OIL consultant and Fellow of Chatham House, Dr. Valerie Marcel, has joined the list of agencies or expert individuals who have condemned the recent Global Witness report on Guyana’s oil contract with ExxonMobil as “opportunistic” and “fraught with disinformation”.
Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a world-leading policy institute which assists governments and societies with analysing major international issues and current affairs. It is an independent institute with no allegiance to any government or political body.

Meanwhile, Dr. Marcel has advised governments in sub-Saharan Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, South America and the Caribbean on petroleum sector policy and governance. She is the author of ‘Oil Titans: National Oil Companies in the Middle East’ and recent publications include ‘The Cost of An Emerging National Oil Company’, the most read Chatham House paper in 2016.

Making serval points on the report ‘Signed Away’, Dr. Marcel first stated that the time at which such a document was released must be seriously considered as it comes at a crucial point of what has been termed as the “mother of all elections” for Guyana. “Just two weeks ahead of a crucial election it is opportunistic, irresponsible and ultimately destructive to throw this bomb into the fray,” she stated on her social media on Wednesday.

“This election matters particularly because it’s the first following oil discoveries; it is a tense election that pits the incumbent coalition government with majority Afro-Guyanese base against the historically long-in-power Indo-Guyanese party. It will decide who gets to rule with the sudden influx of production revenues. This election matters.” Secondly, the Chatham House Fellow also highlighted that the report is riddled with innuendo for which Global Witness sought to save itself from future damage by stating multiple times that it had no evidence to for its claims.

The organisation theorised that Natural Resources Minister, Raphael Trotman, who signed the Exxon deal in June 2016, may have been compromised based on a “lavish” meeting with ExxonMobil prior to the signing. However, the same article stated at one point “Global Witness is not suggesting that Trotman’s Texas trip violates U.S. or Guyanese anti-corruption laws” and, at another, “Global Witness does not have evidence that Trotman was unduly influenced by his lavish Exxon meeting.”

Dr. Marcel pointed out: “This report is irresponsible because it’s not even-handed in its treatment of the two licence negotiations by the Granger government and by the previous government. In a context fraught with disinformation and innuendo, this report adds fuel to the fire, but does not provide clarity. It insinuates conflicts of interest with regards to Minister Trotman but does not demonstrate them. It argues a trip to Houston (unethically) paid for by Exxon caused Trotman to negotiate poorly. That’s pretty unconvincing. Global Witness should have stuck with an assessment of the deal itself.”

The expert didn’t end there but went on to criticize the investigative company of pointing out “Exxon’s heavy-handed techniques” but failing to “deliver the goods in terms of proving how Exxon exerted excessive pressure”. Just on Tuesday, the Government of Guyana also rejected a recent report by international investigative company, Global Witness, as “baseless”, “sensationalist” and “agenda-driven.” It stated that Global Witness contradicted itself in its own report, being unable to establish any corruption or malpractice whatsoever on the part of government or any of its officials. Reiterating where the country stands, the government assured that it entered into a fair agreement for the people of Guyana.