Registry says no secrecy around Exxon agreement

served under the PPP/C government, has said that “the first act of deception” is that the document was filed as of record since 2016, with the Deeds Registry, which is a public statutory authority that is autonomous of the Government, run and managed by a Board of Directors.

He opined that the Exxon agreement was deliberately concealed from the population since all documents filed with the agency form part of the public records of Guyana and are available to the public.

“So when the Government refused to make a document filed at this institution public, not only was it deceiving the population, it was violating the law and obviously interfering with the functioning of an autonomous statutory agency by instructing it not to make a `public document’, available to the public,” Nandlall contends.

For his part, Opposition PPP/C leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, has said that the document was kept hidden, because of the enshrining of the US$18M signing bonus in the 2016 agreement between Guyana and ExxonMobil, which was paid into a “secret account” at the Bank of Guyana.

The government on Thursday released the long-awaited petroleum agreement.

Jagdeo charged that the contract exposes the false claims by the APNU+AFC government that a clause inserted in the Petroleum Act by the PPP/C and national security concerns prevented its disclosure.

The Opposition Leader has said that now that the “sinister plan to squirrel-way the US $18M has been exposed there is no compelling reason to keep the agreement secret any longer”.