only half itemized. Neither account has been reconciled, and neither institution has been asked to explain the gap.

By the Editorial Board — August,2026

ExxonMobil Guyana Limited (EMGL) President Alistair Routledge told an industry audience on August 14 that “collectively the industry has spent over US$3.6B in local companies” of the roughly US$55 billion the company and its partners have poured into developing the Stabroek Block since first oil.

He offered the figure as evidence of “tremendous progress,” framed against an ambition he said remains “higher than that,” and pointed to discussions at the upcoming 2027 Guyana Energy Conference as the venue to build on it.

The number was not interrogated at the venue where it was delivered, and it does not appear anywhere in the Government of Guyana’s own accounting of the same activity. Seven months earlier, in his 2026 Budget presentation to the National Assembly, Senior Minister with Responsibility for Finance Dr. Ashni Singh gave the National Assembly a materially different figure: “over US$2 billion” in goods and services procured from Guyanese companies and nationals since the enactment of the Local Content Act in December 2021 — not since 2019, and not “over US$3.6 billion.”

Both figures purport to measure the same underlying activity: what of the offshore oil boom’s capital and operating spend has actually landed with Guyanese firms. Both were delivered as settled, citable facts, by officials with every institutional resource needed to produce a precise number.

Neither matches the other, and no public record shows either side has been asked to reconcile the difference.

A GAP THAT WIDENS UNDER SCRUTINY

The discrepancy is not simply that the two figures disagree by roughly US$1.6 billion. It is that the disparity survives, and in one dimension worsens, once the underlying periods and Minister Singh’s own category breakdown are examined.

Exxon’s US$3.6B figure covers industry-wide spending — EMGL together with its co-venturers Hess and CNOOC — across a longer window beginning in 2019. Government’s US$2B figure covers a narrower window beginning only at the Local Content Act’s passage in December 2021, and appears to describe EMGL-linked and broader registered-firm procurement rather than the full three-company partnership. A shorter period should, on its face, produce a smaller number. It does — but the gap between the two remains far larger than the roughly two-year difference in start dates would explain on its own, particularly given that the bulk of Stabroek’s capital expenditure and vendor registration activity has occurred since 2021, not before it.

The gap widens further on inspection of the Ministry of Finance’s own supporting detail. In the same Budget presentation, Dr. Singh itemized four categories comprising the government’s local content figure: US$175 million in construction, US$250 million in engineering and machining, US$387 million in manpower and crewing, and US$101 million in accommodation. Those four categories sum to approximately US$913 million — less than half of the “over US$2 billion” headline Dr. Singh cited in the same address. The Ministry has not published what fills the remaining balance.

“More than half of the government’s own headline local-content figure is unaccounted for in its own supporting detail.”

TWO EXPLANATIONS, NEITHER TESTED

There are, in essence, two non-exclusive explanations for why Exxon’s public claim and the Ministry of Finance’s own figures diverge by roughly US$1.6 billion, and this newsroom has found no evidence that either has been formally examined by Parliament, the Auditor General, or the Local Content Secretariat.

The first is that the Ministry of Finance’s accounting is incomplete — that Dr. Singh’s “over US$2 billion” figure understates true local content spending because it does not fully capture procurement by Hess and CNOOC, undercounts categories outside the four itemized in the Budget presentation, or simply reflects a narrower measurement methodology than the one Exxon uses internally. On this reading, the missing US$1.6 billion is real spending that the state’s own books have failed to record — a significant statistical and oversight failure in its own right, given that the Local Content Secretariat exists specifically to track this activity.

The second is that Exxon’s US$3.6 billion figure is inflated relative to what the Local Content Act actually defines as qualifying local content. The Act’s First Schedule reserves 40 specific categories of goods and services for Guyanese-majority firms — office rental, catering, accommodation, insurance, immigration services, non-hazardous waste management, and others — with defined thresholds ranging from 25 percent to 100 percent Guyanese participation. Industry-wide “local spend” figures of the kind Routledge cited routinely include categories the Act does not reach at all: payments to joint ventures where Guyanese ownership is nominal rather than economically substantive, procurement routed through first-tier contractors whose own local content reporting has been separately flagged by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo as unreliable, and category totals that were never independently verified against the Local Content Register.

