… Granger signed approval eight days before leaving office
The incumbent People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) has been accused of extending the period of exploration granted to the ExxonMobil-led consortium producing oil in the prolific Stabroek Block offshore Guyana. In recent weeks, however, members of the APNU and AFC parties and several sustained articles in the Kaieteur News have sought to castigate the governing PPP about the extension. This, however, is not the case.
Documents signed by David Granger indicate that it was the former President who granted that extension while at the helm of the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) government.
Those documents were released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Natural Resources. And importantly, it was also revealed that the Former President also gave ExxonMobil’s local subsidiary similar extensions for its work in the Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks offshore.
Granger wrote three separate letters to Alistair Routledge, the President of Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL), ExxonMobil’s local subsidiary, approving of the extension for the oil search in the Stabroek, Canje and Kaieteur blocks offshore Guyana.
EEPGL is the operator in the three blocks. In the Stabroek Block, it partnered with the Hess Corporation and CNOOC; in the Canje Block, JHI Associates and Mid-Atlantic Oil and Gas; and in the Kaieteur Block, it partnered with Westmount Energy and Hess.
The company’s license to explore would have been up in 2026. EEPGL, however, requested an extension due to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic and this was granted by the then government.
It was on July 24, 2020, just eight days before he left office after a five-month campaign by the then government and elections officials to keep him in power, that Granger signed off on the one-year extension.
Granger’s letters stated that “the days beginning on 11 March 2020 and ending on 10 March 2021 are not counted in assessing elapsed time applicable” to the three prospecting licences.
Based on reports published in the Kaieteur Newspaper, those outspoken about the extension posit that the consortium was unaffected by the pandemic and should not have been granted the extension.
The Ministry of Natural Resources Tuesday released Granger’s letters approving the extension in response to statements critical of the extension from members of the APNU and AFC opposition.
“… when the APNU/AFC leadership issued such statements they not only highlighted their duplicitous nature but also exposed the depth to which they would go to misinform the public while at the same displaying their contempt for the development of the oil and gas sector,” the release said.
Is that why the maan been so quiet since he was ejected, thinking that no one would find those letters ?habee