No laws broken; no corruption in Kaieteur, Canje giveaways – Jagdeo

Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo has said that the government intends to peruse briefing reports on the handling of the awards of the Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks, to find any possible evidence of corruption.He posited, too, during a press conference yesterday, that he does not believe any laws were broken, nor is there any evidence of corruption.

He was asked whether he would support an independent probe by a competent foreign investigator, into the awards. When Kaieteur News first raised the issue of red flags surrounding the awards, in 2019, the then Opposition Leader had said that an independent probe would receive his support.
However, Jagdeo yesterday refused to commit to having said probe then. He said that he would not commit “at this stage.”
He continued: “We go sequentially, that’s how I work. I work sequentially. I’m trying to find out [whether there is corruption].”

Preceding any investigation, Dr. Jagdeo said he has asked for internal documents to be prepared to give an understanding of the approval process for the awards of the blocks, the timelines for the incorporation of the companies which received the blocks, and the names of individuals involved.“I want to make sure that the media also gets proper information from the petroleum department about their engagement.” Jagdeo said. “I want to see how long they have been engaged with these companies before they got the licences. Because if there was long term engagement with them, they were not new engagements that happened suddenly.”
Kaieteur News pointed out that this review being done by Jagdeo would be of his own party, which is a conflict of interest.

In response, he said “that’s the first stage. I have to be satisfied. That’s the first stage at this point in time. So that’s the first one I have to do. I am going in sequence to this.”
He further said that if reporters are listening to reason, then he can proffer a reasonable explanation for what transpired with the Canje and Kaieteur awards, and give them “a totally different picture of what’s taking place there.”

Thus far, he said he has found no breach of the law.
“So the key issue is – was it corrupt? Can we find a link to any government official in this regard?”
He is not convinced, because “what has been raised [is] a lot of speculation.”
The Vice President said that even Global Witness, with its strong reach and international presence, could not provide a single shred of evidence that there has been a corrupt or illegal transaction.
Furthermore, he expressed confidence in former President Donald Ramotar, who signed the Kaieteur and Canje agreements away in 2015, just before he was ousted by the David Granger coalition in that year’s election.

“I’m convinced from knowing Ramotar,” Jagdeo said, “that there was no corruption.”
In his view, the issues raised by Kaieteur News can be explained away since in that time, before the discovery of oil, Guyana was liberal with the way it went about issuing licences.
He responded to the assertion that the blocks were given to companies which are not capable of developing them, positing that even oil majors like ExxonMobil and Total SA would take licences and flip them.

This is what the initial owners of the Kaieteur and Canje blocks did, without doing any work.
“So whether you have capability or not,” Jagdeo said, “that was never a requirement of the [Petroleum] Act, particularly in that period when you did not find oil… People would have to face a whole range of questioning, even with the transferral [of stakes].”
In today’s times, he said, there would be much more stringent measures to determine the capability of applicants before awarding licences.

In a series titled ‘The Fleecing of Guyana’, Kaieteur News has been exposing some of the red flags in the Canje and Kaieteur oil Blocks agreements. The Canje block was awarded by the Donald Ramotar administration on March 4, 2015 days before the elections to local company, Mid-Atlantic Oil & Gas. The Kaieteur block was awarded April 28th, 2015 – just two weeks before the elections – and like Canje – on the advice of former Minister of Natural Resources, Robert Persaud.

Two companies received the block with 50-50 stakes- Ratio Energy Limited (now Cataleya Energy Limited) and Ratio Guyana Limited. The red flags which have manifested in both situations include that the awards were given to unqualified companies, that the initial owners quickly flipped the blocks without doing any work, that they are incorporated in secrecy jurisdictions, and that Guyana likely lost revenue due to the avoidance of an open, competitive bidding process.