Both possibilities point toward the same institutional failure: more than four years after the Local Content Act’s passage, and roughly eleven years after first discovery, there is no single, audited, publicly reconciled figure for how much of Guyana’s oil wealth has actually reached Guyanese hands. The two largest institutional actors with the standing to produce one — the operator and the Ministry of Finance — have each published their own number, and neither has been required to defend it against the other.

THE ENFORCEMENT BACKDROP

The disparity does not exist in a vacuum. It sits atop a documented pattern, described on the record by Vice President Jagdeo himself at an April 2023 Local Content Summit, in which foreign firms structure joint ventures to satisfy the Act’s 51 percent Guyanese-ownership threshold on paper while extracting the underlying economic value through loan and lease arrangements that sit senior to any dividend the Guyanese majority shareholder might otherwise receive.

Mr. Jagdeo further acknowledged that first-tier contractors have been outsourcing carved-out categories of work specifically because “their reporting relationship is not strong enough” to prevent it — a direct admission that the categories meant to guarantee Guyanese participation are not reliably enforced even where they nominally apply.

The statutory penalty for non-compliance underscores how little institutional weight sits behind the figures either side is citing. The Local Content Secretariat has confirmed that the fine for a non-compliant company is GUY$5 million — approximately US$28,809 — against contracts that Guyanese joint-venture partners have described as routinely running into the hundreds of millions of US dollars. A penalty measured in the tens of thousands of dollars is not a deterrent against a contracting structure built around hundreds of millions; it is a cost of doing business, and it supplies no incentive for either an operator or a first-tier contractor to ensure the figures it reports are accurate rather than merely favorable.

WHAT THIS NEWSROOM IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is putting the following questions to ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources / Local Content Secretariat. We will publish responses in full.

1. To ExxonMobil Guyana Limited: Please provide the methodology and category-level breakdown underlying the US$3.6 billion figure cited by President Alistair Routledge, including the share attributable to EMGL, Hess, and CNOOC individually, and the share of that figure that qualifies as “local content” under the First Schedule of the Local Content Act as opposed to broader in-country spending.
2. To the Ministry of Finance: Please reconcile the “over US$2 billion” figure cited in the 2026 Budget presentation with ExxonMobil’s US$3.6 billion figure. Specifically, does the Ministry’s figure include procurement by Hess and CNOOC, or EMGL alone? What categories, beyond the four itemized (construction, engineering/machining, manpower/crewing, accommodation), account for the remaining balance of over US$1.1 billion within the Ministry’s own total?
3. To the Ministry of Finance and the Local Content Secretariat: Has any government body — the Auditor General, the Public Accounts Committee, or the Secretariat itself — independently verified either Exxon’s US$3.6 billion figure or the Ministry’s US$2 billion figure against the Local Content Register or audited financial statements of registered firms? If not, why not, given that both figures have now been cited publicly as authoritative?
4. To the Local Content Secretariat: Of the companies whose procurement is counted within either the Exxon or Ministry of Finance totals, how many have been reviewed for the joint-venture “fronting” structures described publicly by Vice President Jagdeo in April 2023 — in which a 51 percent Guyanese shareholding is not accompanied by proportionate economic benefit due to loan or lease arrangements with the foreign partner? How many such reviews have resulted in decertification, fines, or referral for prosecution since the Secretariat’s establishment in 2022?
5. To the Ministry of Natural Resources: Given that the Secretariat’s own November 2025 review of the Local Content Act was launched specifically to address “gaps identified since the law’s inception,” does the Ministry consider the current First Schedule — and the accounting practices used to measure compliance with it — adequate to produce a verifiable, reconciled figure for local content spending? If not, what is the timeline for a framework that would?

