K
AIETEUR NEWS
Guyana’s largest selling daily & New York’s most popular weekly
Israel kills at least 43 Palestinians in
Tuesday Edition June 24, 2025 - Vol. 18 No. 25 Online: www.kaieteurnews.com Online Price $100 readership
Gaza, including food seekers
yesterday, 37,910
Ram knocks “misleading,
financial statements” by oil companies ...says govt. also guilty of deception
Dead: Jamal Hughes
One dead, another injured after car crashes into cow
Security Guard robs Giftland casino of …wanted bulletin $13.1 million issued for suspect
Orin Boston
Rakameem Benowen Nicholas
SWAT rank accused of killing Orin Boston to know fate this week
20 key elections officers sworn-in
Chartered Accountant, Christopher Ram
K News’ response to MNR's Statement on Oil Revenues and Profit Discrepancy K a i e t e u r N e w s acknowledges the June 22, 2025 statement issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), attempting to address the growing disquiet over the discrepancy between Guyana's reported oil revenues of US$2.6 billion and the US$10+ billion in profits declared by the Stabroek Block co-venturers. Unfortunately, the Ministry's response is inadequate, evasive, and in places, dangerously misleading. As a refresher for all readers, the issue at hand is how in a 50:50 profit sharing partnership, and with ExxonMobil's own financials for 2024 as the basis, there is this ongoing effort to obscure how the consortium received US$10.4 billion, and Guyana's share was US$2.6 billion. Of note, is how ExxonMobil first sat on this for almost three weeks, and then influenced MNR to do what is nothing but lapdog duty for it. Meanwhile, investors reading the co-venturers handsome 2024 profit numbers from Guyana could have made investment decisions based on those same profit numbers being carried in the international media. While the Ministry is technically correct in distinguishing between "profit oil" under the PSA and "accounting profit" under IFRS, this is a distraction from the real and urgent problem: the total
lack of transparency in the financial disclosures of the oil companies operating in Guyana. The public has been given no data on: the number of lifts allocated to each party, the split between cost oil and profit oil, or how much of the revenue claimed as cost recovery relates to current-year expenditure versus the recovery of prior years' unrecovered costs. This opacity raises serious doubts about the credibility of the financials. Under the PSA, up to 75% of oil revenue can be taken as cost recovery, but as the respective statements, the public has no way of knowing whether the contractors' declarations are reasonable, let alone accurate. Even more troubling is the fact that these profit declarations are being paraded in the international press - and are being taken at face value by analysts, investors, and even potential acquirers like Chevron. Yet these same financial statements, audited by the same firm, vary wildly in structure and disclosure. This inconsistency alone should raise red flags. It is of deep concern that the Ministry of Natural Resources as the regulator of the petroleum sector is treading on dangerous grounds when it tries to explain or justify the private financial reporting of ExxonMobil, Hess, or CNOOC. (Continued on page 3)