Jail time for people who keep oil money a secret
What happened with Exxon signing bonus should never happen again – Jagdeo
Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo is forging ahead with a promise he made in opposition last year to legislate criminal penalties for non-disclosure of oil revenues and other financial receipts from oil companies.Making an appearance on last Thursday’s edition of Kaieteur Radio’s Guyana’s Oil & You, Jagdeo told the hostess, Kiana Wilburg, that the country can expect the legislation to criminalise non-disclosures as soon as the government passes the upcoming budget.“We made it clear,” he stated “that the Minister of Finance or the Secretary to the Treasury, they would have under legislation to gazette every cent collected from the oil companies, big or small, a dollar or a hundred dollars.”
Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo.
He added that they would have to gazette the receipt within a time period, about three months, and notify the Parliament.“So if the country knows how much we’ve collected every year,” he told Wilburg, “you can go to the official gazette and just add down all the sums and then you, as a private citizen will know Guyana collected this amount of money for the year…”He explained that the registering of the funds would also have to go through a budgetary and audit process. The Vice President related examining other countries and finding that the likelihood of persons stealing money from the public purse skyrockets when nobody knows how much money has been collected.The need for legislation to criminalise non-disclosures became evident to Jagdeo while in Opposition, as the former APNU+AFC government hid from the Guyanese public for over a year that it had received a signing bonus from ExxonMobil of US$18M at the time of inking the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement (PSA); the money was deposited into the Consolidated Fund in May of 2019, three years after it was received from the oil giant.
“You know what happened with the US$18M,” Jagdeo said. “That could never happen again.”He said the money should have been paid into the Treasury and the Parliament notified.Notably, when Jagdeo’s promise to criminalise non-disclosures was made in 2019, it received criticism from the APNU+AFC’s Amna Ally, who had said that it was important to weigh his words against his record. During his tenure as President, several contracts did not see the light of day. These include but are not limited to the Marriott Hotel contract, the Sanata Complex contract, the Berbice Bridge contract, and the Bai Shan Lin contract.