The 592 Guardian sought comment from ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources in advance of publication. This article will be updated with any response received.

— The Board

My Position on the Crisis within the CCJ

The CCJ Crisis: Its President Has Responded. Questions Remain.

OP– ED BY: Christopher Ram— August  16, 2026

The lengthy statement by CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson is an important development in a crisis which has damaged the integrity and perceived impartiality of the Court – hopefully not irreparably, but certainly for years to come, particularly if the existing leadership remains in place.

Justice Anderson deserves credit for responding publicly. He rejects allegations of panel fixing and improper attempts to influence judicial outcomes. His explanations deserve fair consideration, but cannot substitute for an independent examination of allegations made by five of the Court’s six other sitting judges.

Two of the controversies are of particular importance to Guyana. On the Mohamed extradition case, Justice Anderson does not directly answer Justice Jamadar’s specific allegation that he attempted to influence colleagues whose views differed from his. Unanimity in the eventual result does not answer an allegation about the integrity of the process by which that result was reached.

The other concerns Guyana’s Judiciary, for which the Constitution makes specific provision. Anderson now acknowledges that in October 2025 he privately sought to encourage agreement on the substantive appointments of Chancellor and Chief Justice, speaking separately with President Irfaan Ali and then Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton. He concedes that another course would have been better and that he might have confined himself to public commentary, as his predecessors had done.

This not only reflects poor judgment unbecoming of the holder of such an exalted judicial office, but raises the more important question whether the President of Guyana’s final appellate court should intervene in a constitutional process entrusted to the President and Leader of the Opposition of a Member State.

Significantly, Anderson sidesteps Norton’s more specific allegations: that he sought Norton’s agreement to particular appointments; said that he had participated in negotiations concerning then acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings-Edwards and sought to facilitate them; and told Norton that the President and others were waiting to swear in the proposed appointees, indicating when questioned that he had been with President Ali.

In a lengthy statement intended to answer the controversies surrounding him, omissions of that significance cannot simply be dismissed as oversight.

Nor can responsibility rest with Justice Anderson alone. At the political level, the circumstances demanded strict observance of the separation between Executive and Judiciary. Instead, President Ali appears to have lent support to an intervention by the President of the CCJ in a process which, according to Norton, encompassed the departure of the then acting Chancellor and the proposed appointment of Guyana’s two highest judicial officers.

Ali must – but won’t – explain his role in these serious matters. Who initiated the discussions? What was discussed? What did he understand Anderson’s role to be? Was the Attorney General consulted?

More fundamentally, if the President was prepared to engage the head of Guyana’s final appellate court in such an intervention at the apex of the judicial system, Guyanese are entitled to ask where he believes the boundary lies between legitimate executive action and interference with the Judiciary. If Ali is prepared to cross that boundary with the apex court, what assurance is there that it will be respected in the domestic courts?

Against this background, Guyana’s institutional responses are disappointing. The Bar Association concentrated on confidentiality and expressly declined to address the substance. That position will inevitably reinforce existing suspicions about its political independence. 

For its part, Guyana’s judicial leadership associated itself with a regional statement which declined to address the merits while expressing grave concern about the breach of confidentiality. Given Guyana’s exceptional involvement, was there consultation within our Judiciary before its leadership joined that statement?

There is also an unavoidable issue of perception. In the 2018 presidential term-limits case, Justice Anderson was the lone dissenting judge in the CCJ’s six-to-one decision upholding Guyana’s constitutional term limits. His dissent was entirely within his judicial right and is not evidence of political bias. But his subsequent acknowledged intervention with Guyana’s political Executive inevitably causes that history to be viewed in a new and uncomfortable context.

The controversy also unfairly casts a shadow over the acting Chancellor and acting Chief Justice and their prospects for confirmation. Nothing disclosed establishes wrongdoing by either. That unfair consequence itself demonstrates why the appointment process should have been insulated from outside intervention.

Finally, the Guyana Bar Association and the regional judicial leadership elevated the leaking of confidential correspondence above grave allegations which the CCJ President’s lengthy statement has only partially addressed. There is no evidence that any of the five judges leaked the emails. The disclosure could have come from anyone with access.

What matters is that the correspondence exposed an atmosphere harmful to the Court and the Region. The five judges did not create this crisis by raising these concerns. The crisis lay in the conditions that caused them to do so. 

Justice Anderson’s statement is welcome but incomplete. It cannot be the final word.

THE 592 GUARDIAN 

The Lights We Dim, The Loads We Court

GPL’s “Unusual Demand” Was Never Unusual — And the Government’s Own Numbers Prove It

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Phillips stood beside Minister of Public Utilities Deodat Indar and GPL Executive Kesh Nandlall to announce that Guyana had reached an “unusual peak in demand for electricity.” Public buildings would switch off lights and air conditioning when not in use. 

Community floodlights would go dark during peak hours. Households were asked to conserve. Commercial and industrial customers — who together account for 70 to 80 percent of demand on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System — were told to disconnect from the grid during peak periods.

The peak in question: 242.64 megawatts, reached two days before the announcement.

There is nothing unusual about it. This publication flagged the risk in May, when the El Niño pattern now cited as the proximate cause was already forecast. The government’s own utility had already told the country, in February, exactly where this was heading.

A Trajectory, Not a Surprise

Speaking at the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference in February, GPL’s Kesh Nandlall laid out the numbers plainly. Peak demand had more than doubled in five years — from 120 megawatts in 2020 to 236 megawatts by the end of 2025. The customer base had grown from 201,000 to 244,000. And the curve ahead was steeper still: Nandlall projected peak demand would reach 1,650 megawatts by 2030, a figure he himself described as a “600 percent” increase in generating capacity that Guyana would need to find in four years.

Set against that trajectory, this week’s 242.64-megawatt peak is not an aberration. It is the trend continuing on schedule. Indar himself supplied the comparison: the 2025 peak was 221 megawatts. This year’s is 21.6 megawatts higher — under a 10 percent year-on-year increase, consistent with a growth pattern GPL has been publishing for months. Calling this “unusual” requires ignoring the utility’s own forecasting.

The Diagnosis Doesn’t Match the Prescription

The more revealing admission came from Indar directly, and it undercuts the entire premise of the conservation campaign. Pressed on the numbers, the Minister was unambiguous: Guyana does not have a generation shortfall.

“We know we have enough generation to deal with the grid,” Indar said. “It is just different part of the grid that have peculiar problems with voltage that we have to do intervention at particular spots on the grid.” He repeated the point for emphasis: the country “does not have a power generation issue,” with 256 megawatts of capacity already available — set to reach 265 by Monday with the Garden of Eden addition, and 280 by the end of August.

If the problem is localized voltage faults at specific points on the grid, the remedy for that problem is targeted engineering intervention at those points. It is not a national directive asking households to turn off appliances, ordering community floodlights dark, and instructing major industrial users to physically disconnect from the grid during peak hours. Those are supply-side rationing measures, deployed against what the government’s own minister says is not a supply-side problem.

One of two things is true here. Either the conservation campaign is a blunt public-relations response to a narrower technical fault — treating a wiring and voltage-regulation problem as a generation crisis because that framing is easier to explain and act on quickly — or the “unusual demand” language was reached for before the voltage diagnosis was fully worked out, and the government is now managing the gap between the two explanations in real time. Neither is reassuring. Both point to the same underlying failure: a utility and a ministry reacting to a peak they had already forecast, with a response that doesn’t match the cause they’re now describing.

Where the New Industrial Load Fits

The conservation announcement did not happen in isolation. The same week, representatives of First Bauxite, Strategic Bauxite USA and ElementUSA were in Georgetown meeting with Indar on the electricity requirements of a planned bauxite mine expansion and new calcination facilities — a project backed by an $85.5 million U.S. equity investment as part of a wider $150 million package. Indar welcomed the talks as “an important signal for Guyana’s development.”

Commercial and industrial users already consume 70 to 80 percent of what the grid supplies, and they are the customer class currently being asked to come off the grid at peak. The government says that once GPL reaches its 280-megawatt target by month’s end, industrial users will no longer need to disconnect during peak periods.

What remains unstated is whether that 280-megawatt figure — or the 266 megawatts GPL’s own planners project as the peak for August through October — accounts in any way for the additional load a bauxite calcination operation would eventually draw. If it does not, the margin the government is describing as adequate is thinner than advertised the moment that project moves from technical talks to operating equipment.

The Foresight Question

This newsroom does not fault a utility for demand growth — growth is the point of the investment Guyana has spent years courting. The fault lies in treating a forecast as a surprise, and in reaching for a nationwide conservation order before the underlying technical problem was clearly identified and communicated. 

GPL had the growth curve in February. The El Niño forecast was public well before this month. The gap between knowing a strain is coming and being ready to meet it without asking public buildings to sit in the dark is precisely the gap this newsroom has been documenting across other sectors for months: the announcement without the infrastructure, the plan without the preparation.

Guyana can afford neither posture indefinitely — not with a bauxite calcination plant on the way, and not with GPL’s own numbers pointing toward a demand curve that makes this week’s 242.64 megawatts look, in three years, like the easy part.

— The Board

The Arithmetic of Confidence

What Ramsaroop’s Investment Dossier Leaves Out

By Staff Writer  |  The 592 Guardian

Peter Ramsaroop wears two hats when he writes about Guyana’s investment climate. He is a Member of Parliament for the governing PPP/C, and he is the government’s Chief Investment Officer — the official responsible for the very numbers he then presents to the public as independent proof of success. His recent dossier, laying out Vision 2030’s investment record, is a useful document.

Not because its arithmetic withstands scrutiny, but because it is a near-perfect specimen of a governing style this paper has tracked across a dozen files: announce the aggregate, withhold the underlying record, and treat the gap between the two as a detail rather than the story.

Two of his own examples make the case better than we could.

THE NUMBERS WITHOUT THE NAMES

Ramsaroop’s dossier is built almost entirely from totals. Approximately 189 investment projects. G$1.06 trillion in private economic investment. 73 per cent foreign, 20 per cent local. 137 companies helped into export markets, 112 connected with overseas buyers. Private-sector credit more than doubling since 2020.

Not one of these figures comes with a list. No project registry, no sector breakdown, no accounting of how many of the 189 “facilitated” investments are operating today versus merely agreed on paper. GO-Invest is, by definition, a promotional agency — its data is a record of its own activity, not an independently audited account of the economy.

Ramsaroop is careful to note that GO-Invest figures should not be confused with the Bank of Guyana’s balance-of-payments data on total FDI — a caveat that, read closely, concedes the point critics have been making for years: the investment figures cited in political speeches are frequently not the ones the central bank would recognize.

This is not unique to Ramsaroop. It is the house style of this government’s economic communication. Two case studies from his own dossier show what the aggregate numbers are built to obscure.

EXHIBIT ONE: THE 50 PER CENT THAT KEEPS SLIPPING

Ramsaroop names energy as “the foundation for the next phase of industrialization” and points to the 300-megawatt Gas-to-Energy plant at Wales as the transformational project that will cut electricity costs by roughly half. He gives a completion target: “first power targeted by the end of 2026.”

The public record tells a different story than the one in his dossier.

The Wales plant was originally contracted in 2022 at US$759 million, with completion promised by December 2024. It has since missed that deadline, then April 2025, then the end of 2025, then May 2026, and now sits at “end of 2026” for first power — a target the government’s own project consultant, Winston Brassington, has said will not bring the plant to full 300-megawatt capacity until mid-2027. That is two and a half years later than originally promised, on the government’s own most recent account.

The cost has moved with the schedule. A dispute settlement with the contractor over soil stabilization and delay claims pushed the contract price from US$759 million to US$856 million. Separately, reporting has surfaced that government paid the contractor US$80 million after losing an arbitration matter — a payment made without public disclosure at the time.

 The bill for the delay itself is larger than the overrun on the contract. With the plant not yet supplying power, Guyana has spent 2025 and 2026 running the grid on imported heavy fuel oil and two rented Turkish powerships, at a combined cost estimated at roughly US$884 million above what the original two-year timeline would have cost. The powership rental alone runs to approximately US$235,000 a day.

Ramsaroop’s dossier states a completion date and a savings target as though both were secure. Neither is. The promised 50 per cent reduction in electricity costs cannot be assessed against a plant that is not yet operating at the capacity required to produce it.

EXHIBIT TWO: THE FARM WITHOUT THE LEDGER

Ramsaroop’s second flagship example is Demerara Distillers Limited’s move into fresh milk production — “precisely the type of investment our government has worked to stimulate,” he writes, citing it as proof that local capital, agriculture and processing capacity are converging as intended.

What he does not mention is what the public sector put into making that example possible.

The Demerara Dairies farm at Moblissa sits on land the government’s own newspaper, the Guyana Chronicle, reports was acquired from the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission — state land. The Chronicle’s own account does not specify the terms of that acquisition: whether the land was sold at market value, leased, or granted on concessional terms. No lease, sale price, or transfer document has been made public.

Around that land, the government has committed a package of public infrastructure: a bridge built across the Moblissa creek, commitments to rehabilitate the access road, an electricity extension through Guyana Power and Light and the Linden Electricity Company, and rehabilitation of a water well — commitments significant enough to bring the President and his National Security Adviser to the site in person, alongside GPL’s acting chief executive.

None of these commitments has been published with a cost attached.

The gap between commitment and delivery is itself instructive. More than a year after government financed the Moblissa bridge, the project’s own representatives were still publicly asking government to upgrade the “currently deplorable” access road to the all-weather standard needed to move cattle, equipment and refrigerated milk trucks. The infrastructure Ramsaroop implicitly credits as evidence of a functioning investment ecosystem was, by the account of the company benefiting from it, still incomplete.

None of this makes DDL’s dairy venture illegitimate, and this editorial is not suggesting the company has done anything improper in accepting terms the state offered it. The point is narrower and more damning for Ramsaroop’s argument: he holds up Moblissa as proof that Vision 2030 investment strategy works, without disclosing that the example is underwritten by state land and public infrastructure whose terms have never been made public. A reader is asked to take the success story on faith, in exactly the way GO-Invest’s aggregate figures ask the public to take the trillion-dollar figure on faith.

THE PATTERN

Set beside each other, the two exhibits describe the same governing habit. A number or a date is announced with confidence — 50 per cent cheaper power, a transformational dairy venture — and the underlying record needed to test that confidence is never produced. When the record does surface, usually through freedom-of-information requests, parliamentary questions, or investigative reporting rather than voluntary disclosure, it tends to show the announced figure was optimistic, incomplete, or silent on the public cost behind it.

Ramsaroop closes his dossier by asking Guyanese to consider “where do we fit” in the transformation underway. It is a fair question, but it presumes the transformation is as documented as it is described. Before Guyanese citizens and businesses can sensibly answer where they fit, the government that employs Ramsaroop as its Chief Investment Officer might first answer a simpler one: what did the public actually pay, and what did the public actually get, for the flagship examples it is holding up as proof.

The 592 Guardian has sought comment from GO-Invest and the Ministry of Public Works on the matters raised in this piece and will publish any response received